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“Oh, would you calm down? It was one drop of peppermint oil. More like a half, really.” Noah never imagined borrowing some of Mona’s essential oils would cause such a big deal. The way Gracie ranted—when she wasn’t hiccuping—you’d think the Poison Control Center needed to get involved. “It was supposed to help your muscles relax, not make you blow a brain aneurysm.”

“What made you think serving me the equivalent of peppermint schnapps would help me relax?”

“What makes you think a drop of peppermint oil is the equivalent to peppermint schnapps?”

“Three days I’ll be stuck in the belly of this whale,” she moaned. “Three days!”

“Am I to assume the whale in this metaphor is the hiccups?”

Gracie lifted her head from her desk. “You’re to assume I’m going to file a police report and you’ll be spending the rest of your sorry life locked up in Sing Sing.”

“For what? Serving you tea?”

“Spiking my drink!” Gracie dropped her head back to her arms and hiccuped. “Oh, I think the room might be spinning.”

“One drop of essential oil, babe.”

“Which is what? A fifth of a handle in drinker talk?”

“You’re impossible.” Noah rubbed his forehead. Maybe it wasn’t too late to take up drinking himself.

Gracie angled her head on her arms to look at him. “You’re the one making it impossible to get any work done on your memoir.”

“Hey, I tried answering your silly questions, didn’t I?”

Gracie held up the paper full of his scribblings. “Charcuterie metaphors? Is that what you call trying?”

She crumpled the paper and threw it at the trash can. “Come on, Noah. You haven’t provided me with a single answer about your life since the day you stepped foot back in this house. Come to think of it, you never coughed up a lot of answers before you walked out of my life five years ago either.”

“I walked out of your life? I’m sorry, I walked out of your life?”

“Good to know your hearing is still intact. Yes. You. Noah. Walked out of my life. And honestly, I haven’t the foggiest idea what made you decide to walk back into it. I was doing just fine without you.”

“Really? Sitting around here, stinking up the place in your dirty bathrobe while you wrote about time-traveling horses. That was you living your best life, was it?”

“Well, it certainly wasn’t my worst life. Pretty sure that happened when my husband decided he’d rather spend another offseason working on his curveball instead of his marriage.”

“Marriage? Please. That’s the last thing we would’ve been working on. All you cared about was making babies.”

“Well, that’s part of marriage, isn’t it?”

“It wasn’t just a part of our marriage, it was your entire obsession. An obsession I watched slowly cripple you month after month, year after year. I needed a break. You needed a break. I wasn’t trying to walk out of your life. I was just trying to not feel like a failure the entire offseason when I watched you cry yourself to sleep every night because your husband couldn’t give you what you wanted.”

Gracie tugged a tissue out from inside her sleeve. “Let’s not do this again. Clearly nothing has changed. I’m still hurt and you’re still delusional. Let’s just figure out a way to get through this memoir.”

Gracie’s cell phone buzzed on the edge of her desk. She grabbed it, probably as grateful as he was for the distraction. Anytime they’d attempted this conversation before, it quickly nose-dived into a painful explosion of emotions and hurt feelings.

On a positive note, her hiccups were gone.

Gracie frowned when she looked at her screen. “The hospital left me a voicemail. I didn’t even hear it ring.” She swiped the screen and pressed the phone to her ear. She listened, then turned to Noah with wide eyes.

“Your dad?”

“No.” Gracie spread her fingers across her chest, her breaths growing quick. “It’s Matt. He’s in the emergency room. They can’t get ahold of Mona. I don’t know where she’d be. She always has her phone on her.”

“What’s wrong with him? What happened?”

“I don’t know. Some sort of accident. I hear lots of beeping in the background. That can’t be good. Beeping?”

“I’m sure beeping is fine. It probably means his heart is still beating.”

She covered her mouth and sobbed.

Noah rushed forward, crouched in front of her. “And of course his heart is still beating. He’s got a strong heart. The beeping probably had nothing to do with his heart. It was probably a call light. Somebody probably just needed the bathroom.” He had no idea what he was saying. “Why don’t we drive over and see what’s going on?” That sounded like a good thing to say—until Gracie started to rise, then sank back into her seat with a whimper.

“Shoot.” She massaged her right hip. “I’ve been sitting too long. And I’m not even dressed to leave the house. It’ll take me forever to get ready. Just go. I’ll try calling the ER to get more information, but I want you to call me as soon as you get there, okay?”

“Everything’s going to be fine.” He tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, then kissed her forehead as he got to his feet.

Gracie held his gaze and whispered, “Thank you.” Then, “As soon as you get there. I mean it. As soon as you get there. Noah—” Gracie latched onto his wrist before he could move away. “We can’t lose him.”

He leaned down, holding her face with both hands. “Babe, we’re not going to. I promise.” Then before he could stop himself, he dropped a quick kiss to her lips.

And yeah, she was probably just worried about Matt, but as he drove to the hospital, Noah couldn’t help thinking that for a brief moment it’d sure felt like Gracie had kissed him back.