“I hoped not,” he said. “Not just for my sake, but . . .” He cleared his throat, shifted on his barstool. “I saw you that night last summer. Here at the hotel, at the ice machine.”

“Yeah. I saw you too.” My face heated with remembered embarrassment. The ice bucket had been cold in my hands, and my instinct had been to duck behind the rough stucco pillar so that Daniel wouldn’t see me. It was as though I’d known even then that Dex wasn’t the one I wanted to be with, and that Daniel’s good opinion was one worth keeping. Why hadn’t I listened to my instincts? I should have chucked that ice bucket and gone home that night.

Silence settled over us as we sipped our drinks.

“I knew it wouldn’t last,” Daniel finally said, and I could barely hear him over the general noise of the bar. “You said ‘Happy New Year, Dex.’” He shook his head. “Dex. By then we’d talked so much, and shared so much, that I’d let myself forget that you thought you were talking to him, and not me. I didn’t know what to say.”

“You could have started with ‘By the way, this isn’t Dex.’ That might have been a good beginning.”

“Yeah?” He raised his eyebrows. “And how would that conversation have gone, both of us slightly drunk at one in the morning on New Year’s Day?”

Anger still blazed through me, but I had to admit he had a point. “There were plenty of sober opportunities to set me straight. You should have told me.”

“I know.” He tilted his head back, draining the last of his beer, and pushed the glass away. “I should have done a lot of things. For what it’s worth, Stacey, I’m sorry. I never meant to hurt you.” He reached for me, his hand halfway to my arm, but something in my eyes must have made him halt the movement.

“No.” I put my hands up. This was all confusing enough. If he touched me it would only be worse. He’d hurt me, but he was also the one I wanted to comfort me. “I trusted you.” Tears sprang to my eyes, but I blinked them back. They weren’t part of this conversation. “I told you things that . . .” I bit down hard on my bottom lip. “Do you have any idea how much you meant to me? How much it meant to have someone to talk to? Really talk to for a change? You were . . .” I swallowed hard. Those damn tears weren’t going away, and that made me angrier. Which made me tear up more. I hated this.

“I know,” he said again, his eyes large and sorrowful. “I wish I could fix this.”

I shook my head. Most of my anger at him had burned away with my tears, leaving me frustrated and not a little bit sad. “I wish you could too.”

“Yeah.” I thought he was going to say something else, but instead he stood up, his barstool making a scraping noise as he pushed it back. He took his wallet out of his back pocket and laid a couple bills on the bar in between us, placing his empty glass on top. “I’m so sorry,” he said again. But his eyes weren’t sorry. They ate me up again, and this time I was the main course and dessert all wrapped into one. His eyes were gorging themselves on me, as though he knew he’d never get this chance again, and I didn’t like the way that made me feel.

Before I could say anything else he was gone, threading his way through the Friday night crowd that had formed while we’d been talking at the bar. And that’s when his eyes made sense. He hadn’t just been saying sorry. He’d been saying goodbye.

Well, crap.

At first I just stared at the empty space he left behind. The empty beer glass, my mostly full wineglass, the cash to pay for both. The air between us was clear, but there would be no kissing tonight. Maybe not ever.

So much for my plan.

Thirteen

The Willow Creek Renaissance Faire had been a part of me—and I’d been part of it—for a decade now, and from the beginning the first day of Faire felt like magic. It was opening night of a play, the first day of school, and the beginning of the best summer vacation all rolled into one. The grounds were ready. The performers were in town, and vendors were set up with otherworldly wares. And while every year brought some new faces into the mix, for the most part the performers and vendors were the same each time, so it was like a reunion of familiar faces.

But on this opening day I woke up without that same sense of joy I always experienced. I tried to push away my frustration, remind myself that Faire was my happy place. My happy time. But would it still be, knowing that Daniel would be there too? Were we about to start four weekends of elaborately avoiding each other? Faire wasn’t that big.

