She Catfished Him With My Face, So This Time He Is Mine novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: No Thank You
Reborn at Brooke's brunch, Leah refuses Dean in front of the table and leaves. As she goes, Miles walks in and stops in front of her.
Brooke held her phone up over the brunch table and said, "Smile, you two, this is going in the story."
Dean Carrow laid his arm along the back of my chair.
The restaurant was on the harbor, packed on a Saturday, and every table near ours had gone quiet to listen.
A moment earlier I had been on a delivery table, with a monitor going flat and Brooke's voice somewhere in the hall saying, "She'll be fine, come to me."
Then I was sitting on a patio chair with a mimosa sweating in front of me.
My belly was flat.
My hands were warm and whole.
I knew this table. I knew this exact morning. Dean was about to say that he'd heard so much about me.
"I've heard so much about you, Leah," Dean said.
His voice was easy and low. In my first life I had married that voice.
"Isn't he perfect?" Brooke said, still filming. "I told you. He's Miles's best friend. If you two get together, the four of us can have brunch every Saturday for the rest of our lives."
She laughed and squeezed my wrist.
Brooke Tanner had been my best friend since our first week of college. She had held my hair back at nineteen and driven four hours when my mother died.
I had trusted her with everything.
On the table my phone lit up with a draft I'd been typing to my dad, a joke about the ferry galley and its coffee.
Brooke leaned over and tilted my phone toward her own.
"Oh, that's too good. Hold still." She took a picture of my screen. "I'm sending that to the group chat. You're so funny, you don't even know it."
She had done that for two years, I thought. Every joke. Every voice note. Every midnight rant I sent her when a shift went bad.
I had thought it was friendship.
Dean smiled at the camera.
"Brooke tells me you haven't dated anyone in three years," he said. "That you cry about it."
I looked at Brooke.
"I never said that."
"Babe, you did, in March, you were upset." She waved her phone at the people at the next table, who were watching openly now. "It's okay. Nobody here is judging you. You're so shy, I just want you happy."
Her eyes were wet and kind.
Her thumb was still on the red record button.
Dean reached for my hand. "I'd love to take you out tonight. Brooke said you'd say yes."
"You can trust me," Brooke said. "I would never set you up with someone who wasn't right for you."
I remembered the last thing Dean ever did while I was in labor.
He stood in the hospital hallway with his eyes on his phone, reading a text from Brooke, and left before the doctors reached me.
I took my hand out from under his.
"No," I said.
Dean's smile stayed where it was. "Sorry?"
"No, thank you, Dean. I'm not going out with you tonight or any night."
"Leah." Brooke laughed, a little too high. "You're embarrassing him."
"You told a man I cry about being single. You told him I'd say yes. And you're filming it." I held out my palm. "Delete the video."
"It's a story. It's twenty seconds."
"Delete it now, Brooke, in front of me."
A woman at the next table had stopped pretending to eat.
Brooke looked at her phone, then at me, then at Dean. She pressed the screen.
"There," she said. "Gone. God, you're in a mood."
I did not believe it was gone.
I took two twenties out of my wallet and put them under my glass.
Dean said, "Come on, don't be dramatic."
I didn't answer him.
So I stood up.
My chair scraped on the stone, and the whole patio watched me pick up my bag.
"Leah, sit down, you're being silly," Brooke said. "Miles is about to walk in. He's parking the car. You'll love him, I swear."
The door chimed behind me.
I turned around.
A tall man in a linen shirt stopped just inside, with sun in his sandy hair and a car key still in his hand.
Brooke was already out of her chair, arms open, laughing. "There he is."
Miles Radford did not look at her.
His eyes went across the patio, over Dean and the camera and the people watching, and landed on my hands.
He walked straight past Brooke's open arms and stopped in front of me.
"You have a scar on your left thumb," he said. "From a mandoline."
Behind him, Brooke's smile stopped moving.
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