“Should I call Daniel?” I looked up to see Simon coming out of the bedroom again, dressed in old clothes suitable for painting and carrying a pair of battered running shoes.

“What?” The thought horrified me. “No. Why?”

He sat down on the couch and started putting his shoes on. “We can revoke their contract. Tell him we don’t need them this year. I don’t like that they were jerking you around like that.” His voice was casual, but the way he kept his eyes down, focused hard on his shoelaces, told me what a hard thing this was for him to offer. This Faire was one of the most important things in Simon’s life, and the Dueling Kilts was a long-term act. Firing them for no reason wouldn’t go over well; word traveled fast on the Faire circuit. But Simon was willing to risk our Faire’s reputation for the sake of standing up to someone who had broken my heart. I’d known Simon for most of my life, and he’d always been a friend, but it wasn’t until this moment that I realized just how good a friend he was.

“No,” I said. My heart wasn’t broken. It was just a little bruised. I wasn’t down for the count yet. “It’s okay.” I took my laptop back and snapped it closed. “I can handle this.”

“You sure?” Emily raised her eyebrows.

“Yep. I have a plan.”

Twelve

Having a plan, I soon realized, and implementing said plan were two different things. I didn’t want to tip my hand too early, so once I got home from Emily’s I sent Dex—Daniel, whoever—a quick text. Sorry. Faire prep in overdrive around here, so I’m crazy busy. Talk to you soon! I even included a smiley-face emoji so he wouldn’t get suspicious. His answer came back relatively quickly—I can only imagine! Hope they’re not overworking you!—and was easy enough to respond to with a couple happy-looking emojis without saying too much.

I couldn’t put my plan into action until Friday, when Faire was about to begin, so I had to spend the week going about my life as though nothing had happened. I wasn’t sure how long I could stay neutrally pleasant when Dex—Daniel?—emailed or texted, but he made it easy on me by going dark most of the week. I got a couple good morning/good night texts, and I responded so he wouldn’t suspect that my perspective on his messages had changed, but other than that I didn’t hear much from him.

That, to me, was a tick in the “It’s Definitely Daniel” column. Dex wouldn’t have anything to hide. In fact, he’d be looking forward to seeing me again with this new, richer relationship. Daniel, however, would most likely be filled with anxiety, knowing that the jig was about to be up.

But what jig? Wasn’t that the question, as Emily had said? Now that I was all but assured that Daniel was the one on the other side of the screen, I still didn’t know why.

The week seemed to take about a thousand years. Emily and I exchanged a lot of texts that week too. She offered more than once to help me face the MacLeans to figure all this out, and while the show of support warmed my heart, I ultimately told her that I needed to do this alone. This whole thing was so bizarre, and had the potential for so much humiliation, that I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to go through with confronting anyone if I had an audience.

Okay, if you’re sure, she’d finally texted on Thursday night. But you need to tell me EVERYTHING Saturday morning!

I promise, I responded. Wouldn’t that be a fun way to kick off Faire season? But she meant well, and there was the very real danger of me needing a shoulder to cry on.

Thursday night my tavern wench costume came out of its trunk and I hung it over the front of my wardrobe. All my accessories were together—I’d put them all away at the end of last summer, where else would they be? I’d gotten a new pair of boots a few weeks ago, and I’d worn them enough that they were broken in and comfortable. (I’d made the mistake once of wearing a brand-new pair of shoes the first day of Faire. When I spent that first night putting Band-Aids on all of my blisters, I vowed to never do that again.)

The last thing I did was get my dragonfly necklace out of my jewelry box. I looked from its sparkly crystal eyes to my wench’s costume and frowned. Simon had been right—the two really didn’t match. Emily and I had talked about getting new costumes, and she’d even pinged me to look at a few contenders on our shared Pinterest board sometime in the spring. With everything else going on, it hadn’t been a top priority for either one of us, but rather something we’d get to when we had time. And then we’d run out of time, and here I was with the same costume as always.

“So much for change.” But I tucked the dragonfly into my belt pouch anyway, along with the hair ties and pins for my hair. Let Simon complain about it once I put it on. I didn’t care.

