The Marriage Pact

Chapter Three


JIM TOOK A while to catch his breath. He was pale under that perennial outdoorsman’s suntan of his, and he closed his eyes for a second, summoning strength. When he opened them again, he looked at Tripp with a kind of weary directness.

“I’ve been sick,” he finally confided. “That’s the long and the short of it.”

Tripp, in the process of filling the carafe from the coffeemaker at the sink, froze; his throat went tight as a cinch strap that’d been yanked hard around a horse’s belly and buckled to the last notch. “What kind of ‘sick’?” he asked when he was halfway certain he could speak without stumbling over every word.

His biological father, who’d died after a routine appendectomy when Tripp was still a newborn, was an unknown quantity, a story his mother told, an unfamiliar image in old snapshots.

Jim Galloway was his dad.

Jim sighed once more. “Not the dyin’ kind, so don’t go writing up my obituary and looking for places to scatter the ashes,” he said in his slow and thoughtful way. “I’ll be around awhile, most likely.”

Tripp’s jawbones locked at the hinges. “Most likely? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

Jim, watching Tripp with a mixture of compassion and amusement in his eyes, dredged up a raw chuckle that sounded like it must have hurt some on its way out.

“Everybody has to die sometime, son,” he said hoarsely. “No sense getting all knotted up over something that can’t be helped.”

Tripp leaned back against the counter while he waited for the coffee to brew, folding his arms. He probably appeared calm, but he sure as hell wasn’t. “How long has this been going on?”

His voice, like his manner, was deceptively mild.

Jim likely wasn’t fooled, but it was hard to tell with him. He tended to play his cards close to the vest—everybody’s business was nobody’s business; that was his credo. In other words, he operated on a need-to-know basis, and there was plenty he didn’t think anyone needed to know.

After a beat or two, he smiled again, but he still took his time answering. “I’ve known for just shy of a year,” he finally admitted and, sparse as the reply was, it was plain to Tripp that his dad didn’t like giving up even that much.

Stunned that Jim—even Jim—could have kept something so important to himself for so long, Tripp had opened his mouth to raise more hell when the old man cut him off with a dismissive wave of one hand.

“Some things are—well, private,” he said.

Behind Tripp, the ancient coffeemaker, pulling its weight since pre-Y2K days, chortled and thumped and steamed on the counter, like a small volcano about to blow.

“Private?” Tripp repeated, disbelieving.

Jim kept his gaze averted. A ruddy flush climbed his neck. “I’ll be all right,” he insisted, so quietly Tripp had to strain to hear him. “And I’d sure appreciate it if you’d stop repeating practically everything I say.”

Tripp shoved away from the counter and the noisy coffee machine, scraped back a chair across the table from Jim and sank onto the hard wooden seat. “Well, now,” he replied tersely and with a fair amount of irony. “Whatever disease it was that damn near killed you, and probably still could, is private. Why didn’t you just say so in the first place?”

Jim met Tripp’s eyes with stubborn reluctance. “I could do with a mite less attitude, if it’s all the same to you,” he grumbled in response. A muscle worked in one side of his jaw, as though he was chewing on a chunk of rawhide, then he went on. “The worst is over, son. I’ve done everything the doctors said I ought to, and I’m on the mend now. I just seem to tucker out a little sooner than I used to, that’s all.”

Tripp stared at his dad, imagining some of the things the man might have endured alone, depending entirely on his own stoicism, his damnable pride. In those moments, Tripp didn’t know if he wanted to put a fist through the nearest wall or bust out bawling like a little kid.


In the end, he did neither; he simply waited for the rest of the story.

Meanwhile, Jim’s neck went from red to a purplish-crimson. “Turned out to be my prostate that was causing all the trouble,” he finally said. The words might have been dragged out of him the way he held on to each one of them like a grudge that went back for generations.

