The Mistake (Bad Bridesmaids #1) - Noelle Adams Page 0,33

all.

In truth, it was very, very good.

Robert wasn’t one of those people who believed that every moment needed to be filled with talk, so a lot of the trip was in comfortable silence while he drove and she putzed around on her phone. He let her pick the music, so she switched between a country station and millennial pop, partly because she liked a lot of the songs but mostly because she thought it might annoy him and she wanted to see his reaction.

As she hoped, he raised his eyebrows with each new song, the arch higher or lower depending on the degree of silly schmaltz.

She knew how to read his moods, however, so she could see he wasn’t really irritated. He was enjoying her teasing in his typical, sardonic way.

When they did talk, it varied between casual banter and deeper conversation. The deeper conversation usually came when Robert would ask her random questions that required some real introspection.

They’d been driving about four hours when he asked without warning, “So was I right about Dave?”

She grew very still for a moment—more surprise than indignation. “What about Dave?”

He glanced over and gave her face a brief, searching scan. “About it not being love. About it being a fantasy and not reality. Was I right or were you really heartbroken?” His tone and expression maintained a pretense of relaxed indifference. As if the question wasn’t a significant one.

But something about the way he kept glancing over made her wonder if he was as casual as he was pretending.

She frowned, thinking through the question and trying to figure out how to answer it.

“Too personal?” he prompted after a minute, his mouth twitching in a dead giveaway that he was trying to provoke her. “I thought we were friends now.”

She rolled her eyes. “Friends don’t purposefully try to make their friends mad.”

“Sometimes they do.”

She tried, but she couldn’t hold back a laugh at the glint in his eyes. “Maybe. But honestly it wasn’t that I was trying not to answer the question. I was just trying to figure out the answer.”

“So you don’t know if you’re heartbroken or not?”

“I don’t know. I mean, in some ways I feel heartbroken. Or I did. Not so much now, but even still occasionally. Like I’d lost something really important. But I’m not sure that what I lost is Dave himself.” She sighed and turned her phone in her hands. “That probably doesn’t even make sense.”

“It might make sense. Say more about it.”

She flashed him a brief scowl just to prove she wasn’t overlooking his presumption, but it did feel better to try to put this into words, so she didn’t hold back the way she might otherwise have. “This sounds terrible, but I actually don’t miss Dave as much as I think I should. I mean, I still love him. I always will. He’s been a part of my life for a really long time, and I feel connected to him the way I do to family. But... I don’t miss hanging out with him the way I used to. I don’t wish he were with me all the time... or even sometimes. I don’t miss him. But I miss... It feels like I lost...”

He waited for a minute after she trailed off, turning his eyes from the road once or twice to check her face. Then he finally prompted, “What did you lose?”

She shrugged and stared down at her phone since his dark eyes were too observant, too penetrating. “I lost the dream. The hope. I lost the me I used to be. The one who loved him.”

Robert was silent when she finished. So silent she got nervous and looked over to see him staring at the road. He gave his lips a quick lick as if they were suddenly dry.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?” she demanded, self-conscious that she’d bared so much of her soul and he hadn’t even responded.

“I was thinking about what you said.”

“And what are your thoughts about it?”

“I’m not sure you’ll like my thoughts.”

“When has that ever stopped you? You say things I don’t like all the time. It never seemed to bother you before.”

He chuckled, his eyes warming and his posture relaxing. “That’s true, I suppose. The thing is, I wonder if the you that you used to be—the you who thought she loved him—was the real you.”

Her back stiffened. “I think I’m a better judge of who I really am than you are.”

“See, I told you that you