The electric would come back on any second. Sara wandered around the kitchen, not wanting to go far with just her thin beam of light. When she visited Doug, she didn't move around his house much. She mostly stayed in the guest room he kept for her, working on her writing.
Which seemed to suit them both. Why he even asked her to visit, she didn't know. Guilt, probably, for being such an absent father when she was growing up. Now that she was in her twenties, he had this sudden desire to reconnect, apparently.
Not her. Sara was fine living with her roommates, working as an admin assistant, reading and writing romance novels. She had no interest in getting to know her father, or spending time with any man. After her longtime boyfriend Kyle dragged her heart through the mud, men were on her list of things-not-to-do-ever-again. Fictional boyfriends worked just fine.
Okay, electric not coming on. Her eyes adjusted a little and the faint glow from an outdoor light broke up the darkness somewhat. Sara grabbed her phone and called her bestie.
"Lucy, talk to me. The lights went out and nobody's home."
Lucy giggled. "I've been saying that about you for a long time."
"No, that's not how the saying goes. It's…never mind. How are things in Maplewood?"
"Wonderful. Brad is taking me shopping for furniture this weekend. He hates shopping but I told him if he didn't give me his opinion, I'd buy whatever I want. That scared the crap out of him."
"No doubt."
"How's things going in Clayton? You guys having some heart-to-heart chats?"
Sara rolled her eyes. Her friend knew exactly how she felt about this long weekend. "No. I got here, Doug had lunch with me and could barely tear himself away from his phone. Then he had a Skype meeting while I wandered around the grounds."
"Grounds. Wow. Is that place as big as you remember?"
"Bigger. I think he bought the property next door. Apparently his girlfriend de jour likes to garden. It's pretty cool, actually. So after my self-guided tour outside, I came in, watched some TV, had an awkward dinner with good old Dad, and then went to bed. When I got up today, the housekeeper told me he'd been called away on business. So here I sit."
"Sounds like a blast. Hey, you're doing this visit to make your mom happy, right?"
"Yeah. She has this idea that Doug and I need to reconnect. But it's pretty miserable. You'd think me and my dad could find more to talk about together, but we just sit and discuss the weather. It's downright painful."
Silence for a beat, which usually meant Lucy was about to say something Sara didn't want to hear.
"You know, you might still be kind of upset about Kyle."
"Of course I am! That selfish asswipe postponed our wedding for a golf tournament. Golf!"
"I know, that sucked pretty bad, but that was two years ago."
"And the worst thing, he said he forgot the date. Forgot. How self-absorbed can you be?"
Sara's stomach twisted as she remembered that conversation. On the phone. The bastard hadn't even had the decency to break her heart, face-to-face. How Kyle had tried to make it sound like her fault for scheduling the event on his important day, even though she'd planned the wedding a year out, long before he mentioned a tournament.
How her mom had reminded her, she was lucky to have such a good-looking fiancé, and she should just contact her guests and all the people she'd hired and let them know the date had to be changed. People postponed weddings all the time.
As with every conversation she had with her mother, the unspoken words hurt the most. He's attractive, you're not. Take what you can get and be happy.
Just because she had a large frame and a few extra pounds on her bones, she was considered undesirable by the snooty, rich group of people her family hung out with. When Kyle showed an interest, her mother all but offered him a huge dowry to marry her. He didn't want her money, he always insisted. He loved her personality. More like, he loved that he could boss her around and that she always let him have his way, always tried to please him.
Until that phone call.
She'd contacted her wedding guests, all right. Told them the event was off. Forever. Lost a few hundred dollars on non-refundable deposits, but it had been worth it to get rid of Kyle.
"You need to move on, get out there in the world, meet some new men. They're not all bad."
"I have to disagree."
"Brad is a good guy."
"So you got the last one."
"No, there are more. You're not going to find them sitting behind your keyboard, though."
"You never know about that. If there's a guy out there, for me, he'll have to magically appear. I'm not going out looking."
Not going to get her heart broken again. Once in a lifetime was plenty.