The One That Got Away

by Melissa Pimentel

Genres: Family Life; Women's Fiction

Synopsis

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of The One That Got Away by Melissa Pimentel, read by Suzanne Pirret and Max Bennett.

Ruby and Ethan were perfect for each other. Until the day they suddenly weren't.

Ten years later, Ruby's single, having spent the last decade focusing on her demanding career and hectic life in Manhattan. There's barely time for a trip to England for her little sister's wedding. And there's certainly not time to think about seeing Ethan there for the first time in years.

But as the family frantically prepare for the big day, Ruby can't help but wonder if she made the right choice all those years ago? Because there's nothing like a wedding for stirring up the past . . .

Release date: August 22, 2017

Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

Print pages: 400

Sample

Now


It was a Monday night. The remains of a chicken Caesar salad were congealing gently on the side of my desk, and the mug of coffee next to my elbow—my fifth of the day—was now cold. I looked at the tiny clock at the edge of my screen: 9:23 p.m. There was no way I was getting out of here before midnight.

“Do you need anything?” I looked up to see Jennifer, the assistant I shared with the other account directors, standing in front of me. She’d arrived with the apple-cheeked, milk-fed look of a woman who had wandered in straight from the farm (even if, in her case, that farm was Yale). Now, after only a few weeks with us, her skin had already taken on the vitamin-D deficient pallor of someone unfamiliar with daylight. I felt a twinge of guilt: she was like a sweet little lamb being slowly, methodically sheared by the city.

“No, I’m all set, thanks.” I looked at her more closely. She was wearing lipstick. Red lipstick. “Are you going out tonight?” I asked.

“No!” she said, nervously fiddling with the gold chain around her neck. “I mean, sort of. I had plans or whatever, but I can stay here as long as you need me.”

She was wearing a dress, too, a floral tea dress that suited her tiny waist. It was definitely a date. “Don’t worry about me,” I said. “I don’t need you to stick around, honest. What time are your plans?”

She shifted her weight to her other foot and tried to look casual. “Um, twenty minutes ago?”

“Then what are you still doing here? Go!” I said, shooing her away.

Her eyes widened, her mouth breaking into a wide grin. “Are you sure?”

“Absolutely.”

“Oh my God, thank you!” she said, scrambling around her desk and gathering her bag. “I really, really appreciate it. I’ll be in super early tomorrow morning, I promise.”

“Relax, you’re fine. I’m off for the rest of the week, but I’ll be on email all the time, so just drop me a line if there are any major fires. Hopefully I’ll wrap most things up tonight.”

Jennifer hesitated. “You’re sure you don’t need me? I don’t mind staying, really.” Half of her body was already out the door.

“I know, but I’m fine. Really.”

“Okay, well … have a good trip! Let me know if you need anything!”

“I will. And Jen?”

“Yes?”

“You look great.”

She beamed at me and slipped out the door. I heard her heels clacking down the stairwell and the sound of the fire-exit door swing open and clang decisively shut.

I sighed and turned back to one of my many color-coded spreadsheets. I was working on a major new digital campaign for Spike, a low-cost airline that had been plagued with a myriad of health and safety scandals recently: salmonella in a batch of their in-flight meals, child harnesses that snapped when tested, and one particular incident where a marauding band of mice chewed through a nest of wiring during a flight to San Jose. We were rebranding them as the “Airline of Adventure,” complete with GoPro footage of various lunatics jumping off buildings and abseiling down crevasses. Because surely, at this point, it was only those lunatics who would willingly board one of their rickety planes.

Regardless of my thoughts on the ethics of fudging airline safety, the Spike business was a huge slice of the BlueFly budget, and it was essential that the campaign went off without a hitch. As a result, I’d been pulling sixteen-hour days for the past three weeks, taking phone calls from the nervous CEO late into the night and early in the morning. One of my eyes had developed a twitch a week ago, and now that twitch had a twitch. And, of course, with the worst possible timing, I had to take a week’s vacation to travel to the north of England because my sister had insisted on getting married in a castle (which, if you’d met Piper, wouldn’t come as much of a surprise). And to add insult to injury, my ex-boyfriend would be there, too. Trust Piper to marry the best friend of the one man I never wanted to see again. And at this rate, I wouldn’t even have time to wax my legs before I left.

My phone flashed up with a message.

