Chapter 10

Jack comes into the kitchen, pours himself a steaming cup of coffee, and slugs about half of it down. It makes my throat hurt, watching him. He looks pretty wiped, like he didn’t sleep much, which—well, I know he didn’t.

“Thank you for making coffee,” he says.

“You’re welcome.”

He’s wearing his usual morning attire, or lack thereof. It’s hard to look at him and breathe at the same time, so I avert my eyes from the expanse of tanned skin and busy myself with cleaning up the dishes from Gabe’s and my breakfast.

“How was your evening?”

I raise an eyebrow. “Not as much fun as yours.” Then I’m annoyed with myself for letting him know that I have any idea when he came home or that I care at all what he was doing last night.

I didn’t mean to keep tabs on him while he was out with Henry and Clark, but part of my brain refused to give up the ghost and go to sleep, so I know he came in around 2 a.m. I also didn’t mean to spend any of the time he was gone imagining what he was doing, but I kept picturing him the way he was in high school, surrounded by girls, grinning, holding court. I could see him, older and even better looking, doing the same thing at a bar, and then going home with one of them, holding her hand, whispering something sexy in her ear as they slipped out past the other patrons.

It hurt my stomach to imagine it.

“Just beer and basketball,” he says lightly. “Then a couple other guys showed up and we got into a darts tournament.”

I am ridiculously relieved.

Just like last night, when I heard him come in and pad past my room to his. Relieved, and then mad at myself for feeling it.

It’s clear I have to find a new place as fast as possible. Because even though I was the one who put the brakes on at Jack’s mom’s apartment, I don’t trust myself to do it again.

As soon as he put his mouth on mine yesterday, I started wanting things. The two of us naked. The two of us wrapped around each other. And I figured that it wouldn’t take long—based on previous experience—for me to start wanting the other stuff, too. The two of us snuggled up in bed. The two of us spending the whole night together. Gabe coming in to wake the two of us up in the morning. All of us living together as a family.

It was like Jack’s kiss pushed a Stupid Girl button in my head that made me forget that none of that was ever going to happen. And I knew that if there was more kissing, there would also be more Stupid.

“So,” I say, closing the mental door on that ache. “Janice is going to come watch Gabe so I can apartment hunt. I tried to see if she could watch him at her place, but her husband is sick in bed.”

“Why’d you call Janice?” Jack asks sharply. “I can watch him.”

I’m startled. “I—Honestly, it didn’t even occur to—” I’m most of the way through that sentence before I think better of it, but when I meet Jack’s eyes, he looks hurt. “Um, I just figured you’d be busy with stuff.”

“Nothing as important as you finding an apartment,” he says. “I’ll watch him.”

On one hand, this is a very nice thing for him to say. On the other, I feel a little pang of he wants me out of here as much as I know I need to get out of here.

“Are your mom and sister still out of town? You could call one of them—”

I’m trying to make it a little easier on him, but now he’s glaring at me.

“Why, because you think I can’t handle him?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I watch him all the time.”

Okay, Jack, enough self-righteousness. I know your game.

I give him a stern look.

“What?” Despite the tired eyes and disreputable beard shadow, he still pulls off puppy-dog innocence.

“I read your mom’s Facebook account. Every time you have him, she posts photos. I know who watches him on ‘your’ weekends.” I air-quote it.

To his credit, he drops the act with a shrug. “Yeah. Okay. So most of the time, I have help. But I did fine Friday. And you don’t have to pay Janice. Save your money for first and last months’ rent and security.”

I’d be happy not to have to pay Janice to watch Gabe. That said, I have to do what’s best for Gabe. “It’ll be a long day, and he’ll be awake, not like Friday night.”

“Have a little faith.”

He doesn’t really inspire it, not looking like a hung-over college student, half-naked and scruffy, but his newfound dad bravado is pretty amusing, and part of me just wants to see if he can pull it off. “Okay. Just—text me if you need me.”

He nods. “And…um…”

“Yeah?”

“I might need you to leave me a few instructions.”

I try really hard to hide my smile.

And fail.

“Wipe that smirk off your face.”

I stop just short of inviting him to do it.

The first apartment I see is awful.

It’s far from the Seattle hospital where I work. It’s shabby, the kitchen circa 1960, the linoleum and paint peeling. It’s tiny—just the galley kitchen, a living room, and a single bedroom. I’d have to give Gabe the bedroom and sleep on a futon or foldout in the living room. And on top of that, it’s a hundred dollars more per month than I was planning to spend.

