Epilogue

EPILOGUE

MARY

“I had high hopes for our threesome, but I’m too talented for my own good,” Nicole says. “Mary, you’re done. You don’t need me anymore. Your taste is much too conservative for your own good, and your man should really double down on the leather jacket look, but I can’t deny you’re happy. You’re no longer luck-challenged.”

“What?” I squawk. In a weird way, it feels like a rug has been pulled out from under me. I didn’t realize I’d come to depend on Nicole’s erratic presence in my life until now, when she’s suggesting she might take it away.

“Oh, don’t get your panties in a twist,” she says, twisting her nose ring a little for good measure. “We’ll still see each other. You’re coming to Grease .” It’s not a question.

“So why am I here?” Here being Tea of Fortune, which is not quite bustling yet, given it’s ten a.m. on New Year’s Day and most people are likely at home nursing hangovers. I’ll be honest, I have a bit of one myself. I allowed Tom and Ruth to take Aidan home for a visit this weekend, after a long, tearful conversation with Ruth, and Jace and I went to a dance-off downtown, joined by Molly and Cal (a self-described terrible dancer). He wasn’t wrong, but Jace has a natural talent for dancing—he even suggested we take ballroom dancing lessons together at the studio!—and I can’t remember the last time I had so much fun.

Tina’s working, technically, but there are so few people here, she’s basically just hanging out. She looks tired, which tracks with the fact that she just got back to Asheville last night after a very long drive with her brother, sister-in-law, and their two teenagers. Molly invited her to go dancing with us last night, but even though Tina is up for anything (her own self-description), she stayed in. I think maybe she’s disappointed that Molly’s moving out, although she hasn’t let it show. She’s a good friend, Tina, and I was looking forward to getting to know her better.

“Because Tina’s first challenge is to share her story with someone who’s judgmental and uptight,” Nicole says, rolling her eyes.

“Hey! I thought you said I was doing so well I had to graduate. That can’t be true if I’m still judgmental and uptight. Which is it?”

Nicole gives a genuine smile. “I got you to say you’re judgmental and uptight.”

“Man, I feel like I’m back home,” Tina says with a rueful grin. “You two sound like my mother and my nonna bickering about who gets the last piece of garlic bread. I think I’m the garlic bread. I can’t decide whether I’m annoyed or intrigued.”

“Both,” Nicole says. Then she turns back to me. “Fine. I thought it might be useful for Tina to have both of us around, at least for a little while. Some people think I’m a little extreme, and Tina is more adventurous than you are. It’s possible we could get into some trouble if left to our own resources. You could be a steadying influence.”

I can feel my eyes widen. “Are you saying I’m good for you, Nicole Ricci?”

She scowls. “Who told you my last name?”

“You’re not the only one capable of doing research.”

Tina dings her fork against her teacup. “Can we get back to my issues?”

“And can we get some service?” a woman asks in a frustrated voice from one of the adjoining booths.

“Make a New Year’s resolution not to suck,” Nicole shouts at her. “Maybe this year you can actually keep it.”

The woman gets up, clearly pissed, but as soon as she gets a good look at Nicole, she takes a step back. “Don’t expect a good Yelp review.”

“That’s okay,” Tina says dismissively. “The bad reviews keep people interested. A woman showed up all the way from Oklahoma last week because she read that Josie told a lady she’d get a goiter the size of a can of chickpeas. She said anyone who’d give a fortune that bad had to have a God-given talent.”

The woman huffs off, but she must be afraid of Nicole, because she throws some cash on her table before grabbing her friend and leaving.

“What’d Josie tell the Oklahoma woman?” I ask, curious despite myself.

“That she’d fall in love and live happily ever after. She seemed really dissatisfied, actually. I think she was hoping she’d be told her neighbor’s an alien or something.” She took a bite from one of the pastries on the plate between us—much more confidently than I would be in trying anything from Tea of Fortune. Then again, she works here. She knows which ones to avoid.

