Page 31 of Goalie and the Girl Next Door (Love in Maple Falls #5)

CLéMENT

I roll in slowly, gravel crunching under my tires, and my heart is pounding like I’m heading into overtime.

I expected… I don’t know. Some kind of activity or challenge.

Instead, what I see is exactly like her. Beautiful. Simple on the surface, profound in the details as you look closer.

Just outside the barn is a small wooden table dressed in a faded red-and-white checkered cloth.

A pair of mismatched chairs face each other, and strings of lights zigzag from the barn’s beams to a fencepost, swaying in the breeze.

There are milk bottles with flowers—wildflowers, I think, nothing too polished—and two glass pitchers of an amber drink that might be sweet tea, cider, or liquid courage.

Marcy stands in the driveway, cowboy boots crunching lightly over the dirt. Her dress is casual but a soft blue, the color doing strange things to my ability to form coherent thoughts. I swing my leg off the bike and try to remember how to walk like a normal person.

She tucks a strand of curled hair behind her ear, and we just stand there. Looking at each other. Both clearly trying not to look like we’re looking as closely as we are.

“Hi,” she says.

I smile. “ Bonsoir .”

She laughs, just a breath of a sound, and gestures toward the table. “Welcome to your date.”

“It’s perfect.”

She bites her lip as I approach and for a terrible second, I think she’s going to say she changed her mind and that we’re eating with the whole Happy Horizons family.

That a date was a mistake. That she isn’t interested in a French goalie with a questionable living situation and zero emotional subtlety.

“You hungry?” she asks.

“Famished,” I reply. “But I’m more interested in the company.”

She rolls her eyes. “You always like this?”

“Panicked? Only on very important occasions.”

“I meant charming.” Her lips quirk, but her eyes soften. “You don’t seem panicked.”

“I’m French.” I shrug. “We fake it well.”

She leads me over to the table in front of the barn, sits, and gestures for me to do the same. I do, and for a moment the only sound is the gentle clink of glassware as she pours us both a glass of cider.

There’s the scent of hay, and of something sweet and baked. Somewhere off in the field, Edgar bleats in jealousy. I’ll give him a scratch later.

I take a breath, the kind that you can feel all the way down.

Angel emerges from the ranch house behind us like she’s starring in her own cooking show, holding a casserole dish with incredible reverence .

“Et voilà,” she says, placing it squarely in the center of the table.

“Lasagna. It’s homemade, even if I had to do a quick defrost. I hope it won’t insult your European sensibilities.

” She winks and adds with a terrible French accent, “Bon appétit, monsieur. Mademoiselle.” Then, with a dramatic bow and a swish of her apron, she disappears, leaving behind the faint scent of garlic and basil.

“Do you think we’re going to be spied on?” I ask as I stare after her.

Marcy shrugs. “Probably.”

“Will she hide to take in the sights?”

“Not just her. All of them .”

We laugh, and my shoulders finally get the message they can relax.

Marcy lifts the serving spoon, scoops two generous slices of lasagna, and lifts one onto my plate.

I nod at it appreciatively. “So, this is not the ‘be prepared for anything’ part, right? Like you mentioned in the text? Because I’ve definitely had lasagna before.”

She takes in a sharp breath. “No. That part comes later.”

I pause, fork in hand. “Should I be worried?”

“Oh, certainly.”

She says it so dryly I can’t tell if she’s joking.

“I brought a bag with four different outfits in it,” I say, “because I didn’t know what you had planned.”

Her head snaps up. “Four different outfits? For what purpose?”

“I was afraid it would involve goats and glitter.”

Marcy pretends to consider it. “No glitter, anyhow.”

I chuckle, but the truth is, I am worried.

I’m worried this is going to go well.

Because if it does, if I let her in for real, I don’t know how I could ever go back to France.

Not even back to the version of me who keeps everything stitched up behind smiles and charm.

Definitely not to the version who pretends it’s all just light-hearted and casual.

And once Mathieu arrives in a couple of days, I won’t be able to hide a thing.

He can read my every thought before I think it.

But this is what I want. I glance down at my plate. “You know,” I say, “my mother made a lasagna kind of like this.”

Marcy looks up from her fork. “Yeah?”

I nod. “She swore the secret was cinnamon.”

“Cinnamon?”

I shrug. “I thought she was insane. But it worked. Just a pinch. She said it made the tomato sauce feel like a hug.”

Marcy smiles, her eyes fixed on me.

“She worked a lot,” I continue, surprised at how easily the words are coming. “Long shifts. She was a nurse, always tired. But she never missed one of my games. Not a single one. Even the ones that didn’t matter.”

Her hands are folded around her water glass, her head tilted to the side as she waits for me to go on.

“I told you how she used to wave a handkerchief at me from the stands. I’d look for it before every game, just to know she was there.”

“You did. I’ll never forget that. I can picture it.”

A breath catches in my throat, but I push through. “After she passed, I started keeping that handkerchief with me. Still do. Tucked under the padding where it won’t get ruined.”

Marcy’s expression doesn’t change, but her stillness—how her shoulders don’t shift, how she doesn’t interrupt, doesn’t fidget—tells me she’s listening deeply to every word.

