I’m an idiot. It’s never quite dawned on me before that even though the persona Gemma created was fiction, the pictures she sourced for Jack were of course real, and it stood to reason that somewhere out there, a facsimile of my fake ex-boyfriend would be walking the earth, up until this very moment oblivious to my existence. Now he knows I exist, but he doesn’t know me. He doesn’t know me like “Jack” did, and he’s observing me in a cold, harsh way that makes me cringe right down to my bones. There’s no affection, no recognition, in that gaze.
“What do you mean, how am I here?” he replies shortly. “I live here.”
“What the hell do you mean?” I retort. “I live here.” This is too much. “Where did you come from?”
He’s bewildered. “Excuse me?”
Ruth’s hand touches my shoulder, but I barely register it. She asks if I’m all right (obviously, I am not) at the same time Wesley throws his hands up and announces he doesn’t know what anybody’s talking about. The only thing I can think to do is to pull out my phone. Two texts from Gemma pop up on my screen: Hey you’re late followed a couple hours later by Are you okay? One from Christine: You didn’t clock out before leaving and didn’t receive permission to leave early. Expect to be written up. A missed call and voicemail from Paul, my boss, that I am never going to listen to.
As I scroll through my emails to hunt for the pictures Gemma sent from Jack’s fake email (I used to have the pictures saved on my phone but deleted them months ago), I consider that maybe I’m wrong. I’ve heard about this sort of thing happening: you get hyper-focused on a person and start seeing them everywhere. Wesley might look nothing at all like Jack, but my overworked brain has been wrung out like a sponge after the long day I’ve had, so now I’m hallucinating him into being. The power lines between my eyes and neural pathways have been sawed in half by feral attic raccoons.
Or not.
“Aha!” I thrust my phone at them, triumphant. There he is, in black and white, my very favorite Jack McBride photo. It’s him. It’s him. He has stubble on his jaw now, and he isn’t wearing a black tux like he is in the photo, but I’m right. Oh my absolute god.
Wesley’s gaze lifts slowly to pin on me, monochrome flushing into rich Technicolor. I watch the perturbed thoughts flashing across his beautiful brown eyes like I’m leafing through a picture book. His eyes have no equal, truly. They’re like stones in a riverbed. They’re bronze coins. They’re the leather journal of a sad, sensitive empath who writes poetry about lost lovers—
“Why,” he utters quietly, slicing off my wandering thoughts, “do you have a picture of me at my brother’s wedding?”
“That’s . . . a good question.”
I pause, as though he’s the one who should answer it. “I don’t get this. No one’s supposed to be here. Plus, the house is a mess! What happened to the house? And you’re a groundskeeper? The grounds are a mess, too!” He opens his mouth, the furrow between his eyes deepening, but I rattle on: “I want to know who you are, right now. Are you friends with Gemma Peterson? Were you in on it?”
“In on what?” He’s getting louder, too. “Who’s Gemma?”
“Gemma Peterson!” I have had it. I am done with people messing with me. I tap at my phone furiously until I find Gemma’s Instagram and show it to him.
“Am I supposed to know a Gemma?” Ruth cries in confusion. Wesley shrugs, but then a transformation happens. I watch it click as he recognizes Gemma’s picture.
“That’s the woman from the golf place.”
Ruth and I both say, “What?”
“The golf place. In Pigeon Forge.” His gaze darts past me to Ruth. “I did landscaping for them a while back, Professor Hacker’s Lost Treasure Golf, and that woman”—he points at my screen—“worked there, over a year ago. She kept sneaking her friends in after hours to play golf for free, messing up my work, kicking up the new sod. They fired her for it.”
Gemma smiles up at me from my phone. I can absolutely picture her doing that and the timeline makes sense. She likely came to Around the Mountain Resort & Spa directly on the heels of losing her job at Professor Hacker’s Lost Treasure Golf. I fully get why she’d track down Wesley’s Internet footprint and use him as bait to keep me away from Caleb. Who wouldn’t be lured in by that? He’s gorgeous. She took some liberties developing Jack’s personality, which, again, makes perfect sense. Jack McBride was my type: incredibly outgoing, sociable, ready and waiting to say the right thing. I don’t know Wesley, but so far he doesn’t seem very friendly.
My lips and fingers are numb.
“What does that woman have to do with you having my picture?” Wesley asks.
No way am I spilling the truth. It’s too mortifying. “Never mind. I thought you were someone else.”
“But that doesn’t—”
Maybe if I keep interrupting him, he’ll forget. “You said that you live here, then?” My voice is numb, too. I want to fold myself into a suitcase. I want to transport myself to the moon. I want to be anywhere but here, unraveling in front of him.
“I’ve lived here for a few years,” he returns grudgingly, speaking to a spot of nothing over my shoulder instead of looking at me. “This cabin is for the estate’s groundskeeper. Which, as we’ve established, is me.”
I release a faint, involuntary laugh. “Yes. Which is you.”
To think that this past Christmas, when I mailed Violet a holiday card—as I do every year—and when she read the words Hoping my love life takes a turn for the better in 2021, as in, hopefully Jack and I would get serious about our relationship and move beyond emailing, the man who wears Jack’s face might have been right beside her. The universe is just plain mean sometimes.
My voice is a wheeze. “Small world.”
“I guess?” Wesley rakes an aggravated hand through his hair, eyes tracking up the wall. He’s the most beautiful human I’ve ever seen, and I don’t think he likes me at all. “Listen, I don’t know what’s going on. You’re Violet’s niece? Are you here for something of hers, then?” I didn’t miss the face he made when Ruth introduced me as Julie’s girl. If he knew Violet, then he would’ve heard about my mother. He assumes I’ve come begging for handouts.
“I’m here for the house.” My speech is almost coherent. It’s a proud moment for me.
“You’re here for the . . .” His brows slam down. He turns on Ruth, whose smile wobbles.
“You know, I’ve been preparing for this, and so far it hasn’t gone anything like I’ve practiced,” she tells us with faux cheer. She plunks down on the plaid couch and pats the empty cushion at her right, then the one at her left. “I can explain. Let me first explain that I wasn’t allowed to explain.”