“Oh my God,” she murmured. Were these for her from Peter? They had to be. They were her favorite flower. Was he in the kitchen? Was he going to pop the question right this second?
“Finally, you’re here!” Her kitchen staff flocked to her and began peppering her with questions, as if they were journalists at a press conference and she was someone famous.
“We heard Charli called. Did you call her back? Do you think she’s going to show?”
“Have you heard from Jack? Do you think he’s going to show?”
“Peter left these flowers for you. Are they because of The Reservation?”
“He’s so perfect. How is he so perfect?”
She was half-expecting photographers to appear and camera lights to start flashing, when Valerie walked into the kitchen carrying a stack of dirty plates in her hands.
“Val?” Gianna turned toward her. “What are you doing here?”
She didn’t mean here, as in, here in the restaurant. Valerie had been working at Hayden’s part-time for almost two years. She’d called Gianna completely hysterical a few months after she had the twins (or maybe the twins had been hysterical, Gianna couldn’t remember). One of the twins was always trying to out-cry the other. “Perhaps they inherited this competitive gene from their mother,” Gianna liked to tease Val. Valerie was the most competitive person Gianna knew. Growing up, she’d always done the extra credit, outsold everyone in their Girl Scout troop in cookie sales, and ran the fastest mile in PE class.
“How did I think I was cut out to be a stay-at-home mom?” she remembered Val saying. “At least when I was working at Rubicon, I was getting paid to be in a room I couldn’t stand. This room’s so much worse at this moment, and I’m making nothing!” (Valerie later took back this comment. “About the other day, I love the boys. You know I love the boys. I was just running on no sleep. Sometimes they drive me a bit mad when I’m running on no sleep.”)
It had been the first time in months that Gianna could remember feeling grateful she wasn’t in Valerie’s shoes. Val’s entire pregnancy had been a bit tough on Gianna. She’d been happy for her, of course. But as she’d watched as Val’s belly swelled and took her shopping for the nursery and for cute onesies for the boys, she’d felt occasional sharp pangs of jealousy. No matter how much you loved a person, it was difficult to be around someone who had what you desperately wanted, even if it was just a version of it.
“You could go back to work,” Gianna had said, knowing Rubicon would gladly take her back, but that Val probably wouldn’t want to go back. The only thing she’d liked about her job in sales was the regular Friday afternoon happy hours and the bonuses she received from routinely outselling her quota.
“Can I work for you?” Val had asked. “Just a few days a week to get me out of the house. You only have to pay me enough that I can afford a nanny.”
Gianna had gladly given her shifts. Val was a nice addition to the team. She brought in the most tips and sold more off the menu than any of her staff. Plus, it was nice to get to spend so much time together again, like they used to when they were little and when they lived together in that cozy brick house in Southeast Portland after both graduating college. And Gianna knew this arrangement wouldn’t last forever. Valerie had been experimenting with making and selling greeting cards on Etsy, and business was picking up. Gianna could see her being too busy to come in soon.
What Gianna had meant was why was Val working a shift tonight? Valerie was not scheduled to work on Fridays. She and Richard ordered Chinese food on Friday nights and ate it in their pajamas on their living room floor in front of a fire. It was a date-night tradition that began their third week seeing each other. An unexpected wind storm had caused them to rethink their plan to go out to dinner at a Chinese restaurant where Richard had made a reservation, so they had ordered in instead.
“There was so much intimate conversation!” Val had gushed the morning after, as she and Gianna power-walked through the fallen branches from the storm. “The fire was lovely. We must have shared two bottles of wine! It felt like the rest of the world didn’t exist, and it was just the two of us. We even did it on his carpet. Right there, in front of the fire.”
Lately, though, these dinners seemed to have lost their romantic luster. Valerie said sometimes she and Richard didn’t even light the fire. Richard often turned the TV on instead. Or she got up in the middle of the meal to feed one of the twins.