Still, after spending the rest of the day seeing some really trashed apartments in some really down-on-their-luck neighborhoods, and a few semi-decent apartments that are closer to a thousand dollars out of my monthly price range, I decide that I judged that first apartment prematurely. So I park my car and call the landlord back.

“Sorry, sweetheart. Just rented it. Had five applications after you saw it this morning. Gotta strike while the iron’s hot.”

I squeak my distress.

“Welcome to Seattle.”

I don’t tell him I’ve lived in the Seattle area my whole life. I know this isn’t the Seattle I grew up with, the one that was still recovering from an economic crash, where a billboard only twenty years before had once famously joked, “Last one to leave Seattle, turn out the lights.” Now it’s more like trying to stuff clowns into a car, there are so many people flooding to the city to work in technology.

I sit behind the wheel of my car, sheltered from an increasingly penetrating rain, and let myself indulge in despair.

My phone buzzes.

Jack.

It’s a photo of Gabe. Tucked into bed. Surrounded by his stuffed animals. Asleep. My heart goes all melty. He looks so peaceful and cozy.

Jack has been sending photos all day.

This morning, in response to my text, Everything okay there? he sent one of Gabe on the playground, at the top of the little-kid rock wall, holding on for dear life and grinning like a fiend.

Guess it’s okay, I texted back.

Ye of little faith.

Early in the afternoon, unprovoked, he sent me one of Gabe with his face more or less planted in a ridiculously huge ice-cream cone, ice cream in his eyebrows. Shortly after that, my phone buzzed again. Gabe in the old-fashioned Revere Lake five-and-dime, holding aloft a small model car.

That place is still there?! I tapped back.

Jack and I had loved that store as kids. Because it was always full of treasures, and you never knew what you’d find. Christmas ornaments, cloth slippers, coloring books, Buddha statues, colorful plastic water guns, balloons, key chains. You could spend hours deciding how to spend a dollar. Best bang-for-the-buck around.

Still here. Not sure how, but still here.

An hour later, he sent a video of Gabe throwing a football, with the header, Spiral!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Um, what’s a spiral?

Heathen. A spiral is how a real man throws a football.

Next came the photo of Gabe sleeping, and I take one more peek at it, admiring his long lashes against his fat little cheeks. Of course, I’m bummed I missed bedtime, but the photo makes me smile. Partly because photos and videos of Gabe always make me smile. But also because Jack took those photos. Gabe’s daddy took those photos. Not his grandma or his auntie.

Don’t you dare feel—

Not sure what to call it. Joyful. Hopeful. All sorts of stupid set-yourself-up-for-failure emotions. All the things I’ve promised myself never to feel about Jack again.

Just don’t.

My phone buzzes. I snatch it off the seat. It’s Jack.

Mia’s here. Parked out front. I told her I’d call the police, and she called my bluff. I think she’s going to camp out till you show up.

Face, meet palm.

I think about driving around until Mia gives up and goes home, but I’m just so damn tired.

I see her car as soon as I pull onto Jack’s street. There’s a faint light inside the car—her phone. As I pass the car, I see her face, and I’m flooded with a deep, real grief.

Mia and I have been friends since college; we met one night at a coffee shop, bonding over a shared frustration with the fact that they were out of the chocolate syrup for mochas. She convinced me to follow her to another coffee shop, and then, when there was only one table, to share it with her.

“Thanks, but—I’ll just wait for a table.”

I was pretty shy in those days, and she wasn’t my friend “type”—she was small and sharp—her nose, her words, her voice—and she had a frantic energy about her that made me nervous. The idea of having to make small talk with someone like that—it made me want to pull the brim of my baseball cap down and hide.

She narrowed her eyes at me. “You’re commitment phobic, right? I can tell. You think if you sit at my table and it’s awkward you won’t know how to get out of it.”

“I—”

“Don’t lie. I can see it all over your face. But it’s not a big deal. You can just get up and go. Hell, you can say, ‘This is awkward as fuck, I’m outta here,’ and you won’t hurt my feelings. Nothing hurts my feelings.”

That was so foreign to me that my immediate impulse was to demand that she explain how that was even possible. How could you not get your feelings hurt by people? Would she teach me?

So I sat.

That was Mia—funny, frank, resilient—the friend I hadn’t known I needed. By the end of the evening, we were laughing so hard we couldn’t catch our breath. The next fall, we moved out of the dorms and into an apartment together and remained nearly inseparable through college and after.

