Page 23 of The Weekend Crashers
She looks over at Cole, who’s turned away while he talks. And talks. He said a minute, but he doesn’t appear to be ending his call anytime soon. This is ridiculous. She walks over to him, but he’s too wrapped up in his conversation to notice.
“I didn’t plan this, but I’m here. It is what it is. So let’s—”
Piper taps him on the shoulder and he stops talking.
“Sorry to interrupt, but I really need to get going,” she says. He nods, tells the person on the other end, “I’ll see you later,” and then ends the call.
“Thanks,” he says, handing over the phone.
“No problem.”
They look at each other for a beat longer than necessary. She feels the frisson of unexpected chemistry.
“I have a boyfriend,” she blurts out.
He nods. “And I really just needed the phone.”
She feels herself flush with embarrassment.
“Right. Okay then—have a good... bachelor party.”
“Happy knitting,” he says.
She shakes her head, thinking,What was that?It was nothing, really. It’s probably displacement—all of her relationship anxiety and missing Ethan.
She walks back to the inn.
The lobby is warm and smells like chocolate. Piper looks around for the source of the delicious aroma, but doesn’t see any food. And then she forgets all about the guy Cole and the scent of cocoa and everything else, because her phone suddenly feels like a hundred-pound weight in her hand. Who is she kidding not listening to the voicemail? Of course she has to find out why Gretchen called.
Across from the fireplace she spots an inviting, velvet-cushioned wingback chair. Settling into it, she takes one more glance around to make sure she has privacy. Aside from the man minding the front desk, she’s alone. Satisfied, she plays Gretchen’s message, pressing the phone to her ear.
“Piper, I’m so sorry our last meeting got off track. And if I said anything to offend you, I absolutely didn’t mean it. In fact, I have some fabulous news, so give me a call back ASAP...”
She listens to it three times to make sure she isn’t missing something. The meeting “got off track”? That’s quite the euphemism for firing her as a client. And as for the great news, Piper can only assume it’s a potential booking. Why else would Gretchen backtrack like that?
But really, the reason doesn’t matter. Piper should be thrilled—overjoyed. She should be calling Gretchen back immediately. But she isn’t.
And she doesn’t.
Instead, she turns the phone on Do Not Disturb and heads back to her room.
Chapter Thirteen
Maggie is happy to be reunited with Piper for the first workshop of the day, “Know Your Yarn.” It’s held in a second-floor room dominated by a large farmhouse table piled with balls of yarn in the center.
Belinda stands in the front of the room, but she hasn’t started the official lesson yet. Everyone is chatting casually, and this gives Maggie a chance to ask Piper, “So who called earlier? When we were in the vintage shop?” she says.
“Oh, it was just Ava,” Piper says, naming a friend from high school.
Maggie nods. She’d been hoping it was something work-related—something positive. She still can’t believe Piper’s manager dropped her. Surely, this can be fixed.
Belinda stands at the foot of the table.
“Welcome, everyone, to Know Your Yarn. It’s the topic that inspired me to teach workshops in the first place. It dawned on me, a few years into owning a knitting shop, that many of my customers were tremendously skilled craftspeople but sort of flying blind when it came to what yarn to choose for their projects. I was somewhat guilty of it myself. So the year I turned thirty, I took an opportunity to spend a summer at a sheep farm in the UK.”
Stories like this always make Maggie feel a little wistful. She never had the chance to leave her worries behind and just go wherever life would take her the way her friends had in their twenties.
“So many of us make decisions about our projects without some important practical considerations,” Belinda says. “Do you know that cashmere is eight times warmer but twenty times lighter than wool?”
