Love, Accidentally Read Free

for?” Corrine said, laughing. “Do you want any more iced tea?”
    “No, I’m good,” Ilsa said.
    “How about staying for dinner? I marinated some salmon earlier. I was going to toss it on the grill with fresh corn and pineapple.”
    “Somehow that sounds so much nicer than the In-N-Out burger I was going to pick up on the way home and eat in the car,” Ilsa said. “So where is Bruce, by the way?”
    Corrine sat up, squinted at her watch, and frowned. “Good question. He went for a run but he should’ve been back by now. Maybe he stopped to get something to drink.”
    “I haven’t seen him in what . . . three weeks?” Ilsa mentally counted. “Remember? Last time I came over he was in Seattle, and the time before that he was working late.” Ilsa adored Bruce; he was the perfect counterpart for her sister. He was easygoing, whereas Corrine could be a worrier, and his spontaneity offset her propensity to overplan. Corrine had homebody tendencies, but since they’d gotten married a year and a half ago, she’d seen him challenge her sister to do things she wouldn’t ordinarily: run a half marathon together, take up golf, and hike their way through Yellowstone National Park.
    Corrine finished off her iced tea and stood up. “He’ll be back any second. Why don’t we open a bottle of wine and fire up the grill?”
    Later Ilsa would think back to that night, and what would stand out wouldn’t be the fact that Bruce hadn’t come home for another hour, by which time Corrine was peering out the window and twisting her new wedding band around and around on her finger, or even that her sister drank three glasses of Pinot Grigio but hardly touched her salmon at dinner.
    What would hit Ilsa with a quick, strong rush that felt like a sucker punch was this realization: Corrine never answered her question about when she knew Bruce was the right guy.

     
    ILSA AND GRIF weren’t in bed when it happened, thank goodness. That would’ve been difficult to forgive. Instead they were in the kitchen of his Manhattan Beach apartment, making dinner for a quiet night in. By now they’d been dating for six weeks, even though it seemed like much longer—maybe because they’d been together almost constantly. During late nights at bars and cafés and languorous weekend mornings, they’d unspooled each other’s histories. Ilsa now knew Grif was afraid of snakes, even harmless little ones—kind of funny, when you considered the fact that he’d once chased after two guys who were trying to break into his car—and that he regretted fighting so much with his brother Jake while growing up. She’d told him about the case of chicken pox that gave her the ugliest third-grade school photo imaginable, and he’d gone with her to meet Corrine and Bruce for drinks. They’d strolled in the park with Fabio, whose leg had healed beautifully, and she’d told him about the dogfight she’d broken up that had created the scars on the back of her right hand. She knew how Grif looked right before he fell asleep at night, and what it felt like to wake up with his warm body fitting around her.
    She was mixing olive oil and red wine vinegar for salad dressing while he opened the oven door and checked on the roasting chicken. The small kitchen was bright and filled with good smells, and Ilsa was just savoring her first sip of Riesling when it happened.
    “Can you hand me those tongs, Elise?” he asked.
    She froze.
    “What?” he said, glancing back at her.
    She set her wineglass down on the counter. “You called me Elise,” she said.
    “I did?”
    She nodded.
    “Sorry,” he said. She handed him the tongs, and he flipped over the chicken, then shut the oven door. “It’s kind of weird,” he said. “They sound alike. Elise. Ilsa.”
    “She was the woman you dated before me?” Ilsa asked, and he nodded.
    “You said you guys were together for a long time,” she said. She took a colander of lettuce to the sink and started rinsing it.