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anyone else had ever looked at her that way.
    “Okay,” she said as the waiter filled two crystal glasses with pink champagne. “I won’t fight you if you allow me to make you bread while I’m here. That will be my gift to you.”
    “You already brought me cinnamon rolls all the way from Dare Valley. That was an incredible gift. I might have had one while you were napping.”
    “I want…no, I need to give you something in return, Evan.” She reached for his hand. “It’s important to me.”
    How could she explain that her upbringing had left her feeling like a parasite?
    “You asked me earlier to tell you about…that dark time in my life. Well…”
    Oh, this was going to be hard. She rarely shared her background with anyone—in part because it was in the past, like she’d told him, but also because she feared people would treat her differently if they knew she’d come from money. Or that her own parents had disowned her. But she found herself wanting to tell him, so he would know the whole of her—just like she wanted to know the whole of him. And maybe, just maybe, he would open up and share with her in return.
    “My…ah…parents…It’s weird to refer to them that way now. They’re really wealthy. Old family money. They…never gave anything back in any meaningful way—not to me or to anyone in their circle. They threw money around to advertise their power and status.”
    His mouth tightened. “Go on.”
    “They wanted me to be just like them. To dress a certain way. To talk a certain way. To think a certain way. Do things rich people are supposed to do. Go to art gallery openings and ride horses and crap like that. They sent me to boarding school when I was seven because I cramped their lifestyle.” She took a breath. “I tried to please them in the beginning, but they didn’t even notice. So I rebelled. Hard. That didn’t work either. The calls from the school after I was caught drinking, sneaking out, or whatever were just a bother to them. One day I finally woke up and realized I was only hurting myself.”
    There was a line between his brows as he listened to her. She fiddled with her napkin and made herself continue.
    “I sought help in books and found a good counselor, one my parents hadn’t chosen.” There had been childhood shrinks from early on, but they’d always made her feel like she was in the wrong, like she was a bad girl like her parents called her. “A new world unfolded for me, one filled with love and generosity.”
    The book that had changed everything was one she’d seen on The Oprah Show : Marianne Williamson’s A Return to Love. “I started college, but I was still struggling with what I wanted to do with my life. Then I ran into some people one night while volunteering at a local homeless shelter. They’d just come back from teaching English as a second language to children in a border town in Mexico, run by some nuns.”
    His quiet intensity was making her nervous. What was he thinking? Her and nuns? It must sound crazy. He was so hard to read as he picked up his champagne glass and took what looked to be a fortifying sip.
    “Something in me wanted to go down there. They talked about how giving back to this community had changed their lives. I’d never been part of a community before, and well…they made it sound so great. When I told my parents, we had the row of a lifetime. They made threats, everything from taking away my car to cutting me off. And I snapped. I told them to cut me off. That I hated them and everything they stood for and never wanted to see them again.” The ugliness wasn’t as sticky as it used to be. Now it felt like dust she could brush off with a gentle pass of her fingers over her skin.
    “Oh, Margie,” he said finally, setting aside his glass and grabbing her hand.
    “It’s really not as awful as it sounds,” she said, releasing the huge pocket of air in her lungs. “We were never much of a family. My mother was a party girl