Save the Date by Mary Kay Andrews Page A

flirtation. The next thing he knew, she’d moved into the Macon Street cottage with him. The one closet in the house was jammed with her stuff—not that Jack was exactly a snappy dresser, but it would have been good to have a hanger for his one decent pair of khakis and dress shirt.
    In the beginning, it had all been good times. Zoey was great to look at, fun to be with, and yeah, the sex wasn’t bad either. She termed the Macon Street cottage “adorable.”
    Two months in, though, everything began to change. Nothing pleased her. She hated his friends, his family, especially hated his job.
    He’d come home late at night, covered in sawdust, his hair and face streaked with paint, and she’d make not-so-subtle cracks about manual labor. He had a college degree in business management, didn’t he? Why couldn’t he work at a nine-to-five desk job, with normal hours and sick days and profit sharing and vacation?
    Nobody else had to work Saturdays or Sundays, or evenings—why did he?
    He’d taken her to a job site—exactly once—to try to show her what it was he did for a living.
    It had been one of those huge old Victorian mansions facing Forsyth Park. The place had been chopped up into ten apartments for college students in the 1980s, but the new owners, two retired doctors from Michigan, wanted it restored—to the standards that would qualify it for historic-preservation tax credits. He and Ryan spent six months totally rehabbing the place, gutting it down to the studs, installing all new, up-to-date plumbing, wiring, heat and air systems—then restoring the original horsehair-and-plaster walls, hardwood floors, everything.
    Over the years, most of the original moldings and millwork had been destroyed, so Jack had spent hours and hours poring over photographs of houses from the same era, drawing up plans for the new moldings and woodwork, then painstakingly re-creating them. The crown moldings in the dining room, for example, included five different profiles.
    Zoey had walked in with him that Saturday morning, sniffed, and wrinkled her nose. “Rat poop!”
    She’d retreated to the truck and refused to ever set foot on one of his job sites again.
    Maybe that’s when he should have seen the handwriting on the wall. Instead, they’d hung on together for nearly a year. He probably wasn’t the ideal boyfriend. He worked all the time, and when he wasn’t working, he wanted to just chill at home, or maybe out at the beach. Zoey, on the other hand, wanted to go clubbing, or out to dinner, or maybe up to Atlanta to visit friends. He hated Atlanta, and he wasn’t crazy about her friends, either. They’d nearly split up the night she brought home the dog.
    It was January. He’d been busting his ass between two different job sites, including Ryan’s house. He’d come home near midnight, to find Zoey sitting up in bed cuddling with what looked to him like a Muppets version of a dog.
    “What’s this?” he’d asked, eyeing the dog suspiciously.
    “This is Princess Scheherazade of Betancourt,” she’d trilled. “She’s a purebred goldendoodle. Is she not the most precious thing you’ve ever seen?”
    “Yeah, precious. What’s she doing in my bed?”
    In retrospect, this might not have been the ideal question to ask of a woman who was already deeply infatuated with a new puppy.
    “She’s mine. I mean, ours,” Zoey said. Her pale blue eyes filled with tears. “I thought you loved dogs.”
    Christ!
    “I love dogs. I think they’re great. For people who have the time to spend with them. But I’m working fourteen-hour days and six-day weeks, and you’re at the club all day. Who’s gonna take care of her while we’re at work?”
    “I’ll take care of her, of course, if you’re going to be like that about it. But, I mean, you own the business, right? Why couldn’t she go to work with you? She’s great company.” Zoey buried her face in the dog’s fluffy coat. “Aren’t you an angel? Aren’t you