Tripp took a few moments to absorb the hard-won answer, exhausted by the effort of getting it. “I’ll be damned,” he ground out, once the information had begun to penetrate, “if it wouldn’t have been easier to drive half a dozen mules out of a knee-deep mudhole than get an answer out of you.”

With that, his vocal chords seized up again, and the breath rushed out of him, as though he’d been thrown from a horse, landed on hard-packed dirt and gotten his throat stepped on in the bargain.

On the one hand, he knew his dad hadn’t gotten sick on purpose. On the other, he felt ambushed, cornered, kept in the dark. Combined, those emotions stung through his blood like venom.

Tripp had been in this place twice before—the first time when his mother had died suddenly, and then again, strangely chilled even in the stifling heat of a foreign field-hospital, watching helplessly while the closest friend he’d ever had, or ever expected to have, breathed his last.

For once, it was Jim who got the conversation going again.

“Coffee’s ready,” he said amiably. From his tone, a person would have thought they’d been talking about something ordinary, like that year’s hay crop or local politics.

“Screw the coffee,” Tripp replied, jolted all over again. He sucked in a breath and leaned forward in his chair. “What the hell, Dad?” he demanded in a raspy whisper. “All of a sudden, you’re as delicate as somebody’s spinster aunt, so hung up on modesty—or whatever—that you’re embarrassed to mention your prostate?”

Jim said nothing, the bullheaded old coot.

Equally stubborn, Tripp pressed the issue. “It’s not as if I didn’t know you had one. And guess what? So do I.”

Since the remark was rhetorical, and since he was Jim, Tripp’s dad didn’t comment right away, although he still looked sadly exasperated. He shoved a hand through his shock of gray-white hair and, at last, made an effort to explain.

“I didn’t figure on it taking so long to get my strength back, that’s all,” he confessed. “I wouldn’t have said a word about it, being sick, I mean, if I could have managed the ranch on my own.” A sheen of moisture glistened in his eyes, and his Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed hard. “As it turned out, I couldn’t. Too many things were slipping around here, too fast.” Jim paused again, colored again, this time in shades of defiance. “Just the same, I knew damn well I wasn’t going to die, knew it from the first. I won’t say there weren’t some tough days, and some hard nights, too, because there were, but I’ve been through worse—a lot worse.” He stopped once more, regrouping. “Like losing your mother. Ellie was my North Star. You know that.”

Tripp felt a familiar stab of sorrow, because Ellie Galloway, his mom, had been true north on his inner compass, too. Even after all this time, there were still moments when he couldn’t believe she was gone.

He didn’t trust himself to speak, so he just scowled. Jim wasn’t off the hook, and Tripp wanted him to know it.

Jim made an impatient sound low in his throat. “What was I supposed to do, Tripp? Tell me that. Should I have asked you to come home the minute all of this started, so we could both be miserable?”

Not in the least mollified, even though he knew he would probably have done pretty much the same thing in Jim’s place, Tripp didn’t answer. He stalked over to the coffee machine, sloshed some java into a chipped mug and then set the stuff in front of his dad with a solid thump of crockery meeting tabletop.

He didn’t return to his chair.

Jim took a sip of coffee, savored it for a moment or two and said, “Thanks.” Another sip followed, and another. Eventually, though, he continued, “I guess I could have spoken up a little sooner.”

Tripp, standing at the long row of windows now, his back to Jim, watched Ridley gamboling around the side yard, evidently chasing a bug. “You think?” he snapped.

The coffee, strong and black the way he liked it, must have rallied Jim considerably, because he sounded almost like his old self when he replied lightly, “Then again, I might have been right to hold my tongue, after all. I figured you’d get your britches in a twist once you knew, no matter when you found out, or how, as far as that goes.”

Shaking his head, Tripp turned from the windows. “You’re the only father I’ve got,” he said, calmer now—or maybe just spent. The day had been a long one, after all. He’d been shaken by the encounter with Hadleigh and now...this. “So, yeah, I’d have freaked out in any case. Then I would have stepped up and done what needed doing on this ranch, so you could concentrate on getting well.”