“We’re getting off track,” Nicole says. “It’s time to tell Mary why you need help.”

Tina heaves a sigh. “I’ve always liked romance novels. It started when I found my mom’s hidden stash when I was ten. My nonna found me with one of them in my room and made me write lines from scripture for, like, an hour.” She offers us a little smile. “I didn’t admit it was Mom’s, though, and Mom bought me more books as a thank you. I think that’s when my nonna first started saying rosaries for me at night. She hasn’t stopped, but I’m still me, so I guess it’s not working out so well for her.”

“There’s nothing wrong with reading romance novels,” I say. Even though I hid my Vampire Diaries addiction as if it were crack I liked instead of bad TV shows.

“No, the problem is that I keep finding myself in these impossibly romantic situations, exactly like the ones in my books, and it makes me think I’ve finally found my person, you know? The way Molly has.” She sighs. “And even my dumb big brothers. But it never goes well for me. As soon as I realize I’m living a trope, as soon as I start thinking, Hell, this is it , Tina, prepare your ovaries for romance overload , it all goes to hell. Like this guy, Donovan, we hated each other. I mean, hated each other. But we ended up having sex—”

There’s a rustling sound in the booth behind us, but there are no further requests for service, so apparently, whoever is sitting there is satisfied to listen in.

“—and it was so good. Like, phenomenal. But then Donovan starts catching feelings, and he asks me to marry him. And here’s the thing, he was still an asshole. That didn’t magically change like it does in those books. I mean, this was a man who regularly tipped people less than ten percent.”

“But that kind of thing can happen to anyone,” I say. “Not the tipping thing. The guy sucking. I wouldn’t exactly say it’s a pattern.”

“I didn’t think so either until I started dating my childhood friend. I figured this was it—a second-chance romance—but it turned out he hadn’t moved back home to take care of his parents, like he’d said. He was actually making meth in his parents’ basement.”

“Yikes.”

“Exactly. Then there was the time I got stuck in a ski cabin with a super-hot ski instructor. We had this amazing weekend—forced proximity for the win—only for me to find out he was married. Married!”

“Wait until you hear why she moved here,” Nicole says with a smirk.

Tina sighs, mussing her short pixie cut. “Rory was the worst of them. He’s this brilliant tech billionaire. We met at the bar where I worked. There was this classic misunderstanding, where I thought he was trying to pick up the other bartender, but he was really interested in me. Anyway, he swept me off my feet, sometimes literally, and we were planning to go to Italy together. I mean, we’d bought tickets and booked hotels and everything, and then he found out his ex-girlfriend was pregnant with his baby. He’d never gotten over her, and he saw it as his second chance.”

She leans forward, as if to give this point emphasis. “Mary, he was living a billionaire, second-chance, secret-baby romance, and I was the other woman in it. I was the impediment to their happily ever after. That’s when I knew my luck was fucked. I came here for a fresh start, but it hasn’t helped. The only guy I’ve dated here used to be part of a motorcycle club, and he got arrested for theft after our third date. So much for the reformed bad boy. They say romance books are far-fetched, that these situations don’t happen in real life, but they keep happening to me. Except I’m never the heroine.”

“I told you it was good,” Nicole says smugly.

Maybe it’s the practical side of me, the boring side, but I’m still caught on the Italy thing. It’s really difficult to get a refund for a big international trip like that. I say so, and Nicole gives me a wry look.

“I sent my brother and sister-in-law. They deserved it, and besides, might as well make the most of my shitty luck.”

Tina’s a good person, which squares with what I already know about her. She deserves to have a shot at finding real love. I used to think wanting that kind of love wasn’t practical or wise, that a romantic like Tina was causing her own problems by chasing after windmills, but I know better now. I know what it is to find real happiness and want to clutch it with both hands. And I want that for her, both because she’s a good friend to Molly and because she’s a woman who’s struggling, like I was.

“I’m in,” I say.

“Me too,” Dottie says. Apparently, she was the person sitting in the booth behind us. “Where do we start?”

***

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