The sun had just crested the trees when I parked my car in our grassy lot in the back of the Faire grounds. I didn’t get out right away; instead I watched the early morning sunlight through the trees. I’d thought about texting Daniel a couple times last night, and at least three times this morning, but I hadn’t known what to say. He hadn’t texted me either.

“Ugh, enough,” I finally chastised myself. I locked my phone in my glove compartment. I wasn’t going to need it for a while. I’d put on most of my costume at home: the underdress and overskirt of my wench’s outfit, along with my new boots; all I had to do was get wrangled into my corset, pull back my hair, and put on my necklace. As I tripped my way down to the Hollow that first early morning to finish getting ready, I passed the leathersmith’s booth and she flagged me down.

“How did that backpack work out for you?”

“Oh, it’s wonderful!” I was so pleased she’d remembered selling it to me last summer. It had been an impulse buy to assuage my sadness at the end of the season, but it had become one of my favorite souvenirs. Every time I looked at it and used it, I was reminded of these trees, and how I felt during these weeks. It reminded me that this was my favorite time of the year, every year.

But this time . . . Daniel’s presence lurked at the edges, like storm clouds waiting to blot out the summer sun. All I’d wanted was to clear the air between us, and maybe move forward, but instead he’d just . . . walked away. I’d started at least three texts to Emily last night about the whole thing when I’d gotten home but had erased them all. I’d see her this morning, and talking was better than texting when it came to things like this.

Now that I was alongside my castmates, I pulled my hair up and tied a kerchief over it so it looked oh-so-carefully casual. Then I loosened the strings on my corset as far as they’d go and went looking for Emily. Once she strapped me in, my transformation into Beatrice the seventeenth-century tavern wench would be complete. I’d missed Beatrice, and I was looking forward to being her again.

Em was five minutes late, which for her was right on time. How she managed to do that while living with a control freak of a fiancé was beyond me, but there you were. It was also possible that Simon slept on the Faire grounds once it was this time of year . . . he was pretty attached to it. The idea of the fastidious Simon living in a tent was so ridiculous that the smile was still on my face when Emily found me. But when I saw her my smile fell. I’d been looking all over for her blue and white wench’s costume, but here she was with an underskirt the color of deep wine, and the dress over it a dark black. The corset she’d fastened around her middle was a dark wine color the same shade as her underskirt. She’d gone and changed her costume, and here I was in the same old thing.

Why was everyone else able to seek out change while I let everything remain the same?

But before I could ask her about her new outfit, she hurried over to me and grabbed my arms. “Did you talk to him? How did it go?”

I blinked as my brain switched topics. “Daniel? Oh, yeah.” I folded my arms over my chest. “I talked to him last night when he got into town.” My flat tone of voice did a pretty good job of letting her know how that went.

“Ohhh.” Her eyebrows climbed her forehead as she drew the word out. “It really was Daniel writing to you all this time?” I gave her a tight nod, and her hopeful expression faded quickly. “So I take it things didn’t go well?”

“No. Not at all.” I filled her in on what had happened the night before. How I had hoped that after Daniel and I had talked, there would be a fresh start between us. A new beginning. But his response had been an apology and a closed door. An ending. “But it’s okay,” I said after I’d brought her up to speed. I tried to give her a helpless, what are you gonna do? shrug and my usual smile, but neither one of them really fit right.

And Emily wasn’t buying it for a second. “But he’s been writing to you for months. Months. You’ve been getting to know each other better than anyone else, right? And the second he’s confronted with the truth, he just throws up his hands all ‘Welp, you caught me’? That’s it?”

“Well . . .” When she put it like that . . .

“You’d think he’d try to fight for you. At least a little.” She shook her head. “That’s disappointing.”

“I guess he didn’t want to.” A sense of loss swept through me, which was strange. How could I lose what had never been mine? But despite everything, I didn’t want to believe that this was it. That after all these months, what Daniel and I had had together was over, as if it had never happened. That didn’t seem right either.