Jim was looking away, probably because his eyes were misty again, and he considered Tripp’s words in solemn silence before offering a concession—of sorts. “I reckon we’ve both got a point.” He blinked a couple of times, then faced his son. “You had a right to know, and I had a right to keep my own counsel. I guess we’ve just been coming at things from different directions.” A pause. “What do you say we meet someplace in the middle?”

Tripp nodded, gulped once, got out a hoarse “Fair enough.”

“Well, then,” Jim decreed with obvious relief, “that’s settled.” He levered himself to his feet. “Now, if you can see your way clear to feeding the horses, I’ll see what I can do to rustle us up some supper.”

Once more, Tripp nodded. There was no point in pursuing the subject any further, not that night, anyway.

So, grimly silent, he helped himself to Jim’s denim jacket, found hanging in its usual place on one of the pegs beside the back door, shrugged into it, straightened the collar.

They still had issues, father and son, but in time, they’d come to terms, hammer out some kind of mutual understanding.

But time wasn’t a fixed commodity, was it? One minute, a person was there, living and breathing. The next, he or she could be gone for good.

Time. Let there be enough of it.

Resigned, Tripp left the house, crossed the back porch and descended the somewhat rickety steps to the yard. Ridley stopped exploring the flower beds and the base of the picket fence and trotted over to Tripp’s side. They both headed for the barn.

The chores were familiar; Tripp could have done them in his sleep.

With Ridley tagging after him, clearly curious about the huge nickering critters standing in the stalls, Tripp filled the feeders with good grass hay, made sure the outdated aluminum water troughs were topped off and paused to greet each of the six horses with a pat and a kindly word.

Later, as he and the dog returned to the house, Tripp stared up at the night sky and watched as the first stars popped out.

Maybe, he thought, things would turn out all right.

In fact, he meant to see to it that they did.

Jim would recover, Tripp assured himself. With more rest and less worry, he’d be his old ornery self in no time at all.

As for making friends with Hadleigh...well, that would be a challenge, for sure and for certain.


And Tripp Galloway loved a challenge.

* * *

MELODY WAS THE first to arrive at Hadleigh’s place that evening, looking rushed and windblown, even though she wasn’t late. She’d buttoned up her black tailored coat without bothering to free her shoulder-length blond hair from under the collar, the strap of her shoulder bag was across her chest and the supermarket deli tray—cheese and cold cuts—shook slightly as she held it out to her hostess with ungloved hands.

“You’ve heard,” she concluded after studying Hadleigh’s face for a moment.

Hadleigh took the tray from her friend, set it on the nearest counter and nodded glumly, there being no earthly reason to pretend she didn’t know what Melody meant. “Tripp’s back,” she said.

Was he still married? Did he have children?

She hadn’t had the courage to ask.

Melody let out a relieved breath, put her purse aside, unbuttoned her coat and flopped it over the back of a chair before fluffing out her formerly trapped hair with a quick swipe of her splayed fingers and a shake of her head. “And?” she prompted, still peering at Hadleigh’s face.

“And he was here,” Hadleigh said. To her, this wasn’t good news, but she knew Melody would be surprised, and she rather enjoyed springing it on her.

The reaction was immediate. “Here?” Melody’s blue-green eyes sparkled with pleased alarm. “Tripp Galloway was here, in this house? When?”

“Today,” Hadleigh answered. She took Melody’s discarded coat from the back of the chair and carried it out of the kitchen to the foyer, where she hung it carefully from one of the hooks on her grandmother’s antique brass coat-tree.

Melody trailed her the whole way, peppering Hadleigh with questions and giving her no space to wedge in an answer. “What did he want? What did he say? What did you say? Were you glad to see him—or were you mad? Or sad or what? Were you shocked? You must have been shocked—did you cry? You didn’t cry, did you? Oh, God, tell me you didn’t cry—”

Hadleigh turned from the coat-tree, hands resting on her hips, grinning in spite of the flash of indignation she felt. “Of course I didn’t cry,” she said. “Me, shed tears over Tripp Galloway? That will be the day.”

