The Fiancée He Forgot Chapter 05
Ethan, let’s break up.
Like a bucket of ice water dumped over his head, the realization finally hit him: Grace was allergic to shellfish. And he had forgotten. Again.
He hurriedly typed:
Sorry, Grace, if you don’t want seafood we’ll go somewhere else. Why can’t we talk about this properly? You have to sulk and threaten a breakup? Since when did you get so unreasonable?
Send.
The response came back: Message not delivered.
His heart lurched, as if a hand had closed around it. A panic he’d never felt before rose from his gut.
Grace had grown up poor, and from a young age she’d learned to be independent and to swallow her feelings.
In front of him, she never made scenes. Never played games. Rarely even lost her temper.
This was the first time she’d ever gotten angry.
And the cost was deleting him from her contacts and calling it off, clean and quick.
Ethan panicked.
He called her immediately. The mechanical voice on the other end ground his heart down into the dirt.
Then, from behind him, a bright, familiar voice piped up, casually possessive:
“Ethan, is Grace all set? I already made the reservation. She’s not still mad at us, is she?”
Claire bounced up and hooked her arm through his in one practiced motion, glancing at his screen.
She saw the message—Let’s break up—and the failed-delivery notification. She paused, then let out a puff of laughter, her voice edged with self-satisfied cleverness.
“What’s this? You two had a fight? Girls, you know—when they’re in love they always sulk like this to get their boyfriends in line.”
“Grace loves you so much. You’re this close to being engaged. There’s no way she’d actually walk away.”
She spread her hands, taking on a smug leave-it-to-me expression.
“All right, all right—as long as you’re picking up the tab tonight, this childhood friend/best-friend of yours will personally go coax her back. I am your matchmaker. What’s this family without me? Grace is just mad at you. She wouldn’t cut off her best friend, too, would she?”
Ethan’s eyes reddened.
He looked down at Claire’s hand on his arm—so natural, so intimate.
Just like all the countless times before, right in front of Grace.
But now it made his skin crawl, as if something filthy were sticking to him.
He jerked his arm away.
“Best friend?”
His voice came out hoarse and low, each word deliberate. “Do you remember? Just a week ago, you said it yourself—Grace is allergic to shellfish. You forgot again?”
The smile froze on Claire’s face.
That face, always so full of subtle superiority, cracked with panic for the first time.
She held her breath guiltily, her voice going soft. “I—I really did forget! You know how much I love seafood. Bringing Grace along just to round out the set—it’s fine, isn’t it? That’s how we always did it before…”
“Besides,” she scrambled on, “you knew she was allergic a week ago, too… and, and you’re the boyfriend, and you didn’t remember either, did you?”
As she spoke, she was fumbling with her phone, drafting and redrafting a long, apologetic message in her usual joking, feigned-innocent tone. She hit send.
A moment later, a clean Message not delivered.
The room went quiet for a beat.
Only then did it fully register for both of them—Grace had deleted them.
Both of them. She didn’t want either of them.
Over the following week, Ethan looked for me like a man possessed.
First he drove down to my hometown in Kentucky.
Flew from Boston to Nashville, rented a car, drove out to the coal country.
That winding, rutted mountain road I’d walked so many times—he finally traveled it himself.