Page 48 of Forever Yours

“We found enough food for sandwiches and there’s a bag of chips on the counter.” Annabelle gestured. “Fix yourself something and come on. I’ve got all your souls to crush.”

A few hours later, the game was down to three players—Annabelle, Devlin and Gabe. True to her word, Annabelle had crushed the other players with her skill. Greyson and Prudence were out of the game early, but Gabe was sure they’d folded on purpose so they could go to their bedroom. Sebastian was harder to defeat, his Monopoly prowess being on par with Annabelle’s. She’d finally bested him with a whoop, and he’d retired to the living room with a tumbler of scotch and a newspaper he’d found.

Gabe and Devlin had been staying under the radar as Annabelle had focused all her attention on beating Sebastian, and once he was out she went in for the kill. She’d made the critical error, however, of trading Boardwalk and was getting destroyed by rent on that hotel.

“You never trade Boardwalk or Park Place,” Sebastian commented from the living room after Annabelle had landed on that monopoly and had to mortgage almost all her properties.

“Oh, be quiet,” Annabelle called out to him, then muttered, “Inevertrade Boardwalk. What was I thinking?”

One turn and one unfortunate roll of the dice later, Annabelle was out. She stood and held out her hand, shaking both Devlin’s and Gabe’s. “Well done, you two. I haven’t lost this game since the late nineties. Well done.”

“That long?” Devlin asked.

“No one has wanted to play with me since then. But still, my streak is over. I must be tired.” She yawned. “I think I’ll go nap before dinner.”

She walked past Sebastian on her way to the room. “Good game. I’m sorry I called you a pillock. It was all in good fun,sir.”

Sebastian stood and followed Annabelle out of the room. “Apology accepted. I think I’ll lay down, too. Yesterday did me in.”

The sound of their voices drifted down the hall and Gabe and Devlin were alone once again.

“Did you want to keep playing?” Gabe asked.

“Of course. I may not have anything to prove like Annabelle, but I still think I can win this game.” She picked up the dice and rolled, landing right on Free Parking.

“You’re cheating, I know it! Are these weighted dice?”

“We’re not playing craps in Vegas. I’ll have you know that I’ve never cheated at anything in my life.”

“Seriously?”

“Nope, I’m honest to a fault.”

“Honest you say, like when you lived in Amber Falls for over a year and never let anyone know that we’d…met before?” Gabe was joking, but the words held a question of truth in them.

Devlin looked chagrined. “We haven’t talked about this yet, have we.”

“That wasn’t my intention.” He rolled the dice as he spoke and moved his piece. “But no, we never have.”

Play continued for a while until Devlin spoke again. “Amber Falls was—” She paused as if searching for words. “Unexpected. I’d already decided to leave Boston before we met that night. I scoured the classifieds for months for the perfect place to open my shop, not planning to go much farther away than a suburb, but I wasn’t finding anything in my price range in a location I knew would work. I kept searching farther and farther out until I found my shop.”

“Life can play out in the most fascinating way,” Gabe mused. “When I woke that next morning and you weren’t there, I thought that for the rest of my life you’d be a vague memory that popped into my mind from time to time, the woman I’d always wonder about.”

“You were the same for me. Imagine how I felt when I saw you months after I moved to town. Seeing you was such a shock, I could’ve convinced myself that I conjured you up.”

Gabe gave a rueful laugh. “I was sure you were haunting me.”

“What?”

“That day you stood outside Finnegan’s window—you were ethereal to me—through the etched glass you were like a watercolor painting. I remember I was serving a customer when I saw you, but by the time I got to the door you weren’t on the street. I figured the only way you could’ve gotten away so fast was if you just disappeared. Then months later, on New Year’s Eve, I saw you through your shop window, but I didn’t know the shop was yours then. The only rational explanation in my mind was that you were haunting me.”

“I thought something cosmic was having fun at my expense. Of all the places I ended up, I was not only in the same town as you and the same block as you, but two doors away. From you.”

“What I don’t get is why you didn’t just tell me or talk to me.”

“Other than the major stalker vibes that would’ve given off?”

“You know what I mean.”