As if they both didn’t know she’d wept rivers for weeks after her ruined wedding, and that, as few people would have guessed, those tears had had nothing to do with Oakley and everything to do with Tripp’s announcement that he was married.

How could she not have known?

Tripp would have told his dad, if no one else—wouldn’t he?

Hard to tell. Jim, like many men of his generation, tended to keep his own counsel when it came to matters he regarded as personal, and he was the sort to listen a lot more than he talked.

Melody, good friend that she was, refrained from pointing out the obvious. “What are you going to do?” she asked instead, acknowledging Muggles with a casual but fond pat on the head when the retriever joined them on the return trip to the kitchen. Since the dog came and went constantly from Earl’s place to Hadleigh’s, her presence was nothing unusual.

Melody regarded her as part of the household.

“Do?” Hadleigh echoed. Then she giggled in a strangled sort of way and went on. “Well, let’s see now. What to do, what to do.” She paused, snapped her fingers. “I know. I could enter a convent. Or sign up for the Foreign Legion, provided they’re accepting women nowadays. Failing that, I suppose I could take to the high seas, become a merchant marine—dangerous work, but I hear the money’s good.”

Melody laughed, but the expression in her eyes remained pensive. “Stop it,” she said. “This is serious. We might have to scrap the whole marriage pact thing, start over from scratch.”

They’d reached the kitchen by then, and before Hadleigh could come up with a response, Bex Stuart peered through the oval window in the back door, rapped on the glass and let herself in.

There was something vaguely musical about the way Bex moved; Hadleigh could almost hear the tinkling chime of distant bells.

“Have you heard?” Bex blurted, breathless with excitement the second she’d crossed the threshold.

“Tripp Galloway’s back in town,” Melody and Hadleigh answered in perfect unison.

This inspired a brief ripple of nervous chuckles.

Bex, disappointed that the big story had already broken, put down her purse and a box from the local bakery, then wriggled out of her puffy nylon coat, which Hadleigh took from her.

She retraced the short trek to the coat-tree, this time with Bex and Muggles as part of the caravan, Melody along for the ride, Bex spouting questions.

Déjà vu all over again.

It was comical, really.

“Will everybody please take a breath?” Hadleigh said, while two women and a dog studied her curiously there in the foyer.

“I couldn’t get a thing out of her,” Melody confided to Bex, as though Hadleigh were suddenly absent.

Bex’s chameleon eyes, sometimes a pale shade of amber, sometimes green, widened with rising interest.

“Not only that,” Melody went on, still ignoring Hadleigh, “but he was here.”

“Wow,” Bex marveled. She glanced upward. “And the roof didn’t fall in.”

“You’re not breathing,” Hadleigh told her friends.

They were breathing, of course, just not in the calming way she’d meant. On either side of her, Melody and Bex each took one of Hadleigh’s elbows and firmly propelled her back to the kitchen. They even sat her down in a chair, as though she’d been yanked from the jaws of certain death and might still be in shock.

Muggles, tail sweeping back and forth, tagged along, cheerfully fascinated by all this moving from room to room. Strange creatures, these humans, she must’ve been thinking. No matter where they are, they want to be someplace else.

Nothing was said, but Hadleigh’s two best friends went into action, as if they’d choreographed the scene beforehand.

Bex slid a step stool in front of the refrigerator and climbed up to open the cupboard above, reaching past an I Love Lucy cookie jar and groping around for a lone and very dusty bottle of whiskey, last used to spike the eggnog at Christmas. It was still three-quarters full.

Melody, meanwhile, took a trio of squat tumblers from another cupboard, carried them to the sink, then rinsed them carefully and dried them with an embroidered dish towel.