Are you bailing on me tomorrow?

It was my best friend Jess, who had defected to the wilds of New Jersey two years ago with her husband and baby son, and who I had since managed to visit a grand total of three times. I know, I know, I’m a terrible friend. Something Jess hasn’t held back on telling me. Another text flashed up.

Let me rephrase that. DO NOT BAIL ON ME TOMORROW. You do not want to piss off a pregnant lady because I will crush you.

I’d promised her I’d swing by her place on the way to the airport the following morning, but had, in all honesty, already been planning to make my excuses and spend the morning in the office. But seeing her text messages, I knew I was toast.

Of course I’m still coming! Can’t wait. Xxx

I placed the phone back on the desk and turned back to my spreadsheets. I saw the phone flash up again from the corner of my eye.

You’re a liar but I love you. Let me know what train you’re on and Noah and I will meet you. X

I took a sip of cold coffee and grimaced. Midnight, I thought to myself. I won’t stay any later than midnight.

* * *

I woke up to the mechanized chirrup of crickets.

My eyes stuttered open and I fumbled in the dark until my fingers curled around my phone: 6:33 a.m. I let out a plaintive moan. I thought about closing my eyes again, letting sleep pull me gently back under, but the little blue envelope on my iPhone had an angry red number hovering above it: fifty-seven new unread emails. The Shanghai office had been busy overnight. I tapped with a reluctant index finger and scanned through a series of minor and major disasters that would need rectifying, and felt my chest tighten with each swipe.

6:37. Time to get up. I swung my legs over the side of the bed and suddenly regretted my decision to take an Ambien last night. I shielded my eyes from the sun, now streaming through the window, and sat for a moment while I made a mental calculation of what I had to do today: gym, train, Jessica, plane. England. The ex. I let out another groan and glanced down at my pillow longingly.

I forced myself onto my feet. I had a 7 a.m. training session this morning, and Jeff would make me do extra burpees if I was late. Tuesday at 7 a.m. had been spent with Jeff for three and a half years now, ever since I had tried to squeeze myself into a dress I used to wear back in college and couldn’t get it past my knees. All the days and nights spent at the desk had caught up with me, and the only solution was to subject myself to twice-weekly punishment sessions with Jeff, and frequent pre-dawn runs along the river. It was brutal. It was endless. It was, it appeared, the routine I would be following for the rest of my life. Why couldn’t exercise be like money, or Starbucks points, where you could amass a stockpile and then spend it gradually over time for the rest of your life? Instead, I found that if I took even a week off, my lungs reverted to their previous flaccid state, and my ass started inching toward the backs of my knees. And so, onward I fought.

I padded into the bathroom and flicked on the light, wincing slightly before switching it back off again. Brushing my teeth in the dark felt safer and more humane. Face washed and hair tied up in a fresh ponytail, I pulled on the gym clothes I’d left carefully folded for myself the night before, and scooped some coffee grains into the French press. I glanced up at the clock hanging above the range. 6:48: two minutes to spare. I straightened the covers and double-checked that I had everything I needed for the trip, including the lurid green monstrosity that Piper had decided was the maid of honor dress. I was going straight to the station after the gym and couldn’t afford to come all the way back to the apartment for an errant shoe.

Dress, shoes, make-up, Ambien all accounted for, I had a quick last look around the apartment before heading out the door. It was a tiny studio, but it was all my own—the first place I’d been able to afford by myself in the city. There comes a time in a person’s life when, if single, one should live on one’s own, mainly because the only possible roommates available to one are the deranged and mentally diseased. The commute from Bay Ridge—where I’d lived for the past seven years, ever since I moved out of the place I’d shared with Jess in Sunset Park—had been brutal, but not as brutal as the feeling of being the oldest, and lamest, person in the neighborhood. When Len, the grizzled old bartender at McDougall’s, was replaced by a smirking twenty-three-year-old wearing a Hypercolor tank top, I went home, prepared a financial spreadsheet, and called a real estate broker: I would move to Manhattan, where I would be poor but would at least feel young. (I felt more poor than young, but it was still worth it.)

The new place, nestled in an old tenement building in the East Village, was tiny and extortionately priced, but I could afford it (barely) thanks to my recent promotion to account director. It was beautiful—all exposed bricks and high ceilings—and I’d been slowly replacing my old Ikea furniture with purposely distressed vintage pieces that had originally been bought at a garage sale in Michigan and resold at a tremendous mark-up to city rubes like me. I was fine with this.

