Four Weddings and a Baby by Jessie Newton

Author:Jessie Newton [Newton, Jessie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: JEN Publishing

Chapter Twenty-One

I’m invoking the First Rights of Refusal to talk about Shad.

Robin gasped at Kelli’s text and immediately reached for her phone. Never mind that she had strawberry jelly up to her knuckles. Phones washed, didn’t they?

“Shoot, no,” she said as the first smear of sticky stuff went across the screen. “Mandie, come finish these sandwiches.”

Her oldest daughter got off the couch with a sigh. “I don’t even like peanut butter.”

“Then make what you do like,” Robin said, stepping over to the sink. She quickly washed her hands and returned to her phone. She carefully wiped the jam off the screen to find that nearly everyone had responded already. Her heart pounded, because Robin hated missing things.

No way, Alice had said. I was going to do that for Arthur!

Wow, Kelli, Eloise said.

I won’t ask you anything about him, Kristen said.

What’s this First Rights of Refusal you speak of? Laurel had asked.

“That means you have something to say,” Robin muttered as she typed. She hit send right as Alice started to explain their ritual of calling the right to refuse talking about a topic. Only one of them could invoke the right at a time, which meant Alice would talk about Arthur today if she was forced to.

Robin didn’t like forcing her friends to tell her things they didn’t want to. She did like being in the know, and she disliked feeling left out.

No, Kelli said. It means I don’t want to answer a million questions a million times.

Just answer one then, AJ said. How are things going with him?

“She won’t answer that,” Robin said, watching as a couple more texts flashed on her screen.

You mean I could’ve just invoked this right not to say anything all this time?? Laurel asked, complete with the double question marks. Robin laughed out loud, because she did love having Laurel as a friend. She was level-headed and smart, and she’d experienced truly hard things in her life. Robin really related to people who’d worked hard to get where they were, and that fit Laurel to a T.

Sure enough, Kelli didn’t say anything else in the text string, while Alice, Laurel, El, and Kristen went back and forth in speculation about why Kelli would invoke this right. It was AJ who finally said, Enough, guys. Leave her alone.

Robin turned back to the spread of food on the kitchen island and sighed. “Ready?” she asked Mandie just as she put the top on a ham and cheese sandwich. “Is there room for that in the cooler?”

“Yep.” Mandie smiled and put the ham sandwich on top of everything else Robin had packed into the cooler. “Did you get the shade?”

“Dad put it in the van for me before he left.” Robin smiled at her daughter. They’d survived an entire month with Duke gone, and she could admit that the days had passed in a blur of activities, lists, phone calls, and five events in only four weeks’ time. “I’ll see if I can lift this.”

She’d purposely not

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