Page 31 of Don't Regret Me
She tried to regain her composure, brushing a sweaty palm against her white chef’s jacket. “Yeah?”
The hostess, Shanice, gave her a sympathetic look. “Someone is asking for you.”
Finally, this was it. After eating in silence for four nights straight, Nick asked for her. She wasn’t sure what to say to him after how they’d left things, after kissing him.
“Not him.” Shanice shrugged. “Someone at the front of the house.”
Liz wasn’t sure who it could be until she walked into the dining room and saw them. Corey stood near the front door with two disgruntled kids at his side. He’d offered to watch them tonight to give her dad the night off, but it didn’t look like it was going as well as last time.
“Guys.” Liz reached them, ushering them into a quiet corner. “Is everything okay?” She put a hand on Evelyn’s shoulder.
Corey rubbed the back of his neck. “I got called into work.”
Of course he did. “You promised me you were free tonight.”
“I was, but they need me.”
“Need you, right. Just like your kids need you. Why didn’t you drop them off with my dad? This is my work, Corey.”
He sighed. “You know your dad has always hated me.”
“Fine, you know what, just go. I’ll handle this.”
Corey only hesitated a moment before leaving. Liz bent down to hug both kids. “I’m going to call Papa, okay?”
Owen nodded, but Evelyn didn’t make a move.
Liz used the phone at the host stand to try her dad, but he didn’t answer. It was one thing to bring the kids to the restaurant for five minutes during lunch service, but this was not the place for them tonight.
She was about to walk back into the kitchen and beg her frazzled boss to see if she could leave the already overwhelmed restaurant to take her kids home when someone spoke behind her. “They can sit with me.”
She turned, coming face to face with Nick. He was close, too close, and his fresh, woodsy scent invaded her every sense. “Excuse me?”
“I have space at my table. We can just find a third chair. I bet they’re hungry.”
“Starving,” Owen said.
Evelyn nodded. “If I don’t get some breadsticks quick, I’m probably going to have to eat my own arm.” She looked at Nick. “Do you know that’s called cannibalism?”
“Okay.” Liz clapped her hands together to change the subject. “Fine. You two can eat with Mr. Jacobs if it’s not too much trouble for him. But no making outrageous demands of the waitstaff.” She pointed to Owen. “No trying to spear your brother with a breadstick.” That was for Evelyn. “And for the love of all that we hold dear, do not, I repeat, do not get sauce all over Mr. Jacob’s nice suit.”
What could she say? Her children were menaces to society. They were good kids, smart and kind, but they were also messy. So messy. Both of them had the audacity to look at their mother with innocent eyes.
She didn’t want to leave them with Nick, to put that on him. As she walked back to the kitchen, she couldn’t help thinking of all the times they’d talked about her kids at the lake house. He hadn’t truly understood everything she had to get back to in the real world, why she couldn’t hope to stay there with him forever.
He was the only person she’d ever shared every part of herself with.
For that short amount of time, she’d dreamed of waking up and introducing her kids to the man she never wanted to live without. They’d have loved him, and he’d probably have needed some time to get used to kids in general. He wasn’t the friendliest of guys, and kids sensed every weakness.
When she stopped at the door to the kitchen and turned, the three of them were laughing at something. Evelyn and Owen seemed to have moved on from their disappointment in their father dumping them here, and Nick looked perfectly at ease. It was a glimpse into a future she couldn’t have, one that had slipped through her fingers, grains of sand in the wind.
Maybe that was the wrong analogy. In each life, there were so many possibilities, so many roads a person could go down. Just because circumstances pulled her in one direction, forced certain choices on her, it didn’t mean the others no longer existed. They were the unseen stars in the sky, the memories that could never be made.
The regrets tainting every day going forward.
* * *
Liz’s dadpicked the kids up an hour later, and Nick followed him out, leaving the restaurant feeling much colder than it had before. She’d spent that hour peeking out into the dining room to watch Nick with her kids, to watch Evelyn make fun of him and Owen give him too-serious looks.