Hadleigh watched, bemused, as did Muggles. The whole drill reminded her of the syncopated routines in the black-and-white movies her grandmother had loved to watch on TV, the ones performed in sparkling pools by bathing beauties in sleek one-piece suits and rubber swimming caps.

With a flourish, Melody poured a double shot into each of the glasses, handed one to Bex and one to Hadleigh, with an appropriate flourish, and finally raised her own high, prepared to offer a toast.

Hadleigh’s whirling brain suddenly snagged on a memory. They’d been supermarket premiums, those glasses, she recalled, with a pang of nostalgia, and Gram had collected them eagerly, one by one, until she had a set of eight.

That hadn’t been like her grandmother, a nondrinker and a minimalist.

Hadleigh, in junior high at the time, had finally asked Gram why she’d wanted the glasses, since they were never used. Her grandmother had smiled and said she liked the way they caught stray beams of light sometimes, giving off an unexpected shimmer, thereby brightening many an otherwise dull day.


You were the one who brightened up the dull days, Gram, Hadleigh thought now. You, with your love and your laughter and with that magical smile of yours.

Melody got Hadleigh’s attention with a loud “Ahem.” “To the marriage pact,” she said.

“To the marriage pact,” Bex repeated, with less certainty.

Hadleigh merely nodded and took a cautious sip from her glass.

The whiskey burned the back of her throat and then proceeded to sear its way down her esophagus.

Always a sport, Bex overcame her obvious hesitation, upended her glass, swallowed the contents in one gulp and immediately began to cough, choke and sputter.

Grinning, Melody crossed to where Bex stood and, with her free hand, administered half a dozen brisk whacks on the back.

Bex frowned at Melody, as though affronted, and said, “Geez, Mel, you don’t have to knock me over.”

“Sorry,” Melody said lightly.

“And,” Bex continued, “it probably isn’t smart to drink on empty stomachs. If we’re going to come up with a workable plan, we need to be sober, at least.”

“You’re right,” Hadleigh said resolutely, setting her glass on the table and rising from her chair to head for the fridge, where she’d stashed the pasta salad she’d made earlier in the day. Before Earl was taken away in an ambulance, before she’d inherited a full-time dog, before Tripp had shown up, materializing on the rainy sidewalk in front of her house in the middle of the afternoon. Needless to say, she hadn’t gotten around to baking the cake she’d planned to serve. “Let’s eat.”

The meal was simple, delicious and, from Hadleigh’s viewpoint, over much too quickly. There was virtually no washing up to be done—just the salad plates and the silverware, and Melody stowed those away in the dishwasher while Bex wiped the tabletop clean and Hadleigh let Muggles out for a few minutes, filled the dog’s bowl with fresh kibble and set it on the floor.

After a brief interlude, Muggles came back inside, and the three friends gathered around the table again, as in days of old.

“Since you couldn’t bring yourself to ask him straight out if he was still married, did you at least check for a wedding band?”Melody asked casually.

The truth? Hadleigh had been too rattled to think of that—or much of anything else.

Melody sighed when Hadleigh didn’t speak and then answered her own question. “You didn’t,” she said. “Well, don’t worry about it. Nobody else in town seems to know either.”

Just as Tripp’s return to Mustang Creek had apparently caught everyone off guard, so had his marriage ten years ago. News like that usually got around Bliss County in a flash, even if it was supposed to be a secret—especially if it was supposed to be a secret—but he’d somehow managed to keep that particular tidbit under wraps.

Until he’d sprung it on Hadleigh in Bad Billy’s Burger Palace...

“I...couldn’t think,” Hadleigh admitted, uneasy again, even though she’d firmly decided not to let Tripp Galloway get under her skin. All she had to do was stop remembering.

Fat chance she’d forget.

“You didn’t even ask Tripp why he came back?” Bex wanted to know. Being Bex, if she didn’t like an answer, she just kept asking, evidently hoping to get a better one through persistence.

“He grew up in Mustang Creek, just like the rest of us,” Hadleigh retorted. “And he doesn’t need to account for his whereabouts—not to me, anyway.”

