great—better than great—and the next, I’m driving her to the airport, and she’s telling me, Call me if you’re ever ready. It was... bad. I was blindsided and... really hurt. She knew I was a SEAL from the jump, and it seemed so harsh. I love you, except for that important job that you have that you love so passionately. I don’t love that, so now you have to change or I’m gone.”
“Wow,” Tash said. “I thought... I mean, everyone thought...”
“That I dumped her?” he said. “Oh, good.”
“By everyone, I really just mean Alan and Mia.”
“That’s supposed to make me feel better?”
“They wanted you to marry her. They were crushed when it didn’t work out.”
He laughed as he finished the last of his beer. “Uncle Navy was crushed.”
“Well, Mia was crushed, and Alan was supportive.”
“Ah,” he said. “That sounds about right.”
“As for me,” Tasha said, and he looked up from pouring himself another small handful of his peanuts—his eyes flashing his alarm. She smiled at him sweetly, because yeah, she was going there. “I was still convinced you were going to marry me. It seemed about the right time for Rachel and her smarty-pants to exit stage left. In my head, she wasn’t good enough for you—although she did have the tall thing down. It never occurred to me that she might’ve broken your heart, and I’m sorry I wasn’t more empathetic.”
He was clearly uncomfortable with where she’d taken the conversation, because he jumped on one of her details. “The tall thing?” he asked. “That’s the second time you’ve mentioned tall.”
“Well, yeah,” she said. “Because when I was really little, you told me you couldn’t marry me because I was too short.”
Thomas laughed. “Yeah, okay, I remember that. You had no time for any rules that said seventeen-year-olds couldn’t marry five-year-olds, so I went with height as my main can’t marry you excuse.”
“It got me to eat my vegetables religiously, for years,” Tasha told him.
“You were such a funny kid,” he said. “That pink settee...?”
“Oh, my God!” she said, laughing. “Right?”
When she’d first moved in with Uncle Alan, he’d taken Tasha furniture shopping to buy a bed, a desk, and a dresser for his empty second bedroom. In the center of the showroom, she’d spotted a pink upholstered sofa—the perfect accessory to the I’m a Russian Princess in Exile fantasy that she insisted upon playing ad nauseum.
Alan had read the tag aloud—nearly fainting at the price—and it was described as a “settee.” After that, she refused to call it anything else. It became the beginning and end for her—the absolute pinnacle of her hopes and dreams. Her uncle had ended up buying it and putting it in his tiny apartment’s living room. His SEAL buddies had laughed their asses off—until they started having kids of their own.
“You know, it’s still in Alan and Mia’s playroom,” she told Thomas.
“Oh, yeah.” He smiled back at her. “That shade of pink’s hard to miss.”
Tasha had to look away then, because of the wave of sadness that hit her. For the past five years, she and Thomas had—through careful, strategic planning—only been in Alan and Mia’s playroom when the other was absent. After all those years they’d spent together, reading or watching movies while sitting on that pink settee...
Thomas either misread her emotional shift—or got it exactly right. Either way, he focused on the furniture. “That thing was your home base,” he said. “Like, your life was a giant and really scary game of tag, but when you were sitting on that pink sofa—”
“Settee.”
“Right. When you were sitting on that pink settee—” he accepted her correction the same way he always had, with a smile and an acknowledging tip of his head “—you were safe. You could relax. Still, that thing had nothing on your desk, in your bedroom.”
“I never had a desk before,” she told him, then backed up a bit. “I never had my own bedroom before I stayed with Uncle Alan. And with furniture I got to pick out...? It was unreal.” She shook her head. “Sometimes Sharon would hook up with guys who were older—divorced or widowed—so if they had a daughter or a son who was grown up and gone, I’d sometimes get to stay in their room and, you know, be sternly told not to break anything. Which is the stupidest thing to tell a kid, by the way. Like being sent an engraved invitation to your inevitable failure. So that was hard, plus I always knew it