Page 45 of Dear Ripley

“No, it’s not. It’s a perfectly reasonable comparison.” She paused at the door. “Hurry up, I’m starving.”

I shook my head. “I’ve literally been here talking to you, making you coffee, looking after you. You can wait two minutes for me to take my apron off and lock up.”

“I really can’t. I’m practically wasting away.”

“Indeed. A true tragedy.”

“You’d miss me if I died.”

“God knows why,” I muttered, grabbing my things from the back.

“Because you love me, and everyone knows it. Quit acting like you don’t.”

She really liked to push her luck sometimes. Apparently, the look on my face when I reappeared was enough to clue her in on that fact.

She sighed softly. “I’m sorry for bringing up the Alicia thing. I know it must be hard that she’s not responded to your letter—”

“How do you know she hasn’t?” I asked, brow furrowed.

She laughed. “Because, if she had and it was good, you’d definitely be walking around all happy and glowy, like you do when she’s around and things are good.”

“Something that hasn’t happened in eight years, so you don’t know that’s how I’d be.”

She rolled her eyes at me. “It’s how you’d be.”

“Ugh.” I led her outside, pausing only to lock the door behind us. “Fine. But what if she replied and it wasn’t good?”

“Oh, well, then you’d be walking around like a kicked puppy. Very obvious. You are neither of those things right now. You’re just… that frantic kind of thing you do when you desperately want to hear from her but haven’t.”

“Once again,” I said, leading the way down the street, dusk just beginning to settle in, “I’m reminding you that Alicia and I haven’t even interacted in eight years. You don’t know that my reactions to her are the same.”

Morgan laughed. “Nothing has changed that much.”

I gave up. There was no point arguing with Morgan, not when she’d made her mind up. And, in her mind, Alicia and I were on the precipice of something happening. In her mind, that was great and exciting, and we were all years younger again. And, in her mind, I was staying over at her place most nights to help her curb a crush on some gift-wrapping woman on YouTube.

Morgan had such a weird way of looking at things.

It didn’t take long to get to the restaurant, but, by the time we did, Morgan had regained the spring in her step, clearly thinking she’d won something tonight.

I held the door open for her, sighing. “You’d better have washed the sheets in the guest room.”

She gasped exaggeratedly, turning in the doorway to look back at me, and placing a hand on her chest in apparent shock. “Of course I have. Who do you think I am?”

“You. That’s the problem.”

Chapter 15

Alicia

The restaurant Dad had brought us to was nice. It hadn’t been here the last time I was, but it was clear my family were regulars these days. I hadn’t known my parents were such fans of Ethiopian food, but the number of times they’d talked about it, and the way the staff greeted them told me they ate here a lot.

And it wasn’t hard to see why.

The staff members were wonderful, attentive, and incredibly knowledgeable about the dishes. If I didn’t know better, I’d have guessed the front-of-house staff had been the ones cooking the food with how well they knew it.

They obviously did a decent trade too. It wasn’t packed to the rafters, but there were a good number of other people in, and a very steady stream of takeaway orders coming and going.

So, really, I should have seen it coming that we were going to run into people we knew.

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