Page 8 of The Note
I met her gaze, every bit as green and intelligent as Marissa’s, and I was pretty sure she noticed that I hadn’t looked at Alex directly even once.
The woman was a terror. I kind of wanted to be her someday.
But with her eyes on me, I forced myself to look back at Marissa and Alex’s table, because really, looking at him couldn’t be any worse than thinking about him, could it?
Did Alex Fletcher look good? It was honestly hard to say. Objectively speaking, he was handsome as ever. His relentlessly-straight brown hair was meticulously swept off his forehead, held in place with twenty-seven pounds of styling product, and his pale cheeks were flushed a bright pink that had less to do with the way the heaters were blasting the February chill out of the event tent and more to do with the way Marissa was leaning against his side.
Would I have fallen for him if he hadn’t fallen for me first, though? I wasn’t sure. It was like solving a complex equation in reverse, and I’d never been particularly good at math without Gus to explain it to me.
What I did know, without a doubt, was that Alex had never once looked at me with the tender, devoted passion he was right now gushing all over my sister.
And I had never once looked at him the way Marissa did, either.
“Yeah,” I told Grandma Berry. “He looks really good. Happy.”
Her mouth pursed in a sad little smile, but she nodded like I’d said exactly what she needed to hear. “When a man finds where he belongs, it’s like a key turning in a lock, Tyler. There’s happy, and then there’shappy-happy, when the feeling is so bone-deep, you know it’ll never go away no matter how hard life gets, because you’re where you’re meant to be and doing what you’re meant to do. That’s what Alex has now. And when someone you care about finds that kind of happiness, you can’t help but wish them well.” She paused and tilted her head toward me. “Right?”
“Yeah.” I nodded slowly, and she reached across the white linen table cloth to give my hand a gentle squeeze. “You’re right.”
So when she turned away to talk to the distant cousin on her left, I pushed my plate aside, reached for the bottle of wine, filled my glass to the tippy-top, and said a mental toast to the happiness of my stepsister and the man I’d thought was the love of my life.
But I could feel the note burning a hole in my pocket.
