Choose Me Twice (Second Chance Troubled Marriages #1)

1. Maya

Maya

"The Woman in the Mirror"

The woman in the mirror looks like someone I used to know.

She looks well.

But there is something gray about her, around the edges. Not age, exactly. Something quieter than age.

On the counter, my coffee sits cold. I made it at six-fifteen, set it down while I retrieved Daniel's dry cleaning from the hall closet — the shirts he needs for the week, the slacks he likes pressed a certain way, the light gray jacket he mentioned needing for his Thursday meeting — and by the time I came back the coffee was already forgetting to be warm.

This is not the first time. It is, I think, the several hundredth time, though I have never counted.

I pick up the mug, drink half of it cold because cold coffee is still caffeine and I have thirty-seven things to do before nine, and I look at the woman in the mirror doing this, and I think: when did we start doing things this way?

The answer is that I can't remember, which is itself an answer.

Downstairs, I can hear Daniel moving through the kitchen.

The particular sound of his footsteps, slightly heavier on the left because of an old ankle injury from a college intramural league he played in before I knew him.

The sound of the refrigerator opening, the specific clunk of it, the brief hum before it closes.

He will have his coffee — black, two cups, always two — and he will stand at the island looking at his phone, scrolling through the emails that have already gathered since last night, prioritizing, cataloguing, the gears of his professional self already turning at full speed by the time most people have found their slippers.

Today he has a big presentation. I know this because it's in the shared Google Calendar I maintain.

The city council meeting, the infrastructure project, something about a drainage overhaul for the east side development — the details blur a little, honestly, because I have been holding the details of Daniel's professional life in a kind of temporary storage for twelve years and there is only so much room.

He didn't mention it this morning. Not a word.

He kissed my forehead before I'd fully come awake, the way you pat the hood of a reliable car, and went downstairs to start the gears turning.

I try to remember the last time he told me about a presentation the way people tell each other things — not to inform, but to share.

Not the meeting is Tuesday but I'm nervous about Tuesday.

Or excited. Or I've been thinking about it and I want to think out loud at you because you're the person I chose.

I close the medicine cabinet and try not to examine that thought too closely.

The sketchbook is on the back of the toilet, which is where I've been keeping it for the past several weeks because it's the only room in the house that locks and the only place where I'm briefly, reliably alone.

It's a Leuchtturm, soft cover, the color of a robin's egg, and I bought it eight months ago with every intention of filling it.

I pick it up now, flip through it. Four months of pages, and what I find is this: three rough thumbnail sketches on the first page, a color study on the third that I abandoned halfway through, and then forty-seven pages of absolute blank.

Four months of nothing.

I used to fill a sketchbook every six weeks.

Used to, meaning when I was twenty-eight and had a studio space I rented with two other designers on the near north side, back when my client list was small but genuinely mine.

I did branding work, mostly — logos, visual identities, the occasional book cover.

Nothing that was going to win awards but work I was proud of, work that had my fingerprints on it, work that I lay awake at night thinking about in the good, productive, pleasurable way that means you are alive inside your own life.

Then Daniel got the promotion. Then the commute got longer.

Then we sat at the kitchen table one Sunday afternoon and ran the numbers and it made sense — it made clean, logical, unarguable sense — for someone to be more available at home.

His hours were less flexible. His salary was more.

The math was not complicated. And I said, easily, the way I said easy things back then: I can go part-time. I can freelance. It'll be fine.

It was fine. It is fine. I tell myself this every morning, standing in front of this mirror, and I almost believe it.

I set the sketchbook back on the toilet tank. Close the lid.

The early years were not like this. I want to be honest about that, because it would be easy — and dishonest — to look back from where I'm standing now and sand the happy parts away. There was a time when this man was the brightest room in my life.

I remember the summer we got together, three months after a mutual friend's birthday party where he spent twenty minutes trying to explain the difference between a culvert and a storm drain to a room full of people who did not care, and I was the only one who laughed with him instead of at him.

He called me two days later. He was nervous on the phone in a way that was immediately endearing — too many um's, a tangent about a documentary he'd been watching that had nothing to do with anything, a long pause before he finally said: I think I'd like to take you to dinner, if that's something you'd want.

That was something I wanted.

On our first anniversary, he took me to the rooftop of a building his firm had just completed — before it officially opened, technically not allowed, full dark, just the two of us and the city below us — and he spread out a blanket and said: I wanted to show you the thing I'm most proud of professionally, and then I wanted to tell you that you're the thing I'm most proud of personally.

In my life. You're what I'm most proud of.

I cried. I'm not embarrassed about that. I was twenty-five and he was twenty-seven and the city was spread out below us like a promise and I thought: this is the man. This is the specific man I will choose, again and again, for the rest of my life.

I want that man back so badly it sits in my chest like a stone.

I hear him at the bottom of the stairs. The particular jingle of his keys being lifted from the hook — a hook I installed last year after the third time his keys went missing and we were late for something. He's on the phone already, voice low and competent and completely elsewhere.

When I come to the top of the stairs he looks up.

He waves. It's a good wave — genuine, even warm — the wave of a man who is happy to see me and is also very much somewhere else at the same time.

The phone is already back at his ear. He points to it, mouths sorry, gives me that smile that still does something to me even now, and then the front door opens and closes and the house is very quiet.

I stand at the top of the stairs for what might be thirty seconds or might be longer.

Then I go downstairs and make a fresh pot of coffee.

I stand at the counter while it brews and look at the shared calendar on my phone. Daniel — City Council Presentation. 10:00 AM. I put it there. I know what it is. I know everything about his schedule and I could not tell you the last time he asked about mine.

I take my fresh coffee to the kitchen table and sit with it while it's still hot. This feels, in some small way, like an act of rebellion. Or maybe just self-preservation. It is getting harder to tell the difference.

On the back page of my sketchbook — the robin's-egg-blue one, the one I haven't been able to fill — I wrote something last week that I haven't been able to stop thinking about.

I wrote it at two in the morning when I couldn't sleep, and then I shut the book and pushed it under the bed and tried to pretend I hadn't written it.

It said: I don't know what I want anymore. I'm not sure that's true. I think I know exactly what I want. I think I've just been not-wanting it for so long that the wanting feels dangerous now.

I drink my coffee. It goes cold. I drink it anyway.

Something inside me, very quietly, is making a decision I haven't yet admitted to myself.