Melody sat back in her chair, regarding Hadleigh thoughtfully. “Spare us the act, Hadleigh,” she said. “This is us you’re talking to, your closest friends. We see all—we know all. You’ve been in love with the man since forever.”

“I have not,” Hadleigh protested, with less conviction than she’d intended.

Okay, yes—she’d had a crush on Tripp once upon a time.

And, yes, she’d stuck to Tripp’s heels like a wad of gum from the first day Will brought him home from school, and she’d even shed a few tears over him.

None of which meant she was or ever had been in love with the guy, for pity’s sake.

Tripp was one of the last links to Will, that was all, a connection to the lost brother she’d adored. Except for Gram, of course, Tripp had remembered Will better than anyone, and, at least at first, he’d been willing to share those memories.

They’d warmed Hadleigh, those recollections, like a bonfire on a cold night. She’d considered Tripp a friend, almost a surrogate big brother. And while she could have forgiven him for making a circus out of the most important day of her life, the fact that he hadn’t bothered to tell her, or anyone else in Mustang Creek, that he had a wife tucked away somewhere—well, that had been a betrayal.

And she wasn’t over it.

“The point is,” Melody said, effectively bringing the informal meeting back to order, “Bex and I need to know where you stand on the pact.”

Ah, yes, the marriage pact.

They’d made a personal commitment, the three of them, one summer night at Billy’s, sharing an order of his fabled chicken-chili-and-cheese nachos, a year or so after Hadleigh had been carried bodily out of the church where she’d planned to marry Oakley Smyth.

After a few years, with no viable marriage prospects in sight, it had begun to seem that they were destined to be perennial bridesmaids rather than brides, and they were fed up with waiting around for their lives to start, plucking the strings of second fiddles. It was getting old, playing supporting roles in other people’s splashy, romantic weddings, attending bridal showers for everybody but each other and always, always putting on a brave face.

It wasn’t that they weren’t modern women, not at all. They’d gotten college educations. They had career goals, and they’d accomplished most of them.

But, deep down, they all knew something was missing.

They wanted husbands, homes, families.

Was that so wrong?

And, furthermore, they’d had their fill of dating little boys posing as grown-ups.

Damn it, they wanted men. The real deal, testosterone and all.

So they’d made the pact.

They’d written the tenets of the agreement on paper napkins emblazoned with Bad Billy’s distinctive horned devil logo—they would support each other in the search for their individual Mr. Rights. They would meet at least once a month as long as they all lived within a fifty-mile radius. Failing that, they would do video conferences. In this way, they figured, they could keep their minds focused on the objective—a full life, no settling allowed.

It was true love or nothing. That was the agreement.

So far, there had been none of the former and plenty of the latter.

But a cowgirl never gives up.

Hadleigh, Melody and Bex had certainly stuck to their guns.

If some of the monthly meetings had turned out to be shopping trips, dancing to the jukebox in some cowboy bar or marathon movie watching in one of their living rooms, rather than actual strategy sessions, well, so what? No plan was perfect.

On other occasions, especially after overexposure to TV, specifically the Oprah Winfrey Network, they’d renewed their efforts, gone so far as to light candles, compose affirmations, refine their intentions, really taken the New Age approach. Why, they’d even made “vision boards,” gluing magazine pictures to poster-size pieces of paper. They chose photographs of spacious houses; churches decked out for glamorous weddings; honeymoon destinations the world over; handsome men in tuxes; numerous healthy, beaming children anyone could see were of above-average intelligence; and, finally, a pet or two. They’d taped these creations to the insides of their closet doors and stared at them on a regular basis.


Their friends kept getting married.

Inviting them to serve as bridesmaids.

The edges of the vision boards had begun to tatter and, eventually, out of embarrassment, they’d burned the lot of them in a barrel in Hadleigh’s backyard.

Daunted but still determined, they’d signed up for an online dating service, the one boasting the most marriages.

