IRL: In Real Life (After Oscar, #1)(71)

The first letter arrived the next day. I found it sitting on the freshly polished front hall table after getting home from visiting Mom at the hospital. The house was spotless, the scent of banana bread drifting in from the kitchen. It was heavenly.

I didn’t realize who the letter was from at first, only that it was handwritten which meant it wasn’t likely junk mail. I slid it into my back pocket and forgot about it until I got ready for bed that night.

I opened it, expecting maybe a handwritten note from a neighbor offering a casserole or something, and was shocked to see it was signed by Wells.



Dear Conor,

I know you said not to text you, so I decided to try contacting you this way in the hope you could simply choose not to open it if you didn’t want to hear what I had to say. First of all, the most important thing is an apology. I discovered the first morning of our initial meeting that you wore the same tie as my sexy texter. Once I realized it was you, I was afraid to tell you in fear you’d hold it against me during the negotiations. And… there was something about NotSam that I couldn’t resist. I should have cut the texts off then, but I wasn’t strong enough. I wanted what I had with NotSam—the easy conversation, the steamy connection, the late-night confessions. It was the first time in a very long while I didn’t feel so alone.

But all of that means I was selfish, pure and simple. I didn’t tell you because if I did, I’d lose something precious. Which is ridiculous since I ended up losing it anyway. I’m so very sorry for hurting you, Conor. You deserve better than a man who would keep that from you. You deserve someone who will always put you above all others, including himself.

You asked me in our texts what my name was, and I told you it was Trace. That’s the name my mother always called me. There’s something about a child’s connection to his mother that makes her special name for him more… real somehow. As if she, more than anyone in the world, knows the real person beneath all masks.

But I didn’t tell you a funny story about the name. When I was very young, maybe four or five, my mother took me overseas to her hometown of Andorra la Vella between Spain and France. While we were there, every time my mother introduced me to someone new, they commented ‘Très adorable.’ I didn’t speak French, nor did I realize until years later that ‘Trace’ had come from the Spanish ‘tres’ since I was the third Wellington Grange. Meanwhile, I came home from that trip thinking my middle name was adorable. Whenever someone called me Wellington Archibald Grange the Third, I’d pout and correct them. “I am très adorable!”

On that note, I’ll say au revoir. Je suis très désolé. Tu occupes toutes mes pensées,

Wells/Trace



After looking up the French phrases to discover they meant “I’m very sorry” and “you are in all my thoughts,” I almost caved and texted him. But to what end? I really was too tired to even put two thoughts together. And I had approximately six hours before I had to be back at the shop in the morning. A broken heart over someone I’d basically known all of five minutes simply couldn’t take priority over my mother and the businesses I was attempting to keep afloat.

I was asleep before I even thought to take the rest of my clothes off.

The following day brought more chaos at work, but that didn’t mean I didn’t think long and hard about the letter and gesture of help from Wells.

Every time I thought about him—which was at least a billion times a minute—my chest ached with such acute pain that I’d considered asking one of the doctors at the hospital if there was something physically wrong with me. It didn’t seem possible that heartache could be so literal. But it was.

“Excuse me, do you work here?”

I looked up from where I’d been paying some bills to see an older gentleman and a boy about nine years old standing at the open door to my tiny office in the back of the shop.

“Sorry, sir. Yes, I work here. Do you need help?”

“I’m looking for a basic chess set for my grandson here, and the lady up front was busy helping all the customers in line. I hate to bother you…”

I smiled at him. “It’s no bother, and I have a couple different ones I’d love to show you. My grandfather taught me how to play chess too,” I admitted. It brought back some warm memories that helped pass the next couple of busy hours in the shop before I took a long lunch break to visit Mom in the hospital.

When I got to her room later that afternoon, I told her about the pair. “They reminded me of Pop and me,” I said, settling in and unwrapping the sandwiches I’d picked up. I told her about my day at the shop while we ate. I was glad to see her appetite had picked up a little and her coloring was better.

“I heard from Deborah Hines earlier this morning,” Mom said when I stopped talking long enough for her to get a word in edgewise.

I glanced up at her. “I don’t know who that is. Someone at the university?”

She shook her head. “She’s Wells Grange’s assistant in New York.”

The sound of his name churned the food in my stomach. “Oh. Deb. Yeah. Is um… is everything okay with… ah, everything?”

Mom’s face turned serious, and she reached out a hand for mine. “She needed to confirm some contact information, which was odd in and of itself. But she also mentioned during the conversation that they were able to structure the deal in a way that allows me to get on Grange’s health insurance plan if I needed better health insurance. Theirs is supposedly some top-of-the-line plan heads above what I have through the university. And she also said they could add you to it. Which… doesn’t make much sense since you don’t really work for me.”