One of the best things about work was that the office closed at noon on Fridays in the summer, but that Friday even those few hours crawled by at an excruciating pace. But then finally, finally, it was time to clock out, and I could get ready. At home, I switched my office scrubs for a soft pink sundress and kitten-heeled sandals and took extra care with my hair, styling it so it fell in soft waves around my shoulders. I stepped back and looked at myself in the full-length mirror and nodded solemnly. I looked good, and that was important for this plan. My phone chimed with a text, and my pulse spiked as I looked down at it. But I’d been expecting this text. It was time. I scooped up Benedick and gave him a kiss before I left. I needed luck to pull this off.

My hands shook on the steering wheel, and I took a few calming breaths when I reached the parking lot of the hotel. I slicked on my favorite pink lip gloss and checked my hair one more time in the rearview mirror before I got out of the car. My heels clicked on the pavement, then on the tiles of the lobby, and those clicks sounded like the stride of a powerful woman, which gave me confidence. I needed confidence right now.

I walked toward the check-in desk and waved at Julian, who was on the evening shift. He took his cell phone out of his pocket and waved it at me in a salute. There was that everyone-knowing-everyone advantage to living in a small town again. Julian and I had been in every class together since preschool, and I’d long since forgiven him for putting glue in my hair in the first grade. And now he’d grown up and gotten married, and he and his husband had stayed here in Willow Creek, where Julian worked at the hotel. He was our point of contact for the block of rooms we got here for the Faire performers, so we’d been emailing back and forth a lot lately.

He also knew when the performers had arrived and checked in to the hotel. So he could text me and let me know. And then I could come over here. That had been the first part of the plan.

The second part of the plan was waiting in the lobby, leaning on the check-in desk, scrolling through his phone. Black jeans, black T-shirt, black baseball cap covering a shock of red hair. My heels clicked their way toward Daniel, and my heart thudded harder with each step.

He looked up as I approached, and the molecules inside my body shifted when his eyes met mine. Part two of this plan was getting Daniel to admit that he’d been the one writing to me all this time, and that he wasn’t doing it as some kind of mouthpiece for Dex. Until this moment I hadn’t been sure how I’d wanted this conversation to go. Somewhere, down in the deepest part of my primitive lizard brain, I’d known that it hadn’t been Dex that I’d been getting to know all these months, and even more importantly, I hadn’t wanted it to be.

I wanted it to be Daniel.

But one step at a time.

“Stacey, hey.” Daniel’s voice was light, casual, and it gave me pause. This wasn’t the attitude of someone who knew that he was caught.

“Hi, Daniel.” My voice matched his for casualness, and I have myself a mental high-five. “What are you hanging out in the lobby for?”

“Oh. Some kind of mix-up with the rooms. The guy said he was working on it.” He glanced down at his phone, then over at Julian, who busied himself at his monitor, pointedly not looking at us.

“Hmmm.” I nodded, as though I hadn’t orchestrated the whole thing. “That’s weird.” It wasn’t weird. Julian was stalling Daniel, just as I’d asked him to. “But I’m glad to see you. I’ve been wanting to talk to you.”

“To me?” His eyes lit up with interest as he stowed his phone in his back pocket. He was still acting way too casual, and I wanted more than anything to trip him up.

“Sure,” I said. “After all these months, you know. All those emails, all the things we’ve said to each other. It’s nice to finally see you face to face.”

“Me? No.” There was a glimmer of something in his eyes, but he blinked it away fast. He was good. But he couldn’t hide the flush that crept up the back of his neck, which I saw as he turned his head to the side, away from me, to study the terrible artwork on the far wall. “No,” he said again. “You mean Dex.”

“Do I?” My eyes narrowed as I studied him. Even though I was confronting him with the truth, he was still denying it. He still wanted to nudge me toward his cousin. Was he just Dex’s mouthpiece after all?

“Well, yeah. You’ve been . . .” He glanced up at the ceiling now, and he swallowed hard. The casualness was gone from his expression, and he was starting to struggle. “You’ve been communicating with Dex. At least, that’s what he . . .”