Page 15 of Bed and Breakup (Dial Delights #15)

Molly

After throwing the dolls in a box on the corner with a Free to a Good Home sign—I know they’ll go quickly with all the antiquers in this town—I lock myself in my studio.

So maybe I went overboard. I thought the prank would be funny, if a little mean-spirited.

But I wasn’t laughing when Robin cowered in the hallway like the dolls could actually murder her.

In fact, I felt an unexpected need to protect her.

Maybe it was because she was in her underwear, her hair sticking up in every direction, looking as na?ve and confused as the day we met.

She was even wearing the same shirt as that day at Home Depot, I recall as I start clearing and wiping down my workspace, hands clumsy with Robin still in my head.

With her bleached-blond TV hair growing out and her natural light brown showing at the roots, how am I supposed to remember how much she’s changed?

I’ve got to focus. I came here two weeks ago with a job to do, and between tormenting Robin and daydreaming of renovating the inn, I’ve let myself get off track. I need to snap out of this and get to work.

Luckily, it’s time for my favorite step in making stained glass: cutting pieces to size and piecing them together. I finished my design for Wild Card yesterday while scheming about the dolls and texted it to Louis, who gave it a big thumbs-up.

I’m dressed in my usual glass-cutting attire: a long-sleeved tie-dyed shirt, loose cargo pants, and oversize square-framed glasses to protect me from flying shards.

There’s just enough space to spread out my hand-sketched outline on the floor.

After spending some time chatting with Louis and browsing his impressive stock of board games, I was especially inspired by a corner display featuring several barrels of dice.

Not just standard dice with six faces—eight- and ten- and twenty-sided dice in a wide array of colors and sizes.

I made them the centerpiece of my design, with a trail of colorful squares winding around them like a Candy Land board, subtly placed like the streets of downtown Eureka.

The effect is geometric and vibrant and perfect for such a fun, playful shop.

Now for the good part. I put in my headphones, press play on my audiobook, some nonfiction about the science of bees that Keyana recommended, and start tracing and cutting shapes out of glass.

Each piece must be trimmed down to fit its place in the puzzle of my design.

It’s meditative. The back of my brain keeps up with the audiobook while my hands stay busy, scoring and breaking each bit of glass, wrapping the edges in shimmering copper foil, and, once all the pieces are ready, soldering them into place in the larger picture.

It feels so much like the weekend afternoons I used to spend quilting with Gram.

I didn’t notice the similarities when I first started working with stained glass; I was too focused on repairing old windows without cutting or burning myself.

But when I started making my first original pieces—the floral windows for the bathrooms in the guest suites—it felt eerily similar to cutting and piecing together various fabrics.

Gram would always turn on a book on tape, usually a mystery novel, and we’d get to work.

As a little kid, I was in charge of sorting the fabric scraps into rainbow order, just like I’ve organized the recycled glass I’m using today.

Gram had a gift for color selection, putting together unexpected shades that sang when combined.

I like to think I inherited it from her, that I’m using the same instincts to place this tangerine shade next to that rich eggplant.

As I grew up, I graduated to measuring and cutting fabric, then to running the sewing machine.

She eventually let me help create some of her patterns, sitting shoulder to shoulder with her as we envisioned the individual pieces coming together into one picture.

But then I turned sixteen and got my driver’s license and my first crush, and suddenly, spending my weekends quilting with my grandma seemed less fun than buying too many lattes at the coffee shop where Raquel was a barista.

And then I had to get the job at Home Depot to pay for all those lattes.

And then, in what felt like the blink of an eye, Gram was gone.

I wish I could remember the last time I helped her with a quilt.

But like so many things—my last bicycle ride with training wheels, my last drink at my favorite lesbian bar before it shut down, my last casual good morning kiss from Robin before we split—I didn’t realize it was something I would never have the chance to do again.

Still, every time I piece together a stained-glass project like this, soldering together disparate pieces of glass that likely would have ended up in the trash but are instead finding a new future, I feel like Gram is here with me.

She’s watching over my shoulder as I place the final triangle on the twenty-sided die at the center of the window, smiling at how the blues and yellows and reds play against one another, how each small piece plays a role in creating something so much grander.

Gram is the voice in my head telling me try that indigo next to the emerald, she’s the sense of calm I feel when a crucial piece of glass cracks and I know just how to fix it, she’s the sunlight that gleams through the finished product, turning it into a spectacle of dancing color.

Glass demands your focus. Besides the audiobook, which weirdly helps me concentrate on the work at hand, there can be no distractions, or else accidents are sure to happen. Pieces broken, flux spilled, cuts, burns. I’ve got the scars to prove it.

As much as I insist my head is in the right place for this project, the glass says otherwise.

By the time I finish today’s work, my fingers are covered in Band-Aids, blood droplets stain my paper outline, and my mind is still stuck on Robin in nothing but her underwear and that damn Toad Suck Daze T-shirt.

Even alone in this shed, sweating over the art I love, I can’t escape thoughts of her, regret over the prank I pulled swirling with a desire to get a rise out of her again.

I can’t figure out if it’s that I want her to leave or that I, simply, want her.

Want what we had, the future I pictured for us all those years ago, the one that’s maybe still possible in some alternate universe where things had gone very differently.

What happened to the new Molly? I spent years trying to move on, and these two weeks have made it abundantly clear that I failed. I need to end this chapter of my life so I can truly dedicate myself to the next one. Robin, the Hummingbird Inn, Eureka…I need to move on from all of them.

It’s time to do my least favorite thing and admit that Robin is right: We need to sell the inn.