Page 53 of Wish You Were Her

“And yet he was the one I expected to find here.”

The words startled both of them.

“After receiving her message,” Allegra added quickly. “She wasn’t able to say which one of you the message was for. But I thought it would be Simon.”

He glared. “You assumed it would be Simon?”

“Yes,” Allegra snapped defensively. “He’s… always by the computer.”

It was a weak justification and they both knew it.

“I don’t know who she is,” Jonah admitted, his tone contemplative. He peered up at her. “What was she like?”

Allegra blanched. “Sorry?”

“What did she sound like? How did she seem?”

“I don’t know,” she answered, avoiding his gaze. “Normal, I guess. I wasn’t really taking notes.”

He watched her sigh with a heaviness that surprised him. Frustrated with himself for being defensive and cantankerous, he extended an olive branch.

“I’m sorry for being short,” he said.

“You’ve been short all summer,” she fired back, symbolically snapping the branch. “You’ve been rude and standoffish and judgmental since the moment I came into Dad’s shop. You sneer at what I read. You chase away my customers. You treat me like a stack of orders you can’t be bothered to process and you roll your eyes when I speak.”

Jonah swallowed. He couldn’t deny any of it. And the realreason for his frosty, flinty feelings stared at him with indignation, wondering why he wouldn’t address them.

He wanted to apologize. However, the fear of vulnerability, the terror of being perceived… it was a terrible chaser to a cocktail of pride.

“Some of us aren’t slumming it here for a summer, some of us care about the store all year round.”

The words were the perfect disguise.

He could keep his secrets. It just meant being an ass.

He regarded the disappointment on Allegra’s face. There was nothing guarded about it; her dismay was etched into the atoms of her perfect features. She sat back in her chair and exhaled, taking him in.

“I suppose,” she finally spoke with resignation, “I just thought that coldness was your nature. But whomever you’ve been emailing… they’ve been getting a kind person. Right? A funny person. Or they wouldn’t want to come tonight.”

Jonah didn’t say anything.

“So, youcanbe nice, I guess,” Allegra continued. “Just not to me. You know, Simon once said you think of people as books. So, here. To me, you’re like the pretentious novels you love so much. Just a story that nobody wants to hear.”

The words landed like a spark on a line of powder and it ignited something in Jonah.

“Why did you come to this stupid little town?” he fired back. His voice was loud enough to cause a few bystanders to glance over at the two of them. “In all the years George has lived here alone, you’ve never visited.”

“Don’t talk about my dad to me.”

“Why now? Why a summer in Lake Pristine? You have everything. You’re loved all over the world. People writeessaysabout how in love with you they are. They sleep in the street to catch a glimpse of you at a premiere. You have more money than my whole family combined. What more could you possibly want? Why come here? Why do you have to conquer this small town when you have the whole world, Allegra?”

He blurted out the last word just as he realized his private thoughts had broken free and hit her like a defiant spit in the face. They stared at each other and he was horrified by the shimmer of moisture in her eyes.

“That’s my cue to leave,” she finally said, her words a whisper. She rose to her feet with the posture of a dancer and the serenity of an empress. Jonah felt his insides clench.

“Allegra—”

“I don’t see my father, or any of my family much, because I’m on back-to-back ninety-day shoots,” she told him calmly. “Often in countries I don’t live in. I don’t have friends, just co-workers. My Christmas card list is my agent, my publicist, my estate agent, all of their assistants, my accountant and my managerial advisory board.” She took a shaky breath and smiled sadly. “A journalist wrote a horrible, snarky article about me and I felt tired. I needed to escape. To have a normal summer, like other eighteen-year-olds.”