I tore down the stairs and burst onto the street. It was a beautiful morning: the sky was a faultless blue, the day’s inevitable mugginess had yet to descend, and the street sweepers had already come through, so the road wasn’t littered with the previous night’s detritus of beer bottles and vomit. I sipped my coffee on the way, and listened to the quiet rhythms of the city waking up: the metal shutters sliding open, the pails of water being tossed onto the sidewalk, the quiet tick of town car engines cooling as they waited for their breakfasting businessmen. I walked into the gym, the familiar smell of sweat, chlorine, and overpriced air freshener welcoming me. 6:59 on the nose.

A large, muscular man with a head shaped like a triangle and a sadistic grin stood up when I walked through the door: Jeff.

“Morning, Ruby,” he said. “Ready for the pain?”

“Not really,” I said, but it didn’t matter—it was going to happen anyway.

I sweated my way through the usual series of increasingly grueling and bizarre exercises, Jeff standing over me and occasionally bellowing what he thought was encouragement, but would more accurately be classified as harassment. “Lower! Deeper! Faster! Harder!” he said, over and over. Taken out of context, it would sound as if he were directing fringe porn. I squeezed my eyes shut and thought about the coffee and bagel that awaited me at the end of this, and considered, not for the first time, the irony of working out this hard in order to maintain some semblance of the body I’d had at nineteen, when my diet had consisted entirely of Cheetos, Diet Coke, slices of processed cheese, and cheap vodka. I pushed the thought out of my head and did another rep. This is about being strong and healthy, I told myself, not about being thin. (Okay, it was a little bit about being thin.)

In addition to allowing me to eat a guilt-free bagel, exercise helped temporarily to dislodge the tight knot of anxiety that had nestled itself in my breastbone—like a tiny, fluttering baby bird with an extremely sharp beak—ever since the promotion. With every squat thrust, it flew higher and lighter until, by the end of the hour, I couldn’t feel it at all. Today it was particularly useful, considering the amount of pre-travel/wedding/family/ex-boyfriend anxiousness pressing firmly on my shoulders.

“One more circuit and we’re done,” Jeff said, idly flexing a bicep in the mirror as I began yet another set of weighted lunges. I suppressed the urge to thwack him over the head with a kettlebell.

Workout done, shower taken, and personage assembled, I made my way to the subway, wheeled suitcase dragging noisily behind. The city had stretched its limbs and was fully awake now, and I had to shoulder through a crowd lined up outside a bakery, all desperate to get their hands on a freshly baked cronut despite the fact that no one in the city ate gluten anymore (except me). I dodged a woman struggling to free her stiletto from a subway grate, a vagrant pushing a shopping cart full of dismembered mannequins, and a squall of hungover-looking college students before descending into Second Avenue station.

The subway was, as ever, a minefield of smells and sounds and strangers’ limbs. I normally avoided the subway—the BlueFly office was within walking distance—but there was no way I could walk the thirty-plus blocks across town to Penn Station, and a cab would take twice as long to snake its way through the morning traffic snarls. I pushed my way onto a busy F train, enraging everyone in the vicinity by having a suitcase with me during rush hour, and let my face arrange itself into its Don’t Fuck With Me expression (a mix of boredom, stand-offishness, and vague menace). I found a (hopefully) non-living place to hold on, and spent the next twenty minutes scrolling through my iPhone—thirteen new emails had come in during my gym session—and trying to ignore the truly appalling stench coming from the man next to me. I stole a glance at him: he looked normal, handsome even—fortyish, with an appealing shock of salt and pepper hair and wearing a good suit—but he smelled like he’d rolled around in a mix of garlic and wet dog hair.

I looked at him again, more closely this time. There was something familiar about him … maybe I’d worked with him before? Did he go to my gym? And then I remembered: I’d swapped a few messages with him on OkCupid the month before. We’d even arranged a date, but I’d had to cancel at the last minute because of a work emergency. I felt his eyes on me and stared hard at my phone. Please don’t recognize me, I prayed silently. Please, garbage man, leave me in peace.

