He’s a lawyer. We met through work. Yes, he knows my boss. Yes, he thinks I could do better, but he knows I’m very good at what I do, and that I’ve excelled in the role I fell into, and he’s sure I’ll land on my feet, but he’s pretty sure my boss wants me back.

All said smoothly, with the straightest of faces.

And by the end of dinner, they all think they know him and I’m starting to believe this is going to be just fine.

But one person at the table isn’t fooled, and as soon as we’ve cleared the plates, Nana pushes me in the direction of the kitchen. “Let’s go make a cheese ball for tomorrow. And everyone else…decorate the tree. That includes you, Jake.”

Everyone else does exactly as they’re told, even Jacob, who doesn’t looked panicked in the slightest at being separated from me, when I’m dying inside.

In the kitchen, Nana pulls out the ingredients for her famous cheese ball appetizer. She mixes everything together while I play it cool and wait for her to say something, anything.

“You weren’t expecting him?” she finally asks.

“We had a fight yesterday,” I confess. It’s the truth, if only part of it.

“Ah.” She hands me dried cranberries. “Chop these. Did your fight have anything to do with your job?”

I hate how close she is already. “Uh…”

“And chop these, too.” She slides walnuts at me. “There’s more to the quitting story than you first said, isn’t there?”

“It’s not the best fit for me, even if I am good at it.” I’m very good at being everything Jacob needs. But doing that is slowly destroying me from the inside out, because I’m not getting what I need in return, and he can’t give it to me, and the kisses he laid on me upstairs just proved to me I was right on the money.

“It’s time for me to move on,” I finally say. That’s true. I’m not a legal secretary. I was a teenage girl living her best and worst van life on social media, who happened to be in the right place at the right time—a coffee shop in Conception Ridge—when Jacob’s website crashed while he was working at the next table.

Little old me came to the rescue, because fixing websites is like breathing for me, and then he asked if I knew anything about email listservs. After I stopped giggling and told him that’s not what email management clients are called, he offered me a job if I could fix that for him as well.

Two years later, and my epic road trip all the way around the country is still on hold.