The Search for Lily Myers ✓

32 | Lessons Learned

There weren't that many things that could get Amelia out of bed early on a Monday morning, but good coffee was one of them.

She'd made the somewhat spur-of-the-moment decision the prior afternoon to start the week off right by meeting up with Henry and Liam for coffee this morning before they all had to get to work. Granted, Henry had to show up to his job tragically early—a solid forty-five minutes earlier than Amelia and Liam did—so he'd probably just be taking his to-go. Still, she couldn't think of a much better beginning to her morning than sneaking in a few minutes with her boyfriend and drinking a massive pumpkin spice latte.

She didn't care how basic it was. She only got to enjoy them for a few months out of the year, so she was taking advantage of it while she could.

She wasn't running late and yet when she pulled up into a parking space in front of the coffee shop, Amelia saw that Henry and Liam had both beaten her there. The weather was just mild enough that they'd waited outside for her, lingering close enough to the door to be easily spotted but not so close as to be in anyone's way while they chatted about whatever in the world men talked about first thing in the morning.

Henry pressed a soft kiss onto her temple before they walked inside. The shop was far from empty, but she'd also seen much worse on a workday morning and they still managed to get through the line and order their drinks fairly quickly. Since Amelia and Liam would still have a few minutes to stick around once they got their coffees, the three of them went ahead and found themselves a table, tucked away in one of the corners and slightly more secluded from the bulk of the noise—from the hustle and bustle of coffee grinders running and steam wands hissing and order numbers being called out while all of the patrons talked amongst themselves.

She had just seen Henry, of course, but a few weeks had already managed to slip away since Amelia last spoke to Liam on Halloween. He'd seemed to be in decent mental shape then and she was glad to see that he didn't appear to have slipped back into a state of total despair. She thought all three of them were improving at accepting that life needed to be taken one day at a time right now. Sink or swim, she supposed—they didn't have a choice but to find ways to cope.

Predictably, it took just long enough for their drinks to be prepared that Henry needed to get going pretty much immediately. At least he was going off to a job that he genuinely liked—the past two months might have been infinitely worse if his best form of distraction was something he also happened to hate. He gave her one more last swift kiss on the cheek (which was about as much PDA as either of them wanted to subject anyone else to witnessing) before he had to go.

She wished he didn't have to leave so soon, of course, but she was equally content to get to hang out with Liam for a few more minutes. He was an easy person to spend time with, gentle in his demeanor even if he was slightly reserved by nature. If Amelia had been going through what he was, she certainly would have wanted to safeguard her feelings too.

"You seem like you're doing well," he told her, which surprised her even though she could have said the same thing to him.

"How so?"

"Sorry, did that sound weird? I just mean that you don't seem stressed, that's all."

"Oh," she nodded. "No, it's not weird—I just wasn't thinking that I seemed any different. But I did get some stressful stuff out of the way this weekend. I finally introduced Henry to my parents."

"Ah."

"I wasn't stressed about him," she clarified. "You know Henry; he's just about as good of a boyfriend as anyone could ask for."

Liam nodded. "...But your parents?" he guessed.

Maybe she should have felt odd talking to him about the complications of relationships right after her boyfriend had just been sitting right there at the table with them, but this wasn't really about Henry. And Liam had already been quite open with her about some of his own feelings, so the conversation seemed to flow naturally.