Was that what all marriages turned into after a couple of years? Interrupted date nights? Unlit fires? No passion? No romance? Was she making the whole idea of marriage a bigger deal than it was? Maybe good enough was enough.
“I paid Annie fifty bucks for her shift so I could be here for the big Reservation,” Valerie said now.
“Seriously?” Gianna said. “Why on earth would you do that?”
She could have just gotten a table in the restaurant to spy on Charli and Jack’s table. Several of her staff who weren’t scheduled tonight had done this. Unless . . . she knew about the proposal, and Peter had asked for her help to pull it off. And if Valerie knew, then her mother probably knew.
Oh no, her mother!
Gianna could just imagine her mom’s reaction if she were to call her and tell her she’d broken things off with Peter. There would be tears. Lots and lots of tears. Her mother seemed to view Peter as Gianna’s last hope for getting married while she could still have babies. Gianna often felt that way about him too, which was a bit of a problem.
Then her mom would probably ask what she was supposed to tell her friends. For some reason, what her friends thought still mattered quite a bit to her mother. Weren’t women supposed to outgrow caring about what other women thought about them? Or was that just something moms told their high school daughters to help them build up self-esteem, when really, they all still sought each other’s approval as much as the next insecure teen?
“My friends ask me every week at Bunko for an update on your love life,” her mom once protested when Gianna told her that she didn’t appreciate being interrogated about her relationship status each time they spoke on the phone. Her mom still asked for updates on Gianna’s love life all the time, so she didn’t doubt that her mom’s friends still grilled her.
She knew the inquiries were well-intentioned. Either people were just trying to make polite conversation like Nell and Mark Carter, two of her regulars at Hayden’s, who had been married thirty years and asked her every time they came in how it was possible that someone hadn’t snatched her up yet. Or people were hopeful they could find her somebody, like the Toddler and Teas. This was the name of Val’s group of mom friends (who really needed to rename their friend group, Gianna thought, every time she scrolled through Valerie’s Facebook). They did a whole lot more than drink tea with their toddlers—they hosted Bachelor viewing parties, spent warm summer afternoons boating on the Willamette River, took rainy-day trips to Powell’s bookstore.
Before she met Peter, every time Gianna got together with them, they went through their phones and their Facebooks trying to brainstorm whom they could set her up with.
“What about Phil? He’s the dad of one of Chloe’s friends from school. No, wait, he’s still going through a divorce. Maybe in a few months once it’s finalized!”
“Derik’s cousin was in rehab a while back, but he’s out and just starting to date again. What about him?”
It was quite horrible hearing their suggestions.
Well-intentioned or not, it bothered Gianna that women’s choices were always up for debate. If you were married with children but no job, people wanted to know what you did all day or when you were returning to work. And if you were like Gianna, with a career and no husband or children, people wanted to know when you were going to settle down.
Gianna loved her life! She didn’t need a man. She just wanted one. The right one. Which might or might not be Peter.
“Are you okay?” Valerie asked. “You look pale.”
“I’m fine,�
�� Gianna lied. She didn’t want to share her doubts with Valerie. Like everyone else, Val was Team Peter.
After she and Peter officially became a couple and Val met him for the first time, Val took Gianna out for celebratory drinks. “Here’s to kissing enough frogs,” she’d said, raising her glass of champagne in the air. “You’ve finally found a prince!”
If she knew of Gianna’s doubts, she’d start replaying all of Gianna’s dating fiascos before she met Peter. Gianna could already hear her.
“Oh no, ohhh no,” she’d say. “It took you how long to find a guy like Peter?”
“A very long time,” Gianna would say.
“And you’re how old?”
“Thirty-seven,” Gianna would reply, humoring her.
“Right,” Valerie would say. “You cannot afford to lose Peter. Don’t do this to yourself.”
Her server, Claire, who had seen The Notebook too many times, sidled up beside her now. “This is turning out to be the most romantic night,” she swooned. She was also in love for the first time with a guy from her political science classes at Portland State, so everything had a rose-colored tint to it. “Oh, before I forget, Peter left this for you,” she said, pulling out a note from her pocket.
