“I’d love to have my own kids, my own house. I’d love to be a stay-at-home mom and spend all day with my kids, taking care of the house, taking care of my husband. And if I can’t do that, then I’d love to work in a preschool. I’d love to work with kids, doing crafts all day, reading to them, playing. I love babies.”
“Then you should do that.”
Gradually, her face fell and she nodded politely, looking away. I got the sense I’d said something untoward, but didn’t have a clue what.
“Well . . .” She took a step back. “Thanks for carrying my crate. I have to get to the bakery and work on that particle accelerator.”
“What?”
“Just kidding. I’m not an astrophysicist. I bake cakes.” Her smile was small and forced. She turned away and crossed to the driver’s side door, opened it, then slipped inside.
I stared after her, watching as she started her car.
Jennifer Sylvester was famous for three things: her banana cake, her purple eyes, and being odd.
Giving my head a shake, I turned from her black BMW and made my way back toward the store. I was just at the crosswalk when Jennifer pulled her car up next to me and tapped on her horn.
She rolled down the window and waved me over.
“What’s up?”
“I forgot to tell you. Some news guys were at the store when I first arrived to pick up my bananas, a big swarm of them. They were asking for directions to your house.”
I straightened, thinking her words over. “My house? What did they want?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know for certain. But if I had to guess, I’d say it probably has something to do with you and Sienna Diaz being engaged.”
My mouth fell open and I gaped at Jennifer Sylvester. “How did you know we’re engaged?”
“She told everybody at that fancy movie premiere earlier today. It’s all over the Internet.”
“I’m engaged to be married. My fiancé couldn’t make it today. He’s too busy humanely trapping gigantic black bears and setting them free in the wild—”
Cletus pressed pause on the YouTube video and frowned at me. “She makes you sound like some sort of backwoods hippie.”
“Shut up, dummy. Play the rest of the video.” I motioned to his phone where he’d pulled up the video of Sienna from earlier in the day. It was amateur quality, the sound garbled in places by all the background noise.
Given the five- or six-hour time change, it was late night in London right now. This footage had been shot sometime around 3:00 p.m.
Cletus grumbled something. Eventually he pressed play while I listened and scrolled through my text messages. She hadn’t messaged me. I tried calling her phone. It went to voicemail.
“I can’t wait for you all to meet him. His name is Jethro Winston, and he’s a wildlife park ranger in Tennessee. We’re completely in love, and we’ll be getting married in the fall, when the leaves change.”
I glanced at Cletus’s screen, saw she was smiling as though she’d just done something brilliant. Meanwhile, Tom Low looked like he’d just swallowed a live rat.
Questions were shouted at her from all directions, but that’s basically where the video ended. Cletus tapped his screen and slipped his phone back in his pocket.
“Well, hell. Was that so hard?” He was grinning.
I dropped my phone to the cup holder and gripped my truck’s steering wheel, staring out the windshield. “I can’t believe she did that.”
“From the looks of it, Tom Low put her in a bad spot. He was insinuating that she and him—”
“I saw the video, Cletus. You don’t need to break it down for me.”
Surprisingly, he snapped his mouth shut, his eyebrows lifting high on his forehead, his eyes going wide. I could almost read his mind, hear his internal thoughts as though he were speaking. No doubt it was something like, Settle your feathers, crusty britches.
We sat mostly in silence for a long time. He was drumming his fingers on the passenger side door. The beat reminded me of a ticking clock.
“What am I going to do?” I asked the car. “Should I talk to those reporters? What if I end up hurting her career even more? It seems like I shouldn’t be talking to anyone until I discuss the matter with Sienna first. Which is what she should have done.”
“Why don’t you want to talk to them?”
“What if they ask about my past?”
He shrugged. “Tell the truth. Well, tell the truth about everything except the criminal stuff. No one really expects you to answer those questions.”
Not looking at my brother, because I wasn’t really speaking to him, I said, “I’m disappointed. Actually, I’m pissed off. We’d agreed on a plan and she went and did what she wanted. And now the very thing I was trying to avoid is going to happen.”