“THIRTY-FOURTH STREET, HERALD SQUARE!” The conductor’s voice crackled across the loudspeaker and I pushed my way through the door and onto the platform, leaving a wake of disgruntled tsks as I pulled my suitcase off behind me. The doors started to close and garbage man locked eyes with me, a look of recognition written across his face. I looked away and the doors clanged shut behind me, whizzing him up to 42nd Street. I smiled to myself as I lugged the suitcase up the stairs: another tiny victory won.

I emerged from the station and began my cross-town journey on foot. The heat of the summer had started to press down on New York like a thumb, and by the time I walked into Penn Station, sweat had begun to trickle down my back.

“Can I interest you in free highlights? Our brand-new salon has just opened…” “Free sample of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Chocolate! The first chocolate substitute made entirely of beetroot!” “Half-price tickets to the Knicks!” I hustled my way past the tourists and ticket touts and promoters pressing leaflets into any passing hand. There was a time when I would have taken the handsome man up on his offer of a free haircut, but experience had taught me the hard way that by “new salon” he meant a back-alley joint in Chinatown where they would bleach my hair orange and charge me $110 to fix it. That is the thing about New York: its beautiful, maddening essence. No one gets anything for free here. You have to work for it.

I hurried down the long, curved, white corridor, flying past Nathan’s and the souvenir stands and the bookshop stacked high with the latest pulpy bestseller. The floors were now scattered with the detritus of the morning commute: splashes of coffee splattered on the polished concrete, along with flimsy paper bags that had held now-eaten croissants and egg sandwiches, an abandoned sports section lying limply on a nearby bench. The rush had ended, and an echoey calm had fallen on the station. I saw my train listed on the board—the 6929 to Millburn—and headed toward the platform. I was early, so I stopped at a bagel cart on the way and ordered a whole-wheat bagel (cream cheese on the side) and a coffee (black).

I was furiously blowing on the scalding coffee when something caught my eye: staring out at me from the magazine rack was none other than my ex-boyfriend, his face smiling smugly out from the cover of TechCrunch magazine. “Can Ethan Bailey Save the World?” the headline asked, as if specifically designed to annoy me. “I’m guessing not,” I muttered as I pulled a copy from the rack and slapped it down on the counter.

“Four dollars,” said the unsmiling man, hand outstretched. I peeled off the bills and shoved the magazine deep into my bag, where I could feel it throbbing, and then headed off to catch my train.

The Morris and Essex line is a miniature socio-economic tour of the Greater New York area. I stared out of the window as we chuntered through Chelsea, speeding past the boutique shops and expensive cocktail bars, out past the High Line and over the Hudson River into New Jersey. Through Hoboken and into a sea of squat industrial parks dotted with billboards advertising strip clubs and loan sharks and auto-body shops until the first ad for West Elm appeared and you knew you were out in the suburbs.

I finished off the last bit of bagel and pulled the magazine out of my bag, holding it gingerly between thumb and forefinger as though it might be radioactive. Which it sort of was, at least to me. The coffee I’d gulped down made an unwelcome reappearance in my esophagus. I leaned in and inspected the photograph. He hadn’t changed at all. If anything, he was now better looking. He had the confident sheen of wealth shining out of every pore, and had obviously used some of his apparently now-vast fortune to have his teeth straightened and whitened. His dark hair was slightly shorter, but still curled around his temples, and his eyes were the same greenish-gold I remembered. Yes, it was definitely him: a beacon of success, heralded the world over as the designer of a generation, and presumably described as one of the city’s most eligible bachelors somewhere in the article. At least he was still a bachelor the last time I’d allowed myself to Google him (once every two months, no more) following his split from some leggy fashion editor.

I skimmed the article, which contained the word “genius” so many times I seriously considered sending a thesaurus to the sub-editor, and allowed myself to stare at the accompanying photographs for exactly four minutes. There he was with the late Steve Jobs, arm tossed jovially around his shoulder as they grinned out at the camera in matching turtlenecks. Now he was at the Met gala, aforementioned leggy fashion editor wrapped around him like a baby monkey on a tree branch. And finally, there was a picture of him with his business partner, arms slung around each other’s shoulders and smiling at each other as if they both couldn’t believe their luck.

I couldn’t believe it, either. If you had told me ten years ago that Ethan would end up designing one of the most used and best loved apps of all time, I would have laughed in your face. Actually, first I would have asked what an app was, and then I would have laughed in your face.

