Chapter Ten The Miserable Business of Moving On
Chapter Ten
The Miserable Business of Moving On
Nikki doesn’t come in the next day.
Or the next.
An entire week goes by—one where I may or may not bike down to the cabins, only to find them all dark and empty. Literally
all of them. I know because I peek in every window to be sure.
I spend the rest of my time obsessively refreshing socials to try to figure out where Nikki had gone. Still pulling off the
whole “brave, healing, nonchalant” vibe to the outside world . . .
At least until midway through the second week, when Regan decides enough is enough and casually calls me out on it.
“She checked out that same day,” Regan says, carrying over a bin of carnations that need to be delivered to the local middle
school for one of their fundraisers. We’ve been their long-time supplier since we only charge them fifty cents a stem—they
make a nice profit when they double or quadruple the price for school events.
“Hmm? Who?” I ask, as if I don’t already know, while sorting all of the various colors into the vases the PTA president dropped off earlier this morning.
“Nikki Colletti,” Regan says.
I freeze at the sound of Nikki’s full name, out of place coming from Regan’s lips. A tendril of possessiveness curls up inside
my skull, like her very name belongs to me and me alone, and no. No. I’m not going there.
“Good,” I reply, begging myself to believe it.
I have got to stop torturing myself.
“Aren’t you going to ask me how I know?” Regan asks, which is how I know she’s definitely seen right through me this whole
time.
“How do you know?” I ask, obliging her.
“I ran into Mrs. Sanderson at the grocery store last night and decided to do a little detective work. Don’t worry, I didn’t
use Nikki’s real name,” Regan says. “I just asked if there’d been any guests lately, because I know how tough the off-season
can be. She said she did have a renter for cabin six, and it turns out they left the same day you guys got into that fight.”
Cabin six. Nikki stayed in cabin six?
Objectively, I figured she might have—but there was no number written on the receipt she showed me, so I couldn’t be sure.
The confirmation that she had hits me like a tidal wave. It’s one thing to abstractly imagine her sleeping in the same little
cabin on the shore we once shared together, the same one I stayed in alone when I first arrived back in town—but I’m drowning
in the knowledge that it’s true, that up until recently she was there alone, stuck between the same sheets our bodies once
met under.
I swallow hard. There’s a cleaner, newer Hilton just outside of town now. I don’t know why she couldn’t have just stayed there. It would have stirred up less emotions for both of us, probably.
“Was she scheduled to check out that day?” I ask, even though I don’t really want to know. Either she was always going to
leave me again so quickly or I scared her off for good. Neither option sounds great right now.
“Interestingly,” Regan says, “sort of?”
“Sort of?”
“She was supposed to check out the next morning, so she moved up her timeline, but just barely. If you were feeling bad about
it, you’re officially off the hook.”
“Why would I feel bad about anything?” I ask, testing the waters even though the list in my head is a mile long.
“You can stop pretending, Annie,” she says. “I’m your best friend. Do you honestly think I haven’t noticed that you’ve been
walking around like a kicked puppy the last couple of weeks?”
“I have not,” I grumble.
“Whatever you say.” Regan shrugs. “I won’t pretend to know what you’re going through, but that doesn’t mean you have to keep
it from me. I’m here for you, always.”
“Thanks,” I say. “Same.”
“I know.” She smiles, passing me more flowers to help her sort. “Now that we’ve established our undying loyalty to one another,
you sure there’s nothing you want to talk about?”
“Not really,” I say. “I just . . . I should be happy she seems to actually be gone, right? I expected to be happy.”
“I don’t know if ‘happy’ is the right word .
. .” Regan trails off, as if she needs to consider what she wants to say next.
I set down my flower, waiting. “Nikki seemed different than what I expected from the way you’ve always talked about her.
Nicer,” Regan says. “I can see how that could be really confusing and add a hard and messy layer to an already complicated situation.”
“Yeah,” I say, grabbing another pink carnation to shove in with all the others. “It did.”
“Hey, who knows?” Regan nudges my elbow. “Maybe she’ll drop the whole book thing now. It’s probably messing with her too.”
“I doubt she’d drop it.” I sigh.
“Why?”
“I’m sure they gave her a ton of money. She won’t walk away from all that. Could you imagine?”
“I think she already has a ton of money, Annie.” Regan laughs. “I mean, so do you, though.”
“Not really,” I scoff. “Not anymore.”
“More than most, even with what you lost.”
I frown, reaching my limit for talking about this stuff. It’s true that my Coogan account had a decent amount left over for
small-town Maine, but by Hollywood standards, that’s nothing. And like I told Nikki, the odds that I ever see any of my earnings
back from my felon of an ex-agent are slim to none.
