“So you moved him in with you?” Her tone was complete disbelief. “That boy nearly destroyed you twelve years ago.”
“Mom, no. Come on. I wouldn’t have offered him Mary’s spot, but she mentioned retiring in front of him and he couldn’t get it out of his mind. I still wasn’t sold on having him in the space. You know how protective I am of the Bywater.”
She nodded. We all were. I’d learned it from her and my dad.
“Anyway, he brought me over to this music center in Tremé to meet his business partner. Between the two of them, I believed in their vision for Miss Mary’s place. If I’d leased it to another restaurant, I would have always felt like it was falling short, that I should have found something better. It felt right to go in a different direction.”
She’d listened with tightly pursed lips. “All of that sounds like good reasoning until you get to the part that it’s Miles Crowe.”
“From a business standpoint, I stand by that choice. They’re going to be great in that space.”
“Then how is it you ended up on the news?”
“You are not going to love what comes next.”
“Spit it out, Gabrielle Marie.” But she gave my arm a gentle squeeze.
“We started dating.”
“Oh, Gabi,” she sighed. She only remembered to call me Ellie half the time. “At what point did you decide he was a decent human being? What could have possibly changed your mind?”
I stifled an impulse to defend him. The whole reason I’d run to her crying was because he’d proven that he didn’t want to be publicly associated with me now any more than he had then.
My phone went off. A text from Miles. Call me? We have gotten things so twisted. I turned it off and dropped my phone into my purse.
“Dylan stopped in when we were having lunch at Miss Mary’s once,” I said. “He told Miles who I was, and his reaction was different than I expected. He apologized, and he’d had no idea how much that whole mess followed me. He figured it had burned itself out after a couple of weeks when the next viral thing came along. And it had some pretty tough repercussions for him too.”
My mom snorted. “Like what? Million-dollar recording deals?”
“Yeah, like that. Because he got pigeon-holed as a teen idol, and his label wouldn’t let him move beyond it. He wanted to explore different sounds, reinvent himself, and they wouldn’t let him. He left and went indie, but without their giant machine behind him, he didn’t find the same kind of success.”
She smoothed my hair back. “Why am I only hearing about it now, and how did it lead to you crying on my couch?”
“We’ve been dating for almost two months. And I’m crazy about him. I’ve had hints that he’s not as into me as I’m into him. And maybe that’s subconsciously why I haven’t brought him around before. I didn’t want you to think this was me reliving my freshman crush and not see it for something real.”
“But is it real?”
I slowly shook my head, my eyes welling again. I hated the burning feeling of the tears. She tucked a tissue into my hand without a word. “I should have known. Maybe I did. He’s never said he loves me. He sings me love songs, but he never says the words to me. I hoped it would be a matter of time. But then, this afternoon, Channel Five came to do an interview, and...” The tears spilled over, and I swiped at them with the tissue.
“Oh, honey. It’s okay. You can tell me when you’re ready.” She pulled me back into her arms and held me while I cried some more. This time it was a slow, steady trickle of tears that somehow tasted saltier and sadder than the first ones. I wasn’t sure how long I stayed there, cuddled against her shoulder, before those ran out too.
I straightened and pushed my hair off my cheek where the tears had stuck it. I reached for a fresh tissue and twisted it around my fingers, winding it up, straightening it out against my leg, winding it up again. I watched Miles in my mind’s eye as he spoke to Kyla, replaying his words on a loop.
“He told Kyla that it had been fun getting to know me and that I’ve been a major asset in helping them open the club.” The words left a pit in