statement tugged at Dixie’s heart. She’d missed home—even if it hadn’t missed her.
Em’s dark brows knitted together while her gloved fingertips fluttered to the pointed collar of her black-belted dress with the flared skirt. “You’re upsetting me, Dixie.”
“How so, Emmaline?”
“You’re still bein’ sweet.”
Dixie flashed her a warm smile. “Aw, thank you.”
“Stop that this instant!” Em insisted. “It’s unsettling. I should hate you just like every woman still left in this town who attended Plum Orchard High does.” She stiffened again, as if her years of piled-up high school hurts caused by Dixie were warring with her naturally forgiving nature.
Em had just wanted to fit in back then, and Dixie’d used it to her advantage at every outlet. She wouldn’t forgive someone for treating her the way she’d treated Em, but if regret counted, she had plenty of that to give.
Dixie shot her another smile full of more gratitude. “Yes, you should hate me. You still can, if you’d like. But I appreciate you, and everythin’ you’ve done. So see? We balance each other out.”
“The only thing that keeps me from shunning you just like the others is I can’t help but feel badly for you, Dixie. I, unlike you, have a conscience. You’ve had a horrible patch. I mean, first we all hear you lost your fancy restaurant—”
“That was almost two years ago, Em.” Two long years, scraping together a pathetic living with the degree she never quite got, and working odd jobs with her limited—really limited work skills.
Em clucked her tongue. “Two years, two days. Does the amount of time since the descent into financial devastation truly matter?”
Dixie had to nod her agreement. It only mattered to her. Her and the investors she’d let down.
“Okay, but then, your best friend, Landon, asks me to keep you—of all people—up to date on his journey to the end, knowing darn well I’d never say no because one, I grew to love him, too, and two, for gracious sake, he was dying. Then that best friend in the whole world of yours, I’m guessin’ your only friend left, dies.”
“You’re a fine human being, Em. I mean that.” Dixie refused to take the bait and let Em get a rise out of her.
Em pushed some more. “Adding to all that misery, there’s Caine Donovan. Your heart must be in an emotional tizzy about seeing him after, what is it now? Ten years...”
Dixie remained stoically silent. About all things failed restaurant and especially all things Caine Donovan.
“You remember him, right? One-time Plum Orchard High heartthrob and all-county track star, now one of Miami’s biggest real-estate moguls... Oh, and the man you claimed to love but bet on like a Derby horse?” Em was dropping a line into Dixie’s ocean with a juicy worm on the end of it to see if she’d rear up and bite.
The bet. God, that damn bet.
But the truth was the truth. Her restaurant had failed because she’d been too busy partying and running up her credit cards to bother with silly things like managing the restaurant she’d convinced herself, with absolutely no experience at all, was as good a place as any to escape her hometown and run away from the horrible thing she’d done to Caine.
Her engagement had failed because at the time, Dixie Davis didn’t know how not to turn everything into a three-ring circus.
And yes, Caine was successful, and she wasn’t.
All ugly truths.
Topping everything off, there’d been Mason—the beginning of her end.
Dixie lifted her sunglasses once more and forced a smile, letting her eyes purposely meet Em’s. “Sorry to disappoint, but there’s no emotional tizzy here. Seeing Caine is part of the process of saying goodbye to our mutual best friend. That’s all. He has as much right as I do. He was Landon’s best friend, too.”
Liar.
She’d practiced those words in her bathroom mirror hundreds of times before she’d left Chicago so they’d come off cordial and, above all, gracious. She’d almost convinced herself this imposed meeting was just that—two people who hadn’t worked out, simply running into each other again and chatting niceties until it was time to go back to their lives.
But seeing Caine meant remembering how madly in love they’d been for a time. It meant hearing his voice, a voice so warm it could probably still make her thighs clench.
If they ended up in a close setting, it meant possibly brushing against his granite wall of a chest or watching him confidently smile while he arrogantly tilted an eyebrow at her. It meant that swell of clawing longing for him rising upward and settling in her chest.
It meant reliving emotions that still ached almost as fresh as the day they’d happened.
No one since Caine had ever touched her quite the same way. Caine Donovan was like a drug, and she was his junkie in need of a Caine Anonymous meeting.
Dixie chose to avoid Em dangling the Caine carrot under her nose. Talking about Caine meant stirring up all the emotions that went with everything that had happened. Today all her turmoil was reserved for Landon and her gratitude toward Em.
That Em had walked this far out on the ledge, offering to come with Dixie to Landon’s funeral in front of all of Plum Orchard’s very prying, judgmental eyes, was more than was her due.
The ache of more tears tickled the back of Dixie’s eyelids. “You know, even though I knew Landon’s death was inevitable, it really is just like everyone says—you can never prepare for it.”
Em waved a hand around the room, chockfull of life-size pictures of Landon doing everything from zip-lining in Alaska over an icy glacier to cooking in Bobby Flay’s kitchen. “Well, if no one else was prepared, this sendoff is a sign Landon was prepared. He knew how he wanted to go out, and he left strict instructions about it. You don’t think his mother arranged those drag queens on stilts outside, do you? The Plum Orchard Bible study ladies nearly fell faint to the ground when they arrived.”
A glimmer of a smile outlined Dixie’s lips, lips still chapped and peeling from her nervous habit of tugging them. “He wasn’t shy, was he?”
“Landon was whatever the antithesis of shy is.”
That Landon had been. Loud and proud. Just thinking about him always made Dixie smile.
Yet, each time she thought she might smile, a new wave of loss washed over her, and it reminded her she’d never smile with Landon again. “I hate that he’s gone.” God, she really hated it. She hated even more the fact that she hadn’t made it back in time to be with him when he’d passed.
Everything had happened so fast, in a blur of urgent phone calls from Landon’s hospice care nurse, Vella, and Em’s updates, to the humiliating decline from American Airlines of her very last credit card.
Em pointed to one of the pictures of Dixie and Landon on a nearby table, her eyes fondly roving it. “He hates it, too. Who wouldn’t hate being dead?” She chuckled, eliciting a laugh