“All right, subject change,” she says, just in time. Regan always was creepily good at reading me.
“Thank god,” I say.
“I think this is enough flowers for a chorus concert, don’t you?
” Regan spins the vase around for me to look over.
I nod my approval, and she smiles. “Awesome, I’m going to run these over on my way home.
I promised them by five. You mind locking up if I cut out a little early?
Or actually, come with. I doubt anyone else will stop in tonight and we can grab dinner after. ”
“I’ll stay and lock up just in case,” I say, dodging her offer. Regan, to her credit, doesn’t even try to fight me on it.
We make quick work of packing everything up into an oversized box and loading it into Regan’s car. I watch her drive away
for a little too long, and then shift my attention to the church across the street. The same one that Nikki always disappeared
into.
I’m tempted for half a second to go inside, to try to sit where she sat and feel what she felt. If she can do it with cabin
six, I don’t see any reason why I can’t do it at the place across the street. Except that it’s weird. And pathetic. And I need to be better than that.
I shake my head and turn back inside. I manage to pull the door shut behind me a bit too hard, making all the bells clang.
The sudden silence that envelopes the shop afterward is overwhelming, and I slide the bolt over to lock the door with a sigh.
Has it always been this quiet?
If this were a movie, I would look out the giant front windows right now and see Nikki standing there. I can almost imagine
it, the hope and dread that would swirl up as she banged on the glass to be let in for some grand gesture that would make
everything all better. But there’s no one there. Of course there isn’t.
She’s gone.
She’s gone.
And we were never meant to have a happy ending.
I head toward my little apartment, scooping Gouda as I go and carrying her up the stairs. She meows at me gruffly, reminding me that she does not like to be picked up but also that, since I’m doing it anyway, I owe her dinner too.
“It’s coming, it’s coming,” I say, setting her down beside her bowls and rummaging through my cabinets to find the good cat
food.
Gouda yowls at me as I fill her bowl and then there’s nothing else to do. Nothing at all. I drop onto my couch, wallowing
in the fact that this is my life now. This is the hardest part of it, isn’t it? Of the miserable business of moving on . . .
you have to actually move on.
Until I saw Nikki, I could just pretend I had hit pause on things. That I was taking a breather. But now that she’s come and gone back to her glamorous life and left me here with the flowers and the rent payments, it’s
clear: I’m really not Andy Ducharme anymore. I’m just a woman sitting on a secondhand couch above a tiny shop in New England.
Meanwhile she’s still Nicolette goddamn Colletti. And Nikki Colletti has always had better things to do when it came to me.
Why would this be any different?
I don’t know what I expected, really. Her to sit here and grovel forever? To keep begging me to talk to her even though it
was my decision not to? I told her to leave, I did, so why am I so pissed she actually left? No, not pissed. Hurt. Why am I hurt?
This is stupid. Unless?
I flick over to my contacts, holding my breath while I stare at her name. I don’t know what I was thinking: That she would
somehow immediately text me? That there would be some sort of apology waiting? (Again, for what?! For finally listening to
me after I accused her of ignoring my boundaries?)
The truth is, whatever she came here to find—whether it was me or just my version of events for her to sanitize in her new book—she clearly decided it wasn’t worth it anymore.
That I wasn’t worth it anymore.
“Fuck her,” I say out loud, trying my best to mean it.
Gouda looks up from her bowl for a moment, startled by my sudden outburst, before going back to slurping down her food. She
gags, probably from eating too fast, but I take it as tacit agreement. See? Nikki makes Gouda sick too, I tell myself.
Because that’s the thing. I need to find my way back to anger, and if not to anger then at least to polite disinterest. I’ve
worked so hard to heal, I can’t let my feelings for Nikki—not that I still have feelings for Nikki—burrow their way back under my skin to fester.
Nikki is gone.
Nikki is gone but I’m still here.
My apartment isn’t too quiet, it’s just quiet enough. My life isn’t boring, it’s calm. And I like my secondhand couch and living in New England. It’s not less than, it’s just right, and I need to remember that.
I need to remember that.
I got a little turned around, sure, but anyone would have if their ex walked back into their life unexpectedly only to walk
right back out, even without all the extra baggage that makes us us.
I put my phone down and drop my head back on the couch, letting my eyes drift shut.
It’s fine. This is fine. Nikki and I have never been on the same page before; I don’t know why I expected to be now. Out of sync is our thing, a forever looping roller coaster that I got off the day I started my car and pointed it east.
I’m over it.
I’m fine.
I am. I am.
So why does it feel so damn awful?