Page 41 of The Sandy Page Bookshop

Luke

He had not expected anything new to arise from the high school reunion.

That was the thing about reunions—you knew exactly what you were going to get.

There were the varsity guys, from whatever team, most of whom had expanded their careers and families along with their waistbands.

(The women seemed to fare better than the men.) There were those who peaked in high school whose glory days were behind them.

The nerds who’d found their stride safely outside of the cafeteria and now ran companies or headed hospitals when they weren’t traveling between first and second homes.

Then there were the late bloomers everyone overlooked in the halls but who now turned heads.

Some people surprised you, most people tracked where you expected.

Luke only went for the memories, all of which he understood were well in the rearview mirror.

Which is why he was surprised to strike up something new with someone long-forgotten.

Holly had been on the periphery of his group of friends in high school, and had been a last-minute ask for the prom.

He was a senior and she a junior. After a night of dancing and a few stolen kisses, they dated casually through the summer and parted ways when he went to college.

When she tapped him on the shoulder at the bar, it was probably the first time he’d seen or thought of her since.

They shared a few drinks. They danced. At the end of the night, when she was too tipsy to drive, she joked that he’d need to give her a ride home just as he did after the prom.

Luke still wasn’t sure what to make of it.

From what she’d shared, Holly was freshly divorced and back from Michigan, where she’d gone to college, met her husband, and stayed.

It had only been three months since she’d been back, around the same time Leah returned, which was kind of funny when he thought about it.

Unlike Leah, Holly didn’t know what she wanted to do now that she was back.

“What did you do in Michigan?” Luke had asked.

“My husband works for Google, so.”

“You mean ex-husband?”

“Right.” Luke took that to mean she hadn’t needed to work, and more notably, the reality of being divorced had perhaps not fully landed on her.

From experience he tended to avoid entangling himself in other people’s transitions.

But she was an old friend, he reasoned. Plus, she was fun.

Holly laughed easily, could talk to anyone, and had clearly taken good care of herself.

There was no denying she was an attractive woman.

When he dropped her off at her mother’s house after the reunion, she’d been the one to lean across the front seat of his truck and kiss him.

The next day she texted to ask if he wanted to go to the beach.

Work being what it was, he didn’t have disposable time during the middle of a summer day.

When she asked if he’d like to meet for a drink at the Squire, he said he’d get back to her after he checked his schedule.

The truth was, beyond Scout, his evenings were wide open; he was just buying time to think.

As the day went on, he found himself thinking, Why not?

Leah was the why not, he realized, when he stopped by the Sandy Page.

Standing in her shop once again and listening to her ideas about the café, Luke was reminded why he kept finding himself drawn back to her.

Despite his work demands, he somehow managed to squeeze her harebrained projects in.

More surprising, her harebrained projects seemed to turn out just fine.

She was confounding at times and pushy at others, but he liked that she held herself to even higher standards than she did him.

When he was at the Sandy Page, he felt at home.

He liked watching how personally she interacted with her customers, how she leaned in close when listening and threw her head back to laugh that wild laugh of hers.

He liked how at home she made her staff feel, how much of a regular Eudora Shipman had become, and how the shy girl Lucy seemed to trail Leah like a lost puppy.

Now, standing in the ugly old kitchen as she prattled on about café countertops, he found himself reeling back to the night at Harding’s Beach: to the sand dunes and the sunset and her warm full lips.

It was going to be hard to come back and finish another project for her, but he knew he would.

He also knew he had to find something or someone else to invest his headspace in, because Leah Powell had made herself clear.

During his visit at the Sandy Page, Holly had texted him more than once. On the way home he called her.

“So, are you meeting me tonight or not?” she asked. Her tone was rich with flirtation, and he found himself smiling even as he sat in traffic.

“As it turns out, I am.”