Over time, some of Mia rubbed off on me. I learned to let things slide off me in a way I’d never guessed I’d be able to. She had a way of reframing things so they just didn’t hurt so much. That girl, the one who’d ignored me in the mess hall—it wasn’t that she didn’t like me. It was that she was stuck in her own head and she hadn’t even seen me. That guy, the one who I flirted with every Friday for a semester without ever coaxing him into asking me out? He was so busy trying to impress his football friends that he’d let love walk right by him if it didn’t look like a blond cheerleader.

It wasn’t usually about me. Mia could see that, somehow.

Except this time, Mia is the one who has hurt me, and there is no one who can explain how her betrayal isn’t about me.

And my feelings hurt so bad right now, it’s all I can do not to turn the car around and drive away, anywhere. Instead, I park in the driveway and get out. She does the same.

“You should have called.”

“You wouldn’t have answered.”

“There’s a reason for that.” I glare at her, at her short, choppy black hair and her red lipstick, her compact body in a sweater and another of her stupid long skirts.

I hated the skirts even before Harris put his head under one.

“I know what I did is the worst thing anyone can do. Ever. I know I deserve to have my pubic hairs plucked out one by one—”

I’m not even tempted to laugh. I’ve never been good at getting or staying angry at Mia. But this is different from any of the other fights we’ve ever had, like the one we had over her refusal to ever throw away food in the refrigerator until it was visibly unsafe, or over my tendency to crawl into my own head and ignore her when I was stressed out, instead of talking about it. This isn’t a fight, really. It’s—

The heavy weight in my chest is because this is the end of the line. If the coffee shop was the beginning, her skirt in my kitchen was The End.

“Please,” she says, seeing, I guess, the hardness on my face. “I’m so, so sorry. And I know—I know you must be so angry, and maybe you can’t ever forgive me, but you should know that if you can, ever, I am still your friend.”

Her voice is shaking. I can tell she means it, every word she says.

I want to ask her so many questions. How she can have the nerve to show up here and even ask my forgiveness. Whether she’s in love with Harris. If they’ve exchanged I-love-yous or made promises to each other. If they’re going to get married. If she’ll live in that condo with him, sleep in my spot in the bed.

If it creeps her out.

How she could have chosen him over me.

If I’d had the choice, I wouldn’t have chosen him over her.

The thought startles me.

He wasn’t worth it.

I didn’t love him like that.

I meet her eyes, really, for the first time. They are bleak and dead serious.

She does.

Maybe it’s not really about me.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suddenly flooded with benevolence and forgiveness. I don’t throw my arms around Mia and tell her she can have him.

What I feel is more like indifference. But it’s a huge relief, the indifference. It feels like a big breath of fresh air after you’ve been in a toxic place.

When Harris took me aside in his condo, when I went to pick up my stuff, this is what he said:

“I know you hate me. And I deserve it. And I’m not even going to bother asking you not to hate me. But if you could find it in yourself not to hate Mia—”

Mia’s expression pleads with me, now.

“I don’t hate you,” I say.

She makes a sound of unmistakable relief.

“I don’t know if I forgive you, exactly, but I don’t hate you.”

“Then—are we—still friends?”

Someone snorts with laughter. It’s not me, and it’s definitely not Mia. I turn toward the house and discover that at some point, Jack has slipped outside and is standing in the shadows, arms crossed, like my silent bodyguard. I’m oddly touched—and pissed.

“Go inside,” I tell him.

Surprisingly, he obeys. Or—at least, he turns and walks back toward the front door. At the last minute, though, he turns back toward us.

“You idiot,” he says to Mia. “It doesn’t matter if she forgives you. She’ll never trust you again.”

He says it so fiercely that I know—know—he’s not just talking to her. He’s talking to himself.

His eyes meet mine, and they are dark and—sad. An expression that I don’t think I’ve seen in Jack’s eyes since he was a child, since he gained the ability to hide his emotions from everyone, even me.

Does that mean he regrets it? Losing my trust?

He drops his gaze and turns back to the door.

I’m so intent on watching him as he slips back inside that it’s almost a surprise to me when Mia speaks again. Like I’ve forgotten she’s there.

“He’s right, isn’t he?”

Her eyes are sorrowful, and locked on mine.

I’m so tired.

“Probably,” I say, and then I turn and follow him inside.