Page 46 of The Rebound Plan

“I must have left them down there. Thanks, Max.”

“No problem,” he mutters, looking like there is still definitely a problem.

Emery glances my way briefly, her smile firmly in place, her gaze soft and warm. Delayed guilt roils in my belly.

“This sauce isincredible,” Ani says, changing the subject.

Emery laughs. “You want to know where I learned how to make it? TikTok.”

Russ leans in. “Tell them about the hiccup cure.”

“Oooh yes.” She throws her head back, cackling. “Okay, so if you ever get the hiccups, just yellI am not a fishand throw your arms up in the air. They’ll go away.”

There’s a chorus of disbelieving reactions around the table. She leans over, snuggling into Russ as she looks up at him softly. “Tell them how it worked last night.”

He grins down at her.

Another visceral reaction slices through my chest, this one hotter and more deadly than the guilt.

“She crawled into bed, drunk as a skunk?—”

“I wasn’t drunk,” she corrects. “Happily tipsy.”

“Wakes me up?—”

“Apologizedimmediately.”

“And then scared the crap out of me with the fish thing.”

“You skipped the part where I told you how nice your friends are,” Emery says, triumphantly finishing their nauseatingly sweet little performance.

My thoughts right now aren’t nice at all.

I stab my fork into my pasta, hating how delicious it is. Hating that Emery saved the conversation, diverted my husband’s misplaced jealousy, and sparked this new wave of my own misplaced jealousy all at the same time.

I want to like her so, so much.

Idolike her.

But in this moment, I hate her even more.

I hate how perfect she is for Russ. That my first assumption, that they weren’t suited to each other, wasn’t correct in the slightest.

And most of all, I hate that I read something into this afternoon that obviously didn’t exist.

“What else have you learned from TikTok?” Kiley asks.

“What haven’t I learned?” Emery taps her bottom lip with her index finger, thinking. “How to fold a bottom sheet easily, how to put a duvet cover on a king size duvet by yourself—a lot of them are bedding related—oh, and sleep related, too. Like hacks to fall asleep faster. There’s this thing calledcognitive shuffling?—”

Max smirks. “TikTok dumbs everything down. I do cognitive shuffling but it’s not that simple.”

Emery frowns. “It’s not dumbing something down to make it easily understood. That takes a lot of skill, actually. I learned about cognitive shuffling in sixty seconds, and it works the way it was described. Seems pretty simple to me.”

“I’m sure.” Except his tone sounds utterly dismissive.

God. Damn. It.

I stand up as quietly as I can, wanting to just remove myself from the table without causing a scene.

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