I closed the magazine and shoved it back in my bag. You know that feeling when you put coin after coin into a slot machine without winning a single penny, only to walk away and watch the next person who drops a quarter in win the jackpot? That was the feeling that I had been living with for the past seven years, ever since Ethan’s face appeared in Wired in an article entitled “Rising Stars.” I drank half a bottle of vodka with Jess that night, eventually setting fire to the magazine and placing it in a garbage can in what Jess had promised would be a “cleansing ritual,” but which ended up just melting the (plastic) garbage can to the living room carpet and resulted in a serious deduction from our security deposit.

The trees whizzed by as the train sped deeper into New Jersey. I closed my eyes and leaned against the window, head knocking rhythmically against the pane as the train clicked over the tracks. Tomorrow, I would see him again—the first time in nearly ten years. What could I possibly say to him? Would he even talk to me? What if he still had feelings for me? Or, worse, what if he didn’t? I swatted the thought from my mind like an errant fly. The man opposite caught my eye and gave me a friendly smile. He was dressed in a suit, but the edges of his cuffs were frayed and his collar slightly yellowed, and he had the harried look of a man teetering on the brink. I looked back at the whizzing trees, which were thinning slowly and being replaced by identikit clapboard houses and the occasional strip mall. What if I still loved him after all this time? What the hell was I supposed to do then?

“NEXT STOP, MILLBURN!”

I bumped my suitcase down the steps and onto the platform, waving away the frayed man’s offers to help. It was deserted at this time of day, and I felt strangely criminal being outside the confines of the city and out in the open on a weekday morning. I blinked into the bright sunshine before pulling my phone out of my bag and scrolling through my emails: no major disasters, thankfully. I breathed a small sigh of relief and headed out of the station.

“Ruby! Over here!” I heard Jess’s voice before I saw her, standing by an enormous silver SUV and waving her arms maniacally despite the fact that she was the only person in the parking lot. A smile burst onto my face and I broke into a run.

Jess wrapped me in a hug. “Thank God you made it—I was worried you’d get lost or something!” She was pregnant—heavily pregnant—but she was still all long limbs and blonde hair, though the peroxide had been replaced by more honeyed tones, and her limbs were swathed in a pair of leggings and an expensive-looking maternity tunic. She looked like a glowing, glorious little egg. It was strange to imagine a tiny person swimming around inside her, all tiny fingernails and nose and presumably tiny internal organs squashed inside. It made me feel a little nauseous to think about it. Babies are miracles, sure, but sometimes the specifics veer a little too close to science fiction for comfort.

“Jess, I’m thirty-two years old and I was at your house three months ago—how could I have got lost?” I peered through the back window and waved at Jess’s two-and-a-half-year-old son, Noah. He gave me a long, wary look from his car seat in return. Children are like bears: they can smell fear.

I hauled my suitcase into the trunk and climbed into the passenger seat. The soundtrack to Frozen was playing on the stereo and Jess shot me an apologetic smile as she pulled out of the parking lot. “He’s obsessed,” she said, nodding toward Noah. “It’s all he’ll let us listen to. I keep trying to introduce other things to him, but he’s not buying it. The other day I put on Pharrell because another mom told me she’d used it to break her daughter’s Frozen addiction, but he just screamed the whole way through. Didn’t you, buddy?” Noah let out a triumphant shout from the back seat, and she rolled her eyes. “So for now, we’re stuck with Elsa and that snowman guy until we can stage an effective intervention. Sorry.”

“I’m actually kind of into it,” I said. This was a slightly gray shade of the truth: I’d taken myself to see Frozen on a particularly dark day back in January and had found myself sobbing uncontrollably during “Let It Go,” much to the horror of the multitude of dads who had been shooed out of their homes for the afternoon to take their children to see it for the tenth time. The experience had been mildly cathartic, but not one I was particularly keen on replicating. I’d been struck by waves of retrospective humiliation for weeks, usually while in client meetings.

We cruised into downtown Millburn, which felt more like a 1950s simulacrum of a town than an actual place. “I feel like I’m in a tank,” I said as we drove past a succession of coffee shops, children’s clothing boutiques, and ye olde candy stores. The SUV was a few feet off the ground and made everything—the other cars, the neat rows of shops, the moms pushing their kids along the street in strollers—look puny and vulnerable, like the plastic figurines lining the toy store window.

