Page 7

Kia stumbled out of the forest. The lights in the parking lot felt like spotlights.

Clumps of mud clung to her sparkly boots.

Her phone vibrated with texts. It had probably been vibrating the whole time she had talked to Sullivan.

She just hadn’t noticed. They’d all be texts from potential sponsors funneled her way by Gretchen.

More sponsors. More branded posts. More product placement.

Gretchen had already signed her up with Mayonaisia margarine mayonnaise, Solo cups, and American Spirit breakfast sausages.

Gretchen would be on her if she didn’t text them back immediately, but how could she think about American Spirit breakfast sausages when she had just ruined Alice Sullivan’s life.

She shivered as the cold edged out the adrenaline in her bloodstream.

Across the parking lot, Deja stood in front of Kia’s F-150, waving with her whole arm.

“Kia! Over here. That was terrible. Do you want to talk? I’m here for you. I’ll drive you to Old Girl, and then we can go out.”

Deja had been working with Kia for over a year.

She wasn’t the first superfan who’d wanted to work with Kia, but she was the first one insistent enough and talented enough—serving as everything from fill-in cook to videographer to crowd control—to get on the payroll.

What Kia hadn’t been prepared for was the fact that Deja’s fangirling hadn’t diminished.

Kia Gourmazing hadn’t lost her luster in Deja’s eyes.

And sometimes, like now, Kia wished Deja would silently do her job like any other bored employee in America instead of taking passionate interest in Kia’s every move.

“I’ll drive. It’s my truck.” Kia didn’t want to be the kind of influencer who snapped at her assistant, but today was a fail all the way around.

“You can’t drive,” Deja said seriously. “You’re upset.”

“I’m upset. I’m not drunk.” Kia felt around for her keys.

“You left your bag inside.” Deja held up Kia’s sparkling turquoise purse. “The meeting’s gonna let out soon. Let’s go.” She pulled out Kia’s keys and hopped in the driver’s seat.

Kia got in the passenger side. She sighed and touched the truck’s screen, tapped home, which would locate Old Girl in the Riverview RV Park north of Portland.

When they stopped in the middle of nowhere, Deja sometimes slept on the pullout couch in the RV.

But they weren’t in the middle of nowhere, and Kia couldn’t take too much more Deja cheer.

“You got an Airbnb, right?” Kia asked. “Don’t forget to charge it to my account.”

“Yes, but I can stay with you if you want.”

“No. No. Thank you.”

“I can’t believe what happened in there. And that woman Alice Sullivan… what did you talk about? On a scale of one to a hundred, how pissed was she?” Deja continued talking a thousand words a minute. “It’s kinda like Amazon reviews though. If someone gives it one star—”

“Gives what one star?”

“Anything. A blanket that looks like a tortilla. Taxidermized bat. And someone gives it one star and they’re like, this is the worst thing ever.

You know they’re probably just mad at their life, but if they give it a three, then maybe you believe them.

So do you think she was one star angry or three stars angry? ”

“Probably one star.”

“Not your fault then. She’s just angry at her life.”

Because I ruined it.

Kia pulled out her phone. Interspersed with sponsors were texts from her people, starting with her cousin Lillian.

Lillian: Congrats on the sale, right?

She’d sent that several hours earlier, before Kia had gone into the grange hall.

From her aunt Eleanor she’d gotten a perfectly punctuated text telling her that Eleanor was proud of her and Kia’s father would be too as soon as he sailed close enough to land to get cell phone reception again and heard about the sale.

Eleanor: Also, don’t hesitate to call your father on the emergency radio; I know it’s for emergencies. However, I think this counts as a happy emergency; he would be delighted to hear you won the American Fare Award and are entering the landowning class.

So much punctuation.

Me’Shell wasn’t as optimistic.

Me’Shell: How’d it go? I’m looking for your post????

Me’Shell: You haven’t posted. Did the sale go through. We’re in Wyoming right now. We should still come right? I don’t think we can afford the gas to get back. Ha ha ha HA

Me’Shell: But for real what’s goin on

Gretchen texted, I heard. Call me now. Kia couldn’t debrief with Gretchen. Sullivan’s tears had robbed Kia of words.

Portland blurred by outside the truck’s window, rainy and dark. The traffic lurched. The highway backed up like rush hour even though it was after eight p.m. Everyone said Portland had gotten too big for its infrastructure. Too many people wanted to call this rainy, green city home.

“So what do you think?” Deja asked. “What are you going to do?”

It took Kia a moment to realize that Deja had stopped talking long enough to wait for an answer.

