Page 16 of Now That It’s You (The Can’t Have Hearts Club #5)

“Being at your ex-fiancé’s funeral, or being in the closet with his brother at said funeral?”

“Both.” She hesitated. “Wait, I thought it was a memorial service.”

“It was. Funeral’s just shorter to say.”

“Right.” Meg bit her lip. “I take back what I said earlier. This is actually the least awkward moment of the last hour for me.”

“That’s depressing.”

“It’s a memorial service. Isn’t it supposed to be depressing?”

“Not if you ask Aunt Judy. She insists it’s supposed to be a celebration of life. If she had her way, we’d all be wearing jingle bells and dancing on the bar.”

“I can think of worse ideas,” Meg said, her eyes meeting his in the dim half-light of the closet. “So how are you holding up?”

“Okay.” He hesitated, not sure how much information to volunteer.

But hell, she’d asked, and there was something about being in the closet that gave this whole thing the air of a Catholic confession.

At least, he imagined this might be what the confessional was like, minus the push broom and the jumbo pack of Hefty bags.

“I guess—” he swallowed. “I guess I thought the service would give me some closure.”

“Did it?”

“No. I just keep replaying conversations in my head. Arguments I used to have with Matt about my career choices or my eating habits or whose turn it was to take Mom out to lunch.”

“I’ve been doing the same thing. Rehashing old arguments, I mean. I’ll catch myself doing it and I’ll realize I’m even making the facial expression that goes with the point I’m trying to make.”

Kyle nodded, though she probably couldn’t see him in the darkness. “I know what you mean. I caught myself grinning like an idiot in Costco yesterday after I made a particularly valid point during my replay of an argument we had in high school.”

“I take it things didn’t unfold that way in real life?”

He snorted. “In real life Matt gave me a wedgie and threw my car keys in the toilet, so I’d say no. Of course, I retaliated by putting Doritos in his bed. I’d like to think our methods for solving disagreements improved once we reached adulthood.”

One edge of her mouth ticked up. “I saw Matt pour a beer on your head once, so probably not.”

“How about you?” he asked. “Do your imaginary arguments go differently this time around?”

“Yes,” Meg murmured. “It’s stupid. I’ve been sticking up for myself a lot more, making these clever, well-thought out arguments in my own defense, and then I just feel like a dumbass for fighting with a dead guy.”

“A dead guy you hadn’t seen for two years.”

“Exactly. Who does that?”

“Both of us, apparently. It must be another one of those stages of grieving.”

“I suppose.” She didn’t say anything thing for a moment. When he felt her tilt sideways, he put a hand on her waist to steady her.

“Sorry,” he said when he felt her jump.

“It’s okay. I just wasn’t expecting you to touch me.”

“I wasn’t trying to touch you. Not like that, I mean. I couldn’t tell if you were tipping over.”

She chuckled in the darkness. “I’m not that clumsy. Besides, I took off my heels already.”

“Smart.”

“I was trying to see if the door locked.”

“It doesn’t. I already checked.”

They both went quiet again, and Kyle thought it might be time to leave. Their closet conversation had run its course, and he’d probably be wise to get out of here before someone found them like this.

But then he heard her voice again, soft and hesitant. “Tell me about Cara.”

The words caught him by surprise, but he kept his expression flat even though she probably couldn’t see it. “What do you want to know?”

“You were together a long time. Why did you split up?”

He laughed. “We’re at my brother’s funeral and you want to talk about why my girlfriend dumped me?”

“Sorry. We don’t have to?—”

“It’s okay,” Kyle said, not really minding the question. “Like I told you the other night, I wasn’t that broken up about it. Not sad enough to even muster a few tears.”

“What happened?”

“The short version? She wanted to get married and have babies.”

“What’s the long version?”

“She wanted to get married and have babies and I didn’t.”

“Thanks for elaborating.”

Kyle shrugged, wondering why she was asking. “It was nice while it lasted, but ultimately we just wanted different things.”

It was the truth, though maybe not the whole story. Guilt twisted his gut as he remembered Cara’s tears, the hurled accusations. You’ll never look at me the way I’ve seen you look at ? —

“Did you know Matt didn’t want to marry me?”

“What?” He blinked in the darkness, trying to read Meg’s expression instead of just her tone, which was soft and cautious.

“Matt. He never wanted to get married. Not to me, anyway.”

“That’s not true,” he insisted, even as a tiny voice in the back of his brain asked, Isn’t it?

