“He is so hot. He reminds me of Alcide from True Blood. Don’t you miss that show?” she rambled as the door bing-bonged Jake’s presence in the store.

He smiled when he saw us. “Lily, darlin’, I heard you were back in town. Hey, Rose. Is Violet around?” he asked. I sighed and blushed as I smiled at him like a simpleton. Rose and I had been drooling over Jake since we were tweens.

“Hey, Jake, she’s in the kitchen. You can go on back,” she answered sweetly. Rose was hardly ever sweet; it made me laugh. After he was out of earshot, she smacked my arm. “He saw you first. You got the ‘darlin’,’ you bitch.” Jake had been our ideal man for a long time. And it seemed as if he was still it for Rose. Being around Rose made me feel like a teenager sometimes.

She grabbed my arm again. “Look across the parking lot. It’s Luke.” He was headed into his office, cell phone glued to his ear. “You should go over there and say hi.”

“No, I don’t think so. I don’t want to bother him.”

Her lip curled up, and she rolled her eyes at me. “Don’t be a wimp. You know you want to go over there. The kids are with Mom. If you go over there now, you can be alone with him.” She waggled her eyebrows at me.

“I don’t want to be alone with him. It’s hard enough not to swoon like a fool when there are people around.” I poured myself a cup of Violet’s mediocre decaf. It was the best decaf coffee I had ever tasted, but it still sucked. I added a liberal amount of Violet’s vanilla bean syrup and some cream and iced it. Yum-ish. I wanted a real coffee. I pouted at Rose, and she laughed at me.

“So, swoon, then. Faint and fall over. Luke will catch you. Have you talked everything out yet?” Rose grabbed a sponge and the purple bottle of spray cleaner and started wiping down the counters. I should probably help, but I didn’t want to.

I shook my head and sipped my drink. “No, we haven’t really talked. He said he wants me back. I didn’t want to make him talk about painful things and upset him.”

“You mean you didn’t want him to upset you.” She scoffed. “You sure do like to bury your head in the sand. If you knew how hard it was for him to stay away from you and why he did it, you’d take him back in a hot second.”

“He hurt me too, Rose.” I had to try to defend myself, even though I knew I was being a coward.