“I know,” Jess said, “it’s a little ridiculous, but Noah generates so much stuff. The kid is like a pack mule. Plus it’s great for when the in-laws are in town.”

We pulled into the driveway, stopping just short of a Radio Flyer tricycle that had been abandoned in front of the garage. The house, a three-bed that Jess and her husband had bought two years ago, was a dove-gray Cape with daffodil trim. There was a wraparound porch with a trellis on which ivy climbed, and flowerboxes along the railings and on the windowsills. It looked exactly like a dollhouse I’d had as a kid, and I was always surprised when I walked inside and discovered that the furniture was real sized, not miniature. The yard was dotted with Noah’s various toys, including a wooden Peter Pan house and a tiny cherry-red car, and I took a moment to marvel at the idea of leaving stuff out in the open and not worrying about it being stolen.

“Your house continues to be sickeningly perfect,” I said, shutting the car door and gazing up at the whitewashed shutters and neat slate roof.

“It’s a little small, but it does the job. We just had the lawn reseeded, and Ben is obsessed with watering it. As soon as he gets home from work, he’s out there with a hose and a magnifying glass, checking on his sproutage. We’ll need more space soon, though,” she said, idly stroking her swollen stomach. “This is just a starter home, really.”

I murmured something noncommittal and smiled. Noah was only three feet tall, and the baby would be the size of a volleyball when it was born: did they really need more than three bedrooms? It seemed that as soon as someone turned thirty, they suddenly needed at least three times the amount of space previously required, regardless of how many children they had or how many things they owned. Square footage, front- and backyards, his and hers sinks—everyone seemed to be in the grip of their own personal Manifest Destiny. I thought about my cozy studio, everything tucked neatly into its rightful place: surely, at a push, Noah and the baby could fit in there? Maybe they could each sleep in a drawer, like an illustration from a children’s book. Not that I wanted to test out the theory. First of all, it would be kidnapping. Second, they would definitely get drool over my sweaters, which would be gross.

Jess unhooked Noah from his seat and he flopped forward onto her shoulder. I saw her stagger slightly against his weight and rushed to help. “Do you want me to carry him?” I asked.

Jess waved me away. “I’m like an ox these days. You should see my biceps—I could win strongman competitions. Ben keeps saying that he’s going to sell me to the circus. Now, are you hungry? I’ve got some stuff in the fridge I could throw together for a salad, and I baked some cookies this morning. Oooh, and Ben brought back these amazing salted caramel truffles the other night—you have to try one. Let me just get this little guy settled and I’ll make some coffee.”

Noah ran ahead into the kitchen, shouting something indecipherable and punctuating each statement with a loud whimpering noise. I looked at Jess for a translation.

“He’s hungry,” she said, hurrying after him. “We’re late for his lunch.”

I stayed back in the hallway for a moment, breathing in expensive cedar-scented candles and freshly baked cookies, undercut by the faintly sour smell of often-spilled milk. There were pairs of shoes lined up neatly by the door; I slipped mine off and placed them next to Ben’s neon-green running sneakers. The air settled around me, the dust motes sparkling in the late-morning sun streaming through the window. The inside of the house was as beautiful as the outside, all polished hardwood floors and walls painted in tastefully muted colors. There was a framed wedding photo sitting on the mantelpiece over the little brick fireplace, next to a photo of Jess looking exhausted but deliriously beautiful, holding a newborn Noah to her chest. There was an old wine crate full of toys tucked into the corner of the room, and the coffee table was stacked with Early Reader books. I felt like an alien that had been unexpectedly beamed onto the surface of an unfamiliar planet.

In the kitchen, Jess was assembling a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with military precision. She cut off the crusts, sliced it into long, thin fingers, and placed it on a plastic plate featuring the cartoon face of a lion. I watched from the doorway for a minute and was struck, as I always was by these little domestic tableaux in which Jess now starred, by both a violent, primordial jealousy and a desire to run screaming out of the house in order to take deep lungfuls of clean, free air. The flight instinct was usually the more dominant.

“Lunchtime, buddy!” Jess placed the plate on the tray of his high chair and gave his hair a light tousle.

Noah took one look at lunch and started to whimper. “Jiffy! Jiffy!” he cried.

“Okay, sweetie, I’ll get it.” Jess took another plastic plate fr