Page 41 of Unlucky in Love
Taylor smiled, small and nervous and excited all at once. She stepped into the winter light, the doorbell chiming behind her, and turned toward the river where a wooden footbridge waited like a secret she used to keep only for herself.
Taylor smoothed her hand over the folded note again, tracing the words as though they might rearrange themselves into something less dangerous. Come alone.
Her secret place. Her ritual. Her one corner of the world where Valentine’s Day had belonged to her alone. Nobody knew aboutit. Not Emma, not her coworkers, not her mom when she was alive. It was hers.
Except…someone knew. Someone who had been watching close enough to see beyond the cheerful barista smile and the quiet manager routines. Someone who saw the girl who slipped away with cocoa and a brownie and wished on river water.
Her chest squeezed. In her heart of hearts, she already knew. Who else would go to this much trouble? Who else would know her favorite seat, her favorite author, the shade of ink she liked in her journal? Who else had been shadowing her through these clues, half-protective, half-irritated, but never really letting her out of his sight?
And yet the note’s words pulled her in a different direction. Come alone. A rule. A promise. A dare.
Taylor pressed the violet to her lips, then tucked it carefully back into her notebook. For once, she didn’t text, didn’t over-explain, didn’t look for someone else to give her permission.
This time, she would play the game exactly as it was meant to be played. Alone.
And maybe she’d find the one person she’d been wishing for on the other side.
* * *
Taylor’s boots crunched softly over the gravel path, the February air biting at her cheeks. She hugged her coat tighter. The pressed violet was safe in her pocket, and the words of the note beat like a pulse in her head. Come alone.
Taylor followed the path by instinct more than sight, guided by the soft ribbon of moonlight that spilled between bare branches and turned the river into a sheet of silver. Frost squeaked under her boots. In the distance the town glowed, a low necklace of windows and streetlamps. Here it was quiet. The kind of quiet she had always come to on this week in February, when the restof the world felt loud with other people’s bouquets and candlelit dinners.
She had almost texted him. Twice in the kitchen, once by the pastry case while Jenna whistled something suspiciously like a wedding march. She had typed his name and erased it each time, palms damp, the note in her pocket thrumming like a second heartbeat. Come alone.
The little footbridge appeared the way it always did, a silhouette first, then a shape, then the familiar slats that creaked in the third and sixth boards. Her bridge. Her spot. She had stood here on cold nights and warm ones, with a thermos of cocoa and a brownie pilfered from yesterday’s batch, feeding herself softness because no one else had thought to. She knew the splintered place on the rail that caught mittened wool if you were careless. She knew where the light pooled and where the shadows tucked themselves in to listen.
Tonight there was something new. An envelope rested against the railing at the center, anchored by a flat rectangle wrapped in clear plastic. Even from a step away, her body understood before her mind did. The same careful handwriting curved across the envelope. Her name. Not the polite version she used for formal introductions, but the one Emma yelled through a house. The one Ryan used when he forgot to be careful.
The world narrowed to the size of her hands. She slipped the plastic free, slid a nail beneath the envelope flap, and breathed through the tremble in her fingers. Paper whispered. Inside was another envelope, heavier, official, the kind with perforated edges and a barcode. She opened that too and then everything tilted for a second, as if the river had shifted its course.
Round trip. Paris.
She stared until the letters blurred and reformed. Departure in April. A date that made sense for the café schedule if she traded a weekend and bribed Jenna with every leftover pastry on earth.A second sheet, tucked behind the first, announced a conference badge purchase. International Romance Writers Conference. Keynote Speaker: Elise Marquette.
Elise. The dog-eared author of teenage Taylor’s contraband paperbacks. The one whose acknowledgments she read until she could quote the dedications. The one whose characters had kept her company at tables where she felt invisible. Taylor pressed her thumb to Elise’s name and felt her vision sting. Then she noticed the second boarding pass.
There was a name printed there in crisp letters.
Ryan Carter.
She didn’t know she said his name aloud until the sound of it startled the ducks downstream. She turned so fast the envelope rustled like wings. The bridge behind her was empty. The path was shadow. The trees stood close and bare.
She tried his name again, softer now. “Ryan.”
No answer. Just the river and the hush of winter leaves and her pulse thudding at the base of her throat. She looked down at the tickets, at the conference confirmation, at the clean certainty of the booking codes. She could feel the weight of choices in the paper. The ache of an old dream that had never truly died.
Someone moved at the mouth of the bridge. The boards creaked the way they always did on step three, then step six. Taylor felt it before she saw him, an awareness up her spine and the sudden warmth of certainty settling under her ribs.
He appeared where the lamplight from the path fell across the first length of railing. His coat was unzipped despite the cold, his hands tucked in his pockets like a man trying to look casual and failing. His hair was damp at the edges, as if he had run a hand through it too many times. His eyes were on her the way they had been lately, intent and unguarded.
“It was you,” she said. The words came out like a truth finally allowed to breathe.
Ryan stepped into the moonlight, then kept coming until they were a breath apart. “It was always me.”
The river should have kept speaking. The wind should have pushed across the water. For a heartbeat, the whole night held still.
“Why?” Her voice was steady, though she felt anything but. “Why now?”