“Leave town I guess.” Sometimes her life felt like driving on an empty freeway with no landmarks and no GPS to tell her if she’d ever reach home.

“I mean about Alice Sullivan,” Deja prompted.

“Fuck. Nothing, I guess.” Kia leaned the side of her head against the window. Rain and city lights hit the window.

“But she’s totally into you.”

Please don’t let Deja be writing fan fiction about her love life. (Deja’s fanfic would be Kia’s only love life.)

“And you’ve got tons in common. There’s not much about her online. Nothing recent. She used to be all over the foodie scene, then she kind of disappeared a year or two ago. No social media. My friend Trey isn’t a hacker but—”

Nothing legit started with “isn’t a hacker but.”

“They found out Alice Sullivan owns this fancy eco-restaurant called Mirepoix du Bois. Mirepoix of the woods. She lives on the other side of the Bois.”

“I know.” I wish I didn’t.

“And Trey found a video of your kiss at graduation.”

Kia lifted her head from the cold window and looked at Deja.

“Where? How?”

“Someone filmed your graduation. And they didn’t exactly put it online, but Trey is good at research.

The way that guy was talking shit about how much you hate each other, and then you just grabbed her and kissed her, and she kissed you back like…

fire. There was so much there. I can’t believe you didn’t get together after that.

It was obvious you’ve been in love with her since that kiss.

And I could tell she saw you looking all snatched and realized she feels the same way. ”

Deja’s words hurt like grabbing the handle of a pot that had been in the oven.

For a split second, the body didn’t register pain.

Then pain washed in on a wave of how-could-I-have-been-so-dumb because Kia had played this fantasy in her mind a thousand times.

Sullivan saw her again and suddenly realized what their time together had meant and how irresistible she found Kia.

They kissed and skipped into the sunrise of happily ever after.

(The exact details of HEA were hazy. Did Sullivan move into Old Girl?

Would Sullivan like living in a vintage RV?

Did they buy a farm and raise chickens? There was definitely a lot of sex and cuddling on comfortable sofas and planning birthday adventures.) Hearing how ridiculous the fantasy sounded coming from Deja made Kia feel like a fool a thousand times over.

“I don’t want to talk about Alice Sullivan.” Please take a hint.

“Yes. But,” Deja said with enough pep to make the sun rise early. “This is your chance to connect with your long-lost love. God, I wish I had someone like that. It’s so romantic. What tore you apart? Was it another woman?”

“What? No.”

“A man? Anyway. Doesn’t matter. Maybe you’ll even get married.

Hell, maybe it’d make you a legacy owner.

But that’s not the point. The point is you get a second chance at love.

You could live with her. Portland’s hella expensive.

Seattle too. When I lived in Seattle, I had four roommates.

” Deja relayed something about a roommate who ate everyone’s condiments.

“But like way more mayo than normal. It’s like, What did you do with it?

You don’t think it was something sexual, do you? ”

Deja paused, apparently genuinely waiting for an answer.

“I so can’t answer that.”

This morning Kia “Gourmazing” was living the elusive American dream.

Now she’d betrayed Me’shell, ruined Sullivan’s life, opened the door for Mega Eats to barge into a neighborhood that didn’t want them, and Deja was asking her about sex and mayo.

And she wanted to cry, but there was no one to cry to.

Her father was yachting out of cell phone range.

No one had ever cried on her aunt Eleanor’s shoulder.

And ever since her cousin and best friend Lillian had moved to Paris with her girlfriend, Izzy, Lillian had started scheduling their calls.

The gaps between Lillian’s texts had gotten longer.

Kia had been Lillian’s person. Now it was Izzy.

And even though Lillian loved her and would listen to her all night long if Kia wanted to talk, it didn’t feel the same knowing that some part of Lillian wanted to get off the phone and get back to Izzy.

When Kia got back to her RV, she threw herself on her bed.

She’d always been an optimist. She found solutions.

She tried new things and they worked. She expected people to like her and they did.

She gave a bitter laugh, thinking about Deja’s romantic fantasy.

Sullivan hadn’t missed her. There was no lost love to rekindle.

They weren’t moving in together. Kia wasn’t going to become a legacy owner by marrying Sullivan. Marry Sullivan. Ha! Right.

Deja was sweet but she was ridiculous sometimes.

So ridiculous it wasn’t even worth googling the Oakwood Heights charter to see if marrying a legacy owner made you a legacy owner.

Deja needed a lesson on identifying realistic plans.

The last thing Kia was going to do was show up on Sullivan’s doorstep and beg Sullivan to marry her so Kia could build Taste the Love Land and torture herself by imagining a world in which Sullivan loved her.