“Is he here, now?” Gianna asked, trying to play it cool.
“No, he just dropped these off. Said he’d be back later.”
Flowers for my love to add to the romance tonight, it read. Here’s to happily ever after! xo Peter.
Happily ever after. Did hers include him?
“Gianna! Gianna! Come quick!” Barbara, one of her older, but most spirited servers barged into the kitchen, her red hair like a flame, igniting her entrance.
“What?” Gianna said. “Is Charli here? Or Jack?” Or Peter? She thought in a panic.
“No. But you have to see this.” Barbara peered out through the window in the kitchen door.
“What is it?”
“Just come here!”
“Geez did somebody die?” Valerie teased.
“Well,” Barbara said, “maybe.”
“What?” Gianna was suddenly in full-blown panic mode. She hurried over to the door along with Valerie and almost everyone else in the kitchen—her dishwashers, her two pastry chefs, a couple of other servers.
“I know Portland’s weird,” Barbara said as they all peered out. “But that sure is something you don’t see every day.”
Following Rosie toward a table in the back of the restaurant was the group of women dressed in black that Gianna had seen in the park. The beautiful blonde was crying and leaning on her friends like they were crutches. Watching her, Gianna couldn’t help but think how much she resembled her dessert, the Marjolaine—a six-layer hazelnut cake. In the same way that Blondie relied on her two friends to keep her from toppling over, the Marjolaine relied on the chocolate mousse and the hazelnut-praline crème that were piped between each layer.
“Oh my gosh, I know them!” Gianna said as everyone behind her giggled.
“You do?” Valerie turned to look at her.
“Well, I don’t know them know them, but I saw them on my walk to work.”
She explained the scene in the park to everyone—the crying, the white dress on the ground, the shovel on top of the mound of dirt.
Rosie showed them to a table directly across from the table reserved for Charli and Jack on the other side of the fireplace.
“Ah, lucky!” Valerie said. “You got them in your section, Gianna.”
Gianna didn’t usually wait on specific tables, but tonight, because of The Reservation, she’d made an exception.
“You want to trade?” Valerie asked. “I’ll take the long-lost lovers’ table and wait on the women in the ridiculous black outfits, and you can have the bickering married couple and awkward first date I’ve got.”
“Not a chance,” Gianna said. Not when she might get the whole story behind these ladies’ actions. She watched them for a couple more seconds and then clapped her hands together. “All right everybody, back to work.”
The employees behind her dispersed, and Gianna hurried out to the restaurant floor to return Charli’s call.
Click here to see scenes from these chapters unfold and to Shop the Book™ or visit sincerelyriley.com/scene-4.
ten
THEN
CHARLI HAD BEEN so focused on mounting her pancreatic tissue slides, on selecting and peeling apart pieces of tissue, washing them with dark blue dyes and lighter pinks, and carefully placing them between two slender pieces of glass, that she didn’t even hear Jack walk into the biology lab.
“I feel like a jealous boyfriend,” he said, startling her. “Sometimes I think you love this place more than you love me.”
Charli swiveled around on her stool. The minute she saw Jack in a suit jacket and slacks with a bouquet of roses in his hands, her heart sunk.
“Oh my gosh . . . our anniversary dinner . . . ” It had been a full year since her and Jack’s first kiss, and they were supposed to celebrate tonight. Jack had told her earlier he’d made a dinner reservation at McMenamins, the nicest restaurant in Corvallis, for six o’clock. She looked up at the clock on the white wall above the cabinets filled with beakers, flasks, tubes, droppers, and all sorts of laboratory equipment and saw that it was almost seven now.
“Jack, I’m so sorry. I completely lost track of time.”
“That seems to happen a lot when you’re in here.”