Although their hopes had been high in the beginning, this idea, too, had quickly fizzled. When they were matched with any guys, they often discovered that they’d grown up with them, right there in Mustang Creek, and the reasons they’d never been keen to date them were all too obvious. The prospects from farther afield acted suspiciously married, or asked to borrow money, or expected sex right out of the chute.

Losers.

Still, the Three Musketeers had hung in there. While away at college, they’d attended every party, whether they felt like it at the time or not. They’d gone on blind dates with the brothers, cousins and ex-boyfriends of various friends, friends of friends and those of mere acquaintances, too, as advised by the find-a-man books they shared, devoured and discussed at excruciating length.

The results of all these efforts, though dismal, had at least left them with a few good stories to tell and a lot of things to laugh about.

While a less stubborn crop of females might have cut their losses and run, resigned themselves to the single life, Hadleigh, Melody and Bex were not quitters.

So, here they were, a mere two years from turning thirty, all of them successful in their chosen careers—Melody was a talented jewelry designer, Bex owned a thriving fitness club she was about to franchise and Hadleigh was nationally known for her artistry as a quilter. And the three of them were no closer to finding and marrying the men of their dreams than they’d been that first night at Billy’s when they’d come up with the initial concept.

Hadleigh, having been distracted by these thoughts, suddenly splashed down into the flow of conversation.

“Maybe we were taking too narrow a view,” Bex was saying. “Not considering men we already know as possible husband material...”

Melody nodded, brow creased with concentration. “It could be fate.” She swirled the last of her before-supper whiskey in the bottom of the supermarket glass. “Tripp coming back to Mustang Creek to stay, I mean, and stopping off to see Hadleigh before he’d even been out to the ranch.”

Hadleigh blinked. “Wait a second,” she said. “In the first place, who said Tripp was home for good? His dad’s been pretty sick, and it’s about time he came for a visit, but he’s got a company to run, after all. He might still have a wife, too, and maybe a couple of kids.”

Both Melody and Bex looked mildly surprised.

“You haven’t been listening,” Bex accused, though not unkindly.

Melody grinned. “Obviously,” she added. With an index finger, she tapped the screen of her smartphone, resting nearby on the table. “The miracle of search engines,” she went on. “Very recently, Tripp sold his company for megabucks. Leased his condo in Seattle out long-term and jettisoned most of its contents. And there’s no mention of a current wife—only an ex. Her name is Danielle, she’s been married to an L.A. architect for eight years and they have two children and a standard poodle named Axel.”

Hadleigh opened her mouth, closed it again. Words escaped her.

“Axel,” Bex mused, almost sadly. “Poor dog.”

“Are you for real, Hadleigh?” Melody asked. Before she’d taken up jewelry design, she’d planned on becoming a trial attorney. Sometimes it showed. “You’ve never checked up on Tripp, not even once, in all these years?”

Hadleigh felt color bloom in her cheeks. Muggles, asleep under the table last she knew, got to her four feet and rested a sympathetic muzzle on Hadleigh’s right thigh. “No,” she said, trying not to sound defensive. “I was in denial, okay? I’m only human, you know.”

Melody and Bex exchanged a glance, but neither of them responded.

“Apparently,” Hadleigh pressed, “neither of you did any checking, either.”

“We weren’t crazy in love with the man our whole lives,” Melody said.

“He hurt you,” Bex added, watching Hadleigh. “I didn’t want to know anything about him. For all I cared, the man could have signed up for a one-way mission to Mars or any other planet—the farther from earth, the better.”

“I was never and am not now,” Hadleigh reiterated, “in love with Tripp Galloway. He was my big brother’s best friend. I looked up to him. There might even have been some hero worship in play—before I got my braces off, that is. But I was never, I repeat, never, in love.”

Melody and Bex exchanged another glance, smirking a little in the process. “Right,” Melody said sweetly.

“Whatever you say, Hadleigh,” Bex agreed.