With the tour and our future still lingering in my mind, we enter the kitchen with our fingers linked, the fresh aroma of coffee in the air. I feel like I’m seven years old again and Ella and I are telling my mom how we broke our next-door neighbor Mrs. Millerson’s garden gnome because we wanted to see if it was a real gnome. Mrs. Millerson had caught us and told us we had to get her a new one. We thought we were going to get yelled at but thankfully my mom always went a little easy on me due to the fact that my dad bailed out and she’s always had a soft spot for Ella.

But now instead of telling my mom about the broken gnome we’re telling her that we want to have a wedding in five days and how we almost got married without her. My mom flips out at first, more than I thought she would, but her anger turns to excitement when I remind her that yeah, we were going to get married without her but we decided not to.

Thomas, my mom’s boyfriend who’s a little younger than her, is in the kitchen eating a bowl of cereal at the table while all this goes on. He looks a little more cleaned up than when we last saw him, at least he’s wearing a clean T-shirt and jeans without holes in them. My mom is still dressing like she’s younger—her shirt has all this flashy diamond shit on it and there’s some on the trim of her pants. But I don’t say anything about it. I get that she’s happy and even though I still think Thomas is an idiot, especially when he drips milk on the front of his shirt, he seems to make her happy.

“So we’re really going to do this?” my mom asks with a grin on her face as she pours a cup of coffee.

“Do what?” I ask, exchanging a confused glance with Ella, who shrugs, as confused as I am.

My mom shakes her head at me as she sets the coffeepot down on the counter near the sink. “Get married.”

I press back a smirk. “I didn’t realize it was a we thing.”

She sighs, like I’m a silly little child, and walks past us, making her way across the kitchen to the fridge. “I didn’t mean we as in all of us.” She opens the fridge door and takes out a gallon of milk. “I meant we as in you and Ella.” She beams at Ella as she pours milk into her coffee. “The daughter I never had. God, this is going to be so much fun.”

Ella steps back, tensing, shying away because my mom’s enthusiasm is scaring the shit out of her. “What’s going to be so much fun?” she asks.

“Planning your wedding.” My mom glances at Ella and me as she puts the milk back into the fridge. “You two are going to have the best wedding. I’m going to make sure of that.”

I pull Ella toward me and circle my arms around her waist, trying to ease her panic. “You know you have only five days to plan it and then we have to return home, right?” I tell my mom.

My mom clasps her hands together and glances over her shoulder at the snowflakes drifting down from the cloudy sky. It’s early afternoon but with the lack of sunlight it looks like it’s late in the day. “Five days is perfect.” She returns her attention to us. “I can do a lot in five days.”

“And we’re all broke,” I remind her, pressing Ella’s back against my chest. She’s being really quiet and it’s making me nervous. I’m not sure if it’s all the wedding talk that’s freaking her out or the fact that we just had a baby talk.

“I have some money saved up.” My mom collects her cup of coffee from off the counter. “And besides, you can have a nice wedding without spending a whole lot of money.” Her eyes land on Ella. “Do you have a dress already?”

Ella shakes her head and then blinks at my mom distractedly. “What?”

“A dress, sweetie.” My mom looks at me questioningly from over the top of her cup as she takes a swallow. “Does she have one yet?”

I lean over Ella’s shoulder to catch her eye and I’m startled by the layer of water in her eyes. There’s something wrong and I need to find out what. “Yeah, she has one,” I say to my mom and then grab Ella’s hand and lead her toward the hallway, calling over my shoulder. “Mom, we’ll be right back.”

Ella absentmindedly follows me. Once I get her into the hallway and out of my mother’s gaze, I stop us and whirl her around to face me.

“Okay, what’s wrong?” I ask, examining her watery eyes.

She stares over my shoulder at a few framed pictures of my mom and me hanging on the wall. “It’s nothing.”

I place my hand on her cheek and force her to look at me. “It is something; otherwise you wouldn’t be about ready to cry.”

“I don’t…” Tears bubble in the corner of her eyes and her voice cracks. “It’s just that… God, this is so stupid.” She rubs the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand.

“Nothing you say is stupid,” I assure her, wiping a stray tear away with my thumb.

She frowns doubtfully at me. “Even when I told you that I was pretty sure we could push to one hundred miles per hour when there was a foot of snow on the road?”

