Page 42 of The Lonely Road

“Everything goes well with a good bottle of wine,” I counter.

“And you,” she adds.

My heart warms.

We eat and drink and catch up the way you can only catch up with someone who has known you since you were kids.

Which auntie did what?

Who’s getting married?

Who’s getting divorced?

Who’s been seen in a truck that isn’t their spouse’s?

The usual inventory of a community that keeps a close track of itself.

Then we take the wine into the living room, settle into opposite ends of the couch with our feet tangled in the middle. Sienna pulls a handwoven throw over both of us, and we talk, now about ourselves rather than others.

“So, he’s still calling you.” She shakes her head when I tell her about Griffin. Not with surprise—Sienna has never been surprised by men behaving badly—but with disgust. She was never impressed by him to begin with.

“What can I say. I know how to pick ’em.”

“You seeing anyone?”

I hesitate.

She narrows her eyes. “Taya! Spill!”

“There’s nothing to spill…yet.” This is technically true and also not the full truth, and Sienna knows the difference immediately.

Her eyes go wide—the same expression Cam had when I told him I had something for him.

I tell her about Mason Brooks.

“Sounds like a romance,” she remarks when I’m done.

“We had coffee, and we’re going to dinner. That’s not a romance. It’s a nothing.”

“It’s not a nothing.”

“No,” I admit.

“You like him?”

“I don’t know him.” I turn my wine glass in my hands. “But I’m attracted to him in a way I haven’t been before. Not even with Griffin.”

“Griffin is an asshole.”

I huff a laugh. “True! Griffin, I think, was me wanting to be close to someone I looked up to.” I let out a long, deep breath. “He was someone I thought I wanted to become. I did fall in love with him—I’m not going to pretend I didn’t—but the foundation of it was wrong from the beginning, and some part of me always knew that.”

“Your insight into yourself has always been annoying,” Sienna quips.

“My lack of insight into Griffin, though....”

“You loved him, and he screwed you over. Those two things can both be true.” She tucks her feet further under my leg. “What does your gut say about this one?”

I consider that.