“I know. I feel awful.” When Charli stepped through the doors of the lab, it was like she entered another world where minutes and hours didn’t exist. She’d get in a zone researching, and time stood still. “I thought I set an alarm on my phone, but it must not have gone off. Do you hate me?”
“No. Don’t worry about it.” He gave her a reassuring smile. “I only booked that restaurant because I thought you’d like it. Guess I should have just packed a picnic and brought it to the lab. That probably would have been more up your alley, huh?”
“If bringing food into the lab was allowed . . . then yeah,” she laughed.
Jack started to walk around the room, past microscopes, test tubes, computers, Timmy the skeleton.
“What is it about this room that you love so much?” he asked.
“What is it about a baseball field that you love so much? This stool right here, it’s like my pitcher’s mound. Sitting on it day after day, understanding something so small and so complicated more intimately with each hour gives me a rush.”
“It just looks kind of . . . well . . . ”
“Boring?” She got that a lot.
Jack nodded.
“Trust me, it’s not. Discovering something that might, in one small way or another, be used one day to save lives is such a thrill. Come over here. Let me show you.”
Charli had Jack sit down on her stool and look through the ocular lens at the small slide of pancreatic islet B-cells she was analyzing.
“It’s kind of like looking through a kaleidoscope,” Jack commented.
“Yeah, sort of. Except I’m not just looking for pretty patterns.” She explained how she was studying the tissue as part of a research project for the university to try to better understand the underlying cellular mechanisms in the pancreatic cells of a diabetic rat. “What I understand here will eventually help all of us make more sense of a much bigger issue.”
“I guess I can see how that’s exciting,” Jack said.
Charli took a deep breath of the sterilized air. “It is exciting. This place is where I feel most alive. Most excited. Most inspired.”
“What about when you’re with me? Don’t I inspire you? Don’t I make you excited?”
“Obviously,” she winked. “But it’s an excitement and inspiration of a different sort.”
“But if you had to choose, hypothetically speaking, would you rather spend the rest of your days in this lab filled with all the tools you’d need to make ground-breaking discoveries, or spend the rest of your days outside the lab with m
e?”
“That’s an impossible ‘would you rather’ question.”
“Come on, you wouldn’t pick me?” Jack stood up and wrapped his hands around her waist, pulling her toward him.
When he started to nibble on her ear, she folded. “Now you’re swaying me.”
He continued to kiss her, his warm breath tickling her and eventually making her giggle.
“I’m only kidding,” he finally said. “I would never make you choose between me and this room. But for tonight, can you come with me?”
She threaded her fingers through his. “Of course. Do you have another place in mind?”
“I was thinking on the way over here that it might be kind of fun to drive in to Portland for the night.”
“All the way to Portland?”
“It’ll only take a little over an hour at this time. We could pick something easy up for dinner on the way and then go to Hayden’s for dessert.”
“Ooooo, I like where your head’s at.” They visited Hayden’s every time they went home, but it had been a while since they’d been last. She and Jack always shared a slice of the Chocolate Mint Cloud, a silky mint mouse wedged on top of a chocolate cake base, and Charli was suddenly craving it.
“Great,” Jack said. “How can I help you clean up?”
Charli had him put all of her notebooks and pencils back into her book bag as she cleaned off and carefully disinfected her area, covered the microscope, and replaced her tweezers and unused slides. She was excited to spend the rest of her night with him—she really was—but she had to admit that the thought of getting back into this room tomorrow was equally exciting.
—
JACK KNEW HIS focus should have been on the pitch he was about to throw to start the game. Not only was it the first inning of the sold-out national championship versus UCLA at Rosenblatt Stadium in Omaha, but the scouts for most of the major league teams were in the stands watching Jack pitch, and he was eager to impress them. Jack had been drafted by the Philadelphia Phillies just a few weeks earlier, but he’d turned the offer down because he was only a junior and wanted to graduate from college before he went pro. He had to continue to play well to keep other scouts from other teams interested. But he couldn’t get the news Charli had shared with him the night before out of his head.
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