you stay away. If he wants you, he’ll contact you.” His bushy eyebrows bent with sympathy. “Let it go, darlin’.”
Devlin didn’t want me near him. Even though I felt as though my knees might buckle, I locked them and remained standing. I refused to cry any more than I had already. Even the memory of losing Joshua paled in the face of the grief I felt now. It was still too fresh—no scar covering the wound. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
“Honey, sit down.” My mom was trying really hard to comfort me. I didn’t want to be comforted.
“I’m going home.” This time it was the truth. I wasn’t going to talk to Devlin Calvary. He’d made it clear he didn’t want me. I’d said everything I needed to say to him. Including the I love you he’d never returned.
Chapter Nineteen
Rena
I stepped into the craft store Sarafina’s for a job interview, feeling like a traitor to Lyle Mullins, who’d been the owner of the Craft Palace before it’d closed. Then I spotted Lyle behind one of the registers and I didn’t feel so bad. He recognized me and gave me a cheery wave.
I passed racks of colorful paper, walls of stickers, rubber stamps, and shelves lined with dated planners. An employee discount of 25% off awaited me if I landed this job, but even that failed to cheer me up.
“Rena,” came a voice to my right. Tasha waved from a display of storage boxes. “I’ve said your name like five times.” She gestured to the stacks of pink, black, and turquoise patterned boxes with matching flowers and knickknacks interspersed between. “What do you think?”
“Looks great,” I said, my voice toneless.
She lowered her jazz hands and sighed. I couldn’t hide my depression from my best friend, so I hadn’t tried. “It’s been a month, Rena.”
Four grueling weeks since Devlin had fired me. Four weeks of doubt, loss, and sleeping alone. I’d only slept next to him twice. Twice wasn’t enough.
“Do you think he meant it?” I asked Tasha.
“Not this again.”
She’d been at my side for four weeks. Every moment she wasn’t working at Sarafina’s or studying. She’d grown used to my glass-eyed stares and my sullenness.
“Reen. You can’t keep doing this to yourself.”
“Let me ask. One more time,” I begged. Pathetic.
“Fine. Ask.” She pointed at me sternly. “But my answer will be the same as it has been the last ten times you asked me.”
“Do you think Devlin will avoid me forever?”
“I don’t think so,” Tasha answered.
Hope flooded through my veins, and I was momentarily high. Tingling returned to my fingers and toes. My heart lifted in my chest.
“He’s trying to protect you.”
“And when I told him I loved him and he didn’t say it back…”
“He was trying to protect you then, too.” She gave me a soft smile. “I’m jealous, actually,” she said as she rearranged a porcelain unicorn figurine on her display. I would love to feel that way for someone. Even if it all went to shit.”
I gave her a wounded look.
“Temporarily. Temporarily went to shit,” she corrected.
“I wonder how he’s doing.” I’d caved and gone to his apartment last week. The front door was open and an old white-haired guy was on a ladder painting the walls. No furniture, no vase on the floor, no lady-in-a-red-dress painting. When I asked where the former resident had gone, the old man had shrugged.
“He’s okay.” Something in her tone told me she knew more than she’d let on.
“What aren’t you telling me?” I cocked my head.
“I don’t know if it’s healthy for you—”
“Dammit, Tasha—”
“Okay, okay.” She waved her hands in surrender. “Cade ran off his third physical therapist. Paul asked my dad if I could fill in. As a favor.”
I knew Paul had saved Tasha’s father from a tax-evasion lawsuit a few years back.
She shrugged. “I’ve only worked with Cade twice, and yeah, we don’t exactly get along but—”
“Tash!”
“Devlin’s living at Paul’s,” she said, giving up the ghost.
“Devlin lives with Paul?” I repeated.
“Yep.”
“How’s Cade doing?”
Tasha erased the gap between us and trained big blue eyes on me. “That’s not the question you want to ask.”
True. I hadn’t expected to find out that Tasha actually knew how he was. Now that I knew someone who knew, not knowing seemed safer.
“Has Cade spoken yet?” I asked, avoiding asking more about Devlin.
“Not much. He writes everything down. Or points.”
“Paul must have to keep them on opposite sides of the house.” There wasn’t a lot of love lost between those two.
“They’re doing well, I think.