understanding. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
The tightness in her chest loosened as her heart grew heavy. “Failing. Another broken heart. I don’t even know where to begin.”
“Things you already know you can survive,” Liz said with enviable confidence.
“Jackie leaving almost killed me,” she reminded her as her old wound throbbed and pulsated thought her body.
“But it didn’t. And Rhiannon is not Jackie. Not to say I told you so, but if you recall, I told you she wasn’t right for you.”
“Yeah, but you don’t like anybody,” Carmela replied with a tired smile.
Liz’s lips quirked into a broad grin as if Carmela had just played into her trap. “Yet I’m practically jamming Cupid’s arrow in your eye and shoving you in Rhiannon direction.”
Ignoring the comment, Carmela turned the direction of the conversation slightly. “She wants to go with me to Jackie’s wedding,” she blurted as the server refilled her water glass.
“Rhiannon does?” Liz asked, her light eyes widening.
Carmela nodded. “She wants to pretend to be my date so I look marginally less pathetic.”
Instead of laughing, Liz relaxed back into her chair, swirling something in her mind like the merlot in her glass.
“Do you want her to go with you?”
It was the same question she’d been asking herself all day, but clarity was impossible. All she could see was all the ugly ways such a dalliance could end. “I just don’t think I have it in me to do it again, Liz,” she admitted quietly, old scars threatening to split open.
“You’re not doing it again, Carm. Rhiannon is not Jackie,”
she repeated, “and you’re not the person you were nearly fifteen years ago. Don’t judge the future by the past because that lens is broken and distorted. Decide on what’s in front of you. Not what’s behind you.”
After the longest, cleansing breath of her life, Carmela nodded. “I’ll be right back,” she said, before standing, taking a chug of Liz’s wine, and grabbing her phone out of her purse.
Liz didn’t reply. She just nodded and smirked as Carmela braced herself and walked out onto the terrace overlooking the intercostal.
The evening was cold and blustery, and Carmela was sorry she’d left her jacket hanging on the back of her chair. If only she could blame her trembling on the weather. Ignoring the pending message for a moment, she selected the contact that had been at the top of her recents lists for months.
Taking another gulp of oxygen and trying to steady herself, she pressed it.
When Rhiannon answered, Carmela hadn’t been expecting loud commotion behind her.
“Am I interrupting something? Are you at a party?”
Carmela asked, too anxious to come right out with it.
“No, my parents just invited one of my aunts and a cousin over for dinner. Six Cubans fighting for airtime sounds like a frat house during a big game,” she joked. “What’s up?
Everything okay?”
It was a loaded question. “Yeah, fine.”
“So how come you’re calling? Aren’t you on your ritual dinner with Liz?” Rhiannon had moved away from the noise and into an echoey room. Maybe a bathroom or a closet.
Picturing her somewhere amusing helped her wildly beating heart.
Carmela swallowed hard, but it did nothing to change the arid, gritty desert that had become her mouth. “Are you serious about wanting to go to the wedding? There’s an itinerary and it’s going to be a whole production. If—”
Rhiannon interrupted her. “Yes. Obviously,” she replied with unbridled glee. “When do we leave?”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX