Beautiful Mistake

We’ll call it one, and we’re even. But can I cash that one in today, if you’re feeling up to it?

I’d forgotten Caine had asked me to cover his class this afternoon. I was working the day shift, but Charlie wouldn’t mind if I left a little early. Late afternoon was always dead anyway

Ummm, Ava, we should go out the front. He’s standing at the back door now.”

She looked around the room. “No, he’s at the front door talking to Sal, the new waiter.”

She was more wasted than I thought. I lifted my chin toward the rear exit, a straight line to Owen. “That’s the back door, Ava.”

“I know. Owen’s at the front door.”

I furrowed my brow. “Isn’t that Owen? With the blue button-up shirt?”

She drunk-snorted. “I said he was the good-looking guy in the blue shirt, not the Greek god modeling one.”

My head whipped to the front of the bar. There was only one guy near the front door who I didn’t know, and he was talking to Sal. “Owen is talking to the new waiter right now?”

She looked again and then sighed and nodded. “I should tell Sal to punch him.”

“Ava—the guy talking to Sal right now, right at this moment, is Owen?”

“Yes.”

“His shirt is brown, Ava. Not blue.”

She turned again toward the front door, squinted, and shrugged. “Maybe. I can’t see so good. My contacts are all smudgy from my makeup and crying.”

When she’d said her ex had just walked into the bar and pointed in the general direction of the front door, there’d been only one guy with a blue button-up on.

Shit.

I’d told off the wrong guy.

Since I couldn’t very well make Ava leave through the front door where the real Owen was standing, I sucked it up. Of course, Not Owen had his eye on

But when I slipped into the church, I found her kneeling in a pew near the confessional.