“Yeah, well, we all have our drunk moments,” I say, recollecting the night she’s talking about. How she was a little drunk and a little excited over the fact that some dude told her she had a nice ass. She would never admit that was what was making her all cheery, but I could tell it was and it was fucking annoying.

“Go faster,” she’d begged from the passenger seat with her head against the dashboard as she watched the night sky through the window. “Go, like, a hundred.”

“No way,” I’d replied, shifting into a lower gear as the engine grumbled. The road was dangerous going twenty-five, the car barely able to keep any sort of traction as we slid up the vacant street, heading home.

“Oh come on, Micha Scott.” She sat up and ran her fingers through her hair. She had on a leather jacket and a black shirt underneath it that had a low collar and I could see the curves of her breasts. The sight made me hard, which pissed me off because another guy had put a smile on her face. “Just try it. If things get too crazy, you can stop.”

I shook my head, ripping my gaze from her cleavage. “You’re drunk and thinking stupid.”

“Hey, that’s not very nice.” She’d pouted. I hated when she pouted because she looked ridiculously sexy and it made it difficult to deny her anything she was asking for, even if it meant us getting killed. She propped her elbows onto the console and leaned over, putting her face only inches away from my cheek. “Come on, just do it. For me.” She had this amused, drunk look on her face. She was too gorgeous, perfect, beautiful for her own good. If I could, I would have told her that. Told her how amazingly perfect she was and how I could spend thousands of hours writing lyrics about how beautiful she was and it wouldn’t even begin to describe it.

My eyes may have been on the road but all my attention was on her. “Pretty girl, I’m not going to kill us, no matter how hard you beg.”

Her lip popped out even more as she slumped back in the seat. “Fine. Don’t have any fun.” Propping her boots on the console, she’d slouched back against the seat. “And I don’t know why you keep calling me that.”

“What, pretty girl?” I smiled amusedly as she nodded with a frown, her eyelids drifting shut as exhaustion took her over. I took a chance, telling her the truth, knowing that she probably wouldn’t remember it by morning. “It’s because I think you’re beautiful, but I can never get away with calling you beautiful without you kicking my ass, so I settled for a more milder version of the truth.” I sighed as she passed out, her knees slumping to the side and falling off the dash and onto the floor. Then her head lowered down against the console and she wiggled it to the side until it was pressed against my ribs and her hair was on my lap. Smiling, I slowed down the car and took my time getting home. The night actually turned out to be pretty fucking perfect.

“I’ve had a lot more stupid moments than you.” Ella’s voice jerks me from the memory.

“Oh, I doubt that,” I argue, bracing my hand on the wall beside her head. “And I doubt that whatever you’re going to tell me is going to sound stupid.”

She rubs her hand over her face, leaving red lines on her skin. “Part of the reason…” She clears her throat. “I’m just thinking about mom stuff. That’s all.”

“About the journal?”

“No… about getting married… without a mom around.” She wavers. “It’s part of the reason why I wanted to get married here. So we would be close to her.”

My heart sinks into my stomach. Through all of this, I’d never even thought about that. About how she must be feeling about her mom not being around for all of this.

“See, I told you it was stupid,” she says with a heavyhearted sigh. “I should just keep my mouth shut.”

“No, it’s not stupid. Not at all.” I pause, considering my next words carefully because they’re important. “Do you want to have it somewhere near the cemetery?”

She quickly shakes her head. “No, I like by the lake. It’s just nice knowing she’s in the same town. God, this is so weird. I’m talking about her like she’s still alive.” Her voice quivers at the end and she looks away, avoiding eye contact with me.

“Hey.” With my hand, I turn her head back toward me. “Nothing about wanting your mother near you is weird, whether she’s alive or not.”

She smiles sadly, but it’s nice to see her smile while we’re talking about her mom, even if it’s a sad smile. “Well, I still want to have it at the lake,” she tells me. “And my dad will be there, so I guess it won’t be so bad.”

“What about Dean and Caroline?” I ask. “Should we invite them?”

“Caroline’s pregnant so I’m not even sure she could and it’s super short notice,” she says.

“It’s up to you.” I give her a quick kiss on the lips and then step back. “If you don’t want to invite them, then fine. But, I mean, you do get married only once, you know.”