Meg sighed and leaned against the door. “It’s okay, I knew. I mean, we dated for more than eight years without him ever once bringing up the subject of marriage.”

“You didn’t talk about it at all?”

“I said he didn’t bring it up. Once a year, I’d broach the subject. I tried to play it cool, to act like I didn’t care that much, but all I had to do was say the word marriage and he’d act like I just shoved his testicles in a vise and started cranking.

“Ouch,” Kyle said, trying not to picture it. “He obviously changed his mind at some point. I never thought he had it in him to make such a romantic gesture with a proposal.”

“He didn’t.”

“What?”

“He didn’t make a romantic gesture with the proposal. That whole story we told the family was completely made up.”

Kyle stared at her, remembering the glow in her cheeks, the beautiful wildness in her eyes that autumn when Matt had stood up at the dinner table and said they had an announcement.

Meg had sat there beaming, regaling them all with the story of Matt getting down on one knee at a candlelit restaurant with a solitaire in a champagne flute and a cello quartet playing their favorite song?—

“I don’t understand,” Kyle said.

“We made it up,” she said. “Well, I made it up. I was embarrassed about how it really happened, so I just sort of blurted out this imaginary version of events. When Matt saw how everyone ate up that version of the story, he just sort of went with it.”

“What really happened?”

Meg sighed. “Like I said, I made a big effort to only bring up marriage once a year.

We were watching a football game on TV and one of the players started talking about his wife in an interview—about how she was always there for him and was his rock through all the ups and downs.

Anyway, I made a comment about how sweet that was.

How the word wife sounded so much steadier than girlfriend or partner .

“What did Matt say?”

“I believe his exact words were ‘Jesus Christ, Meg—enough with the nagging already.’”

“God.” Kyle felt his hands clenching at his sides, and he cursed the part of himself that wanted to go back in time and punch his brother. Admittedly he hadn’t been on the same page as Cara when it came to marriage, but he liked to think he hadn’t been a dick about it.

“Normally, I would have just let it drop,” Meg continued. “I never wanted to be a nag, you know? But I guess I was thinking it had been eight years and I wasn’t getting any younger and—well, anyway, I asked why he was so opposed to marriage.”

“Why was he?”

“I don’t know. He never said. He picked up a bowl of potato chips and walked into the guest room to watch the rest of the game.

We didn’t say another word about it until two nights later when he came home from work and slammed this little velvet box on the counter while I was in the kitchen making crab cakes. ”

“The ring?” he guessed, hating this story the more he heard.

“The ring,” she confirmed. “I looked up and he said, ‘Here. We might as well do it.’”

“‘We might as well do it,’” Kyle repeated. “It has a certain romantic flair to it.”

“Matt never claimed to be a romantic,” she said, sounding a little defensive. “I knew that from the beginning, and I was fine with it.”

The prickly note in her voice made Kyle bite back the criticism flaring up at the back of his brain. “Okay.”

“Anyway, he tried to put the ring on my finger, but my hands were covered in crab meat and egg, so I tried to rinse them off really fast, but the ring slipped off and went into the garbage disposal, and I spent the next twenty minutes trying to fish it out.”

“I guess that’s more unique than fishing it out of a champagne flute.”

“I don’t really like champagne anyway.”

“So you said yes?”

She hesitated, and he watched her brow furrow a little in the muted half-light.

“You know, he never actually asked. And come to think of it, I never said yes. I just started wearing the ring and planning the wedding and trying really hard to believe he’d love being married once it actually happened. ”

“I guess you never got to find out.”

“No,” she said, her voice soft in the darkness. “I guess not.”

Kyle hesitated, knowing he was treading on thin ice. No way in hell would his brother want her to know about those dark, somber months after the split. But Kyle could throw her a bone, couldn’t he?

“Even if you’re right that he didn’t want to get married, I know he loved his life with you,” he said softly. “He didn’t want that to end.”

“Neither did I,” she said. “Not then, anyway.”

She paused, and he wondered if she was thinking of a way to leave or a way to stay here for a little while longer.

“I met Chloe,” she said at last. “She seems nice.”

“She does?” Kyle lifted a brow. “You’re sure you met Chloe?”

Meg snorted. “I was being polite.”

“Why? Chloe usually isn’t.”

“She’s probably just grieving,” Meg said, but didn’t sound convinced. “I didn’t even know Matt had a new fiancée.”

“I think we were all sort of hoping she’d take a cue from you and call it quits before the wedding, but it wasn’t looking likely.”

“Sounds like they got engaged pretty quickly?”