“I think,” I say, twisting the edge of my napkin between my fingers, “I might be done with hockey after this season.”

It’s the first time I’ve said it out loud. I can’t bring myself to look at her .

“I love it. I do. But I’m not twenty anymore, and the injuries…” I pause, still twisting the napkin. “I’ve given it everything. But maybe I want to give something to the rest of my life now.”

The silence stretches between us as we gaze in each other’s eyes. There’s a bridge between us that we’ve only just begun to build.

Then Marcy says softly, “I’m glad you told me.”

That’s it. No advice or reaction other than her presence, and it’s enough. I feel lighter. We sit quietly. Her eyes sparkle in the light of the sunset and I’m being pulled in. We stay that way, looking at each other, comfortable in the silence.

“Did she ever teach you to cook anything other than lasagna?” she asks and I laugh.

“Ah, mademoiselle , I can cook anything.”

She asks more about my exploits in the kitchen and I perhaps oversell myself—soufflés, coq au vin, the time I tried to make croissants from scratch and nearly cried into the butter block. She laughs and makes quiet sounds of “mmm.”

Her expression grows serious. “I never talk about this,” she says, eyes on her fork, not me. “I don’t think I’ve ever actually said the whole story out loud.”

I sit a little straighter. The evening air has cooled, but the twinkle lights above us sway in the breeze, casting golden movement across her face. I wait for her.

“I followed someone here. To Maple Falls, I mean.”

My stomach knots.

She keeps her voice level, like she’s reading a weather report. “In retrospect, we were never serious. It was that sort of thing where everyone assumes you’ll end up together. He was my high school sweetheart, if you can call it that.”

Marcy looks at me, and her gaze is bracing. She’s daring me to flinch .

“I came out here because his team was playing the Ice Breakers. I thought maybe if I showed up, if I took that leap, he’d see I was ready for that next step in our relationship.

That I wasn’t afraid of his hockey career.

I thought he’d finally see me .” She laughs, but there’s no joy in it.

“Instead, he told me I needed to stop clinging to certainty. He’d always said I should do something brave for once, and I’d thought that was it. ”

My jaw tightens and I grip my water glass.

“I thought coming here would be enough.” Her voice doesn’t shake. She’s already cried this story dry. “I took a bus across the country. I don’t fly. I’m petrified of it. But I came here. Turns out, I was never going to be enough for him.”

I want to reach across the table and hold her hand. Then, I want to find that man and tell him exactly how much courage it takes to start over, to rebuild a life alone in a place you don’t know, where no one is waiting.

He didn’t deserve her. He didn’t see her at all.

She exhales slowly. “I gave up on relationships after that,” she says, brushing an invisible crumb off the table.

“When I got to Maple Falls, I was so focused on building a new life. I had a degree, a laptop, and four pencil skirts. That’s it.

No money. No plan. No backup. Just this idea that maybe if I could make a life here on my own, I’d stop feeling like a cautionary tale. ”

She says it so plainly, like it isn’t one of the most courageous things I’ve ever heard.

“I didn’t even realize how long it had been until Angel told me to wear something that wasn’t covered in ranch life.”

I sit forward, arms resting on the table, and say the only thing that feels remotely worthy.

“Marcy, I don’t think I’ve ever admired anyone more.”

She looks up sharply .

“I mean it,” I continue. “A woman who started over with nothing but ambition and four pencil skirts? That’s a legend where I come from.

He’s the coward who couldn’t see the strength it takes to cross the country—on a bus, no less—just to give your relationship a try. He didn’t deserve you for a second.”

She opens her mouth, then closes it again. Her eyes shine and she blinks fast as she reaches for her glass.

I pretend not to notice.

“Thank you,” she whispers.

We talk for another hour—about nothing, about everything. Our families. Our first jobs. The meals that defined us and the fears that have followed us.

With each story, I watch something in Marcy loosen.

Her shoulders relax. Her hands, which she always folds neatly in her lap or clasps together, start to move as she speaks.

She gestures. She laughs. She teases me about the way I say “croissant” and I tease her right back about how she cutely butchers it.

Her guard doesn’t drop all at once. It peels away like the delicate layers of a pastry, one truth at a time.

Angel, bless her, moves like a ghost—clearing plates, serving warm peach cobbler with vanilla cream, never interrupting. At some point, the lights in the ranch house dim.

I glance at my watch hoping time has stopped, because I don’t want this to end. The night feels stitched together from a thread that’s rare and fleeting. One wrong move, and it might dissolve.

Marcy finishes her dessert and sets her fork down gently. I swallow hard.

“I know dinner’s winding down,” I say, forcing the words past my jaw that suddenly feels nervous. “But I don’t want to leave yet. I know it sounds… I don’t know. Over-eager. But I don’t want to lose this feeling. ”

She looks at me, and for a second, I think I’ve gone too far.

But then she smiles.

It starts in the corner of her mouth and rises slowly, a sunrise that takes its time because it knows you’re watching. Her eyes catch the light, and they glint with something I can’t name but want very badly to understand.

“I have an idea,” she says.