dumbfounded. This might have been the biggest revelation of the last few minutes. The whole time I’d known her, nothing was ever Kat’s fault.
“Yeah, she said she was waiting and waiting for you on the subway platform. She thought you’d left her behind, but I said it had to be a misunderstanding.…”
I sat back against the booth. So Kat hadn’t just taken the opportunity to leave as soon as I’d gotten on the train without her—and she certainly hadn’t missed the train on purpose. While I’d been dealing with muggers with fake knives, she’d thought I’d gone on without her. She’d been waiting for me, thinking I’d been the one to leave her behind.
So it had all been a misunderstanding—on both our parts. It gave me some hope in terms of us fixing things. I knew we were going to have work to do—we’d have to deal with everything we said during our fight—but things no longer felt quite so dire. There was a tiny bit of light at the end of the tunnel.
Before I could tell Beckett any of this, Todd came hustling back to the table, his face slightly red. “Okay,” he said, giving us a nervous smile. “So it seems like the most expensive drinks are our smoothies and juices. However, they’re not on the dinner menu. I spoke to Chef to see if she’d make an exception, but—”
“That’s okay,” I said, shaking my head. I looked at Beckett and smiled, for what felt like the first time in a while. “He’ll take a Roy Rogers.” Beckett rolled his eyes at me, but smiled. On one of our first dates, he’d ordered this, and I’d had no idea what he was talking about, until he explained to me that he’d been drinking them since he was little. His older sister, Emily, would always order a Shirley Temple, and though he liked them, his six-year-old masculine pride meant he couldn’t abide a pink drink. So a waitress had brought him a Roy Rogers—Coke, grenadine, way too many maraschino cherries—and from that moment he was hooked.
“Oh,” Todd said, looking a little bit thrown by this reversal. “So no smoothies. And you want a Roy…” His voice faded out, a question in it somewhere, and Beckett and I nodded. “Sorry… but can I see your ID?”
I stared at Todd. “What for?”
“Seriously,” Beckett said, his voice firm. “I get them all the time. I’ve been getting them since I was a little kid. It’s not a big deal.” Todd looked from me to Beckett, swallowed hard, then scribbled something on his server pad. “And for you?” he asked me. “Do you want a… Roy?”
“She’ll take an iced tea,” Beckett said slowly, looking at me. “Less ice than normal, but with a lemon squeezed in. Mint if you have it.”
Todd hurried away, looking stressed, but I just looked at Beckett—thinking about Kat and my Starbucks and Margaux and Ruffles and now Beckett, who still knew my drink even after how I’d treated him, even after all this time. “You remembered,” I said, my voice a little strangled.
“You too.”
“You think I’m going to forget your cowboy drink order?” I shook my head. “Never.” I looked at him across the table. I was used to seeing Beckett in school, or working in the shop, scattered with a faint layer of sawdust. He didn’t look like that now. He was wearing a button-down, in a blue that brought out his eyes, the sleeves rolled up over his forearms. His dark blond hair, which turned curly if he let it grow, was as usual cut short.
I was suddenly flashing back to the last time we’d sat across a table and shared a meal together—just the two of us, not cast and tech crew splitting a pizza before a dress rehearsal. It had been late August, the week before school started again. At the Boxcar Cantina, where I’d broken his heart, and mine, all in one fell swoop.
We were halfway through our meal—enchiladas for me, a huge burrito for him, queso to share—when he’d taken my hand and told me, his voice shaking with nervousness and emotion, that he loved me.
I’d just sat there, my heart pounding, but not with happiness or excitement. Without warning, everything in me was screaming danger danger danger. And even though a part of me—a big part—wanted to say it back, because I loved him, of course I did… I couldn’t do it.
Suddenly, everything that had happened with my parents—the fallout, the