Second Chance at the Riverview Inn (Riverview Inn)

“What? What’s wrong?” Jonah asked.

“Nothing. Micah is just…well, we text now.”

“He’s texting you?” Jonah asked, his eyebrows lost in his hair. “Like…right now?”

“Yeah.” She laughed, feeling giddy and…alive. There was a different chemistry to this. Something that felt like flirtation. Which was ridiculous, she understood that. Micah Sullivan, Rockstar, would not…flirt with her. But also, it seemed like he was? “Hold on.”

More growling she texted back, trying to make a joke. But then she settled on the truth. Because it had been that kind of day. But mostly I didn’t expect you to get in that closet with me. Thank you for that.

The little dots showed up and then disappeared. Showed up. And then disappeared. And then stayed disappeared.

“Well,” she said with a sigh, disappointed, though she knew she shouldn’t be. “That didn’t last long.”

They drove past the driveway to the farm.

“Jonah? Where are we going?”

“To the inn.”

“They going to make a big deal about this?”

“What?” Jonah looked over at her, like he didn’t understand what she was saying. “Make a big deal? Alice? Delia? Your mom? When do they make a big deal about anything?”

The answer was always.

The problem with living with her family in such close proximity was that everything was celebrated. Birthdays, anniversaries, promotions, good grades. All of it was celebrated. And to think that this, her and Jonah going to go meet their favorite band, and the first time she’d successfully been in a car on the highway, had left the twenty-mile radius of the farm and the inn, wouldn’t be celebrated?

Yeah, she wasn’t that naive.

Someone was baking a cake and making a special dinner, and all of her family would have a barrage of questions about meeting Micah and the rest of the Outlaws.

The closet she would keep a secret. Even though Mom and Aunt Alice would lose their minds. It would almost be worth it to see the expressions on their faces, but the follow-up questions would be relentless.

The rain was gone and the anxiety she felt that made the world feel scary sometimes was, for whatever reason, not present.

“What are you thinking?” Jonah asked.

“I’m thinking…” She sighed and didn’t give herself to second-guess this instinct. She’d been talking herself out of ideas in the name of safety and being a new mom and the world being a relatively terrifying place for too long. It wasn’t her natural state. “That I would like to drive.”

He blinked and immediately pulled over to the side of the road. It was twenty minutes from where they were to the inn, along an almost entirely empty road. The rain had left puddles that they avoided as they got out, passing each other at the front of the car.

Jonah, like she was sixteen all over again and he was teaching her how to drive, held out his hand as he jogged past her and she gave him a high five. Laughing like the kid she’d been a lifetime ago.

Settling into the driver seat she felt giddy. Jonah, always intuitive, said nothing as she put the car in Drive and eased off the gravel shoulder onto the old asphalt she practically knew by heart.

In her life before, she used to do a lot of the driving while Evan sat in the passenger seat and sent emails and texts, or sometimes took notes while the two of them hammered out ideas and plans and initiatives.

In her life before, she’d liked driving, particularly on these old mountain roads with their lazy curves and small dips and rises. When she and her cousin Josie were teenagers, they used to drive one of Josie’s stepdad’s old farm trucks to the top of the highest hill on the north end of the road and gun it down the hill, then whoever was driving would take her foot off the gas and see how far they could coast.

Teenagers thinking they were invincible, obviously. Finding out differently had been a painful lesson.

She drove carefully, her heartbeat normal. Her hands a little sweaty. But okay.

I’m okay.

“Put on some music, would you?” she said.

Jonah immediately played “Wild Horses” by Band Of Outlaws, and Micah’s voice, so familiar to her before today, was somehow even more intimate. Like he was singing to her inside that closet.

What a day, she thought. What a weird and fabulous day.

Chapter Five

Micah

When he’d been 12, his mother picked him up from school in the beat-up blue Datsun that was more rust than paint. And she’d been crying, but that wasn’t really anything new. And he’d gotten in trouble at lunch, and that wasn’t really anything new.

But she’d looked at him with her pretending face. And her pretending face scared him.

“We’re going on vacation,” she told him, wiping her eyes and her nose.

“Where’s Alex?”

“He’s staying with Peter. This is just for us.”

There’d been a lot of just for us things lately. It was making him nervous. Peter wasn’t a bad guy but there had been talk about Mom and Peter getting married and Peter adopting him. They fought about it at night and Micah’d heard Peter say “Not unless you get your shit together.” A lot.