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Would you like some coffee? Yes, please? What did they do with my real parents?
“Excuse me,” I finally said. “Are we in some kind of a time warp? You two are still divorced, aren’t you?”
“Paige,” my mom said reproachfully.
“What? This is weird,” I said, and suddenly remembered that I had forgotten to ask Sophie if she’d heard anything about Mom and Dad spending time together. Now I guess I didn’t have to.
“No, it’s not. Your mother and I can be friends. And especially now with Sophie’s baby coming, we thought we should make an effort to get along a little better. That’s all,” Dad said. “Speaking of whom, I thought Sophie was here. Didn’t I see her car in the driveway? She’s still driving that gas-guzzling SUV, right? I’ve told her a thousand times she needs to trade that thing in for something more energy efficient, but you know how stubborn your sister is.”
“Yes, I certainly do. Anyway, her head started to spin around Exorcist -style, so she went home to rest,” I said.
“Oh,” my father said. My mother shot me another look.
“She’s just a little tired. It’s hard carrying around all of that extra weight,” my mother said.
“Yeah, that must be it,” I said, heavy on the sarcasm. “Well, since we’re not going to go baby shopping, I think I’m going to run over to Saks.”
And then I hightailed it out of there, because frankly, the two of them were starting to creep me out, what with all of the smiling and agreeing and niceness. Could it really be true that my mother and father were becoming friends?
No. No fucking way.
Chapter Eight
“Are you starving? Because I thought we could take a drive out to my house—I just put the windows in—but if you’re too hungry, we could do it some other time,” Zack said as he pulled out of the visitor’s parking lot for my building and turned right on Congress.
“No, I’d love to see it,” I said. I’d been curious about his new house ever since he’d mentioned it the day we went sailing. Before then I’d have guessed that he lived in a typical Peter Pan bachelor pad, complete with an ugly yet comfortable secondhand couch, bed linens that hadn’t been changed in two months, and a light-up neon beer sign that had been filched from a bar on a drunken bet.
We took the same twisting, scenic route that leads to Lake Travis, but turned off the main road before we got to the marina, and then turned again so that we were climbing a steep and somewhat remote road, before turning yet again up a short driveway. In front of us was an extremely cool, modern two-story house, sitting on what I could only imagine was an incredibly expensive hillside lot. Dense trees surrounded the house on three sides, while I could just make out a glimpse of the blue waters of the lake behind it.
“Oh my God . . . I can’t believe your location. The view from inside must be incredible,” I breathed.
Zack grinned and looked up at the house proudly. It was still unfinished, but it was obvious that the house was well on its way to becoming a showplace. It had modern lines, a boxy shape, and huge windows all over to take advantage of the view.
“You want to see inside?” he asked.
“Absolutely,” I said.
Inside, it was still very rough. The bones of the walls were there, but Zack hadn’t put up the Sheetrock yet, and the kitchen was nothing but a shell. But the layout was open, and flowed well, and it was easy to see how gorgeous it was going to be.
“I’m doing a lot of it on my own, when I have the free time, so it’s not much to look at now,” Zack apologized.
I looked at him. “Are you serious? I love it. I went house hunting with Soph when she and Aidan were looking, and all of the builder houses looked so much alike, it was hard to tell one from another. And I hated how homogenous the neighborhoods are. This is so private and airy and pretty.”
Zack looked pleased. “I know what you mean. I used to work for one of
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