13. Emily
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Emily
He’s gone again when I wake up.
It’s not the first time. It’s not even the third.
This thing between us is barely a week and a half old and already there’s a pattern to it, and the pattern is that I wake up alone.
I roll over into the cold half of the bed, and there’s the note on his pillow, same as the last few times, five words in his slanted handwriting. Didn’t want to wake you.
I lie there and look at it for a second longer than is healthy.
Here’s the thing I’m not letting myself say out loud, not to him, not even really to me: I hate that note.
I hate it specifically because the words are so nice.
He’s being considerate. He’s letting me sleep.
And every single morning it lands in my chest like the opposite of considerate, like waking up next to me would’ve been a chore he’d rather skip, like getting out before I open my eyes is the polite version of bolting.
We’re not together. I know we’re not together.
This is an arrangement, a friends-with-benefits, two-adults-who-live-in-the-same-enormous-house situation that we’ve both very carefully not put a name on.
So I don’t get to be hurt that he leaves.
That’s not in the contract I signed with myself.
I get up. I shower in a bathroom nicer than any hotel I’ve ever stayed in.
And then, because I am apparently a sad and pathetic woman, I pull on one of his shirts before I go down, the soft gray one that smells like him, and I tell myself it’s because it’s comfortable and not because I want to walk around wrapped in him all morning.
He’s in the kitchen, laptop open, and when I come in he looks up and smiles, and the knot that’s been sitting in my chest since I read the note goes loose.
“Morning,” he says.
“You left early.” I aim for casual. I think I mostly get there.
“Work stuff.” He slides a coffee across the island to me, already made exactly how I like it, which is a small thing I refuse to examine too closely. “Tokyo’s still on fire.”
“You and Tokyo. Should I be jealous of Tokyo?”
“Deeply. It’s a whole thing. Very expensive, lot of screaming.” He doesn’t look up from the screen, but the corner of his mouth tips. “You’d hate it.”
“I don’t know, I’m good at screaming.”
Now he looks up. “I’m aware.”
“Oh my God.” I throw a grape at him from the bowl on the counter. He catches it out of the air and eats it, smug as anything, and I hate how much I want to climb across this island and into his lap at eight in the morning on a workday.
“You’re awful,” I tell him.
“You started it. You’re the one who brought up screaming over breakfast.” He pops another grape. “I’m a professional. I have meetings.”
“You have meetings I scheduled. After nine, because I’m onto you.”
“See, this is why you’re the best hire I’ve ever made.” He says it light, but he holds my eyes a second too long when he says it, and the kitchen goes warm, and I have to look down at my coffee before I do something embarrassing.
This is the deal, though. Keep it casual.
Keep it separate from the job. Don’t make it weird, don’t make it heavy, don’t be the woman who reads four polite words on a pillow and spins them into a tragedy.
So I drink my coffee and I don’t say any of the things sitting behind my teeth, and I let him go back to his screen, and I tell myself I’m fine with all of it.
I’m getting really good at telling myself things. I think I learned it from him.
There’s one thing I did this week that I didn’t tell myself anything about, though, because it didn’t need talking into.
I filed for divorce. Walked in on my lunch break, signed what needed signing, started the clock on ending it for good.
Then I changed my number, picked a new one off the screen at the phone store and watched my old life go dark in my hand.
No more wondering what was stacking up behind those blocks, and no old number left sitting in their phones like a door they could come knock on whenever they pleased.
Just a clean blank phone and a number only the people I actually want have.
I cried a little in the car after, and I couldn’t have told you if it was grief or relief, and I decided it didn’t matter which.
***
Work, at least, makes sense. Mostly.
I’m nervous every single morning, if I’m honest. I walk in half-sure today’s the day someone realizes hiring me was a mistake.
But under the nerves there’s this other thing I haven’t felt in years, a kind of jittery excitement, because for the first time in forever I get to find out if I’m actually any good at something.
For two years Henry told me, in that patient disappointed voice, that I couldn’t be trusted with anything harder than a grocery list, and somewhere in there I started to believe him.
I forgot I used to run the entire student council.
I forgot I used to be the person other people came to when something fell apart and needed a level head.
Turns out it’s all still in there, just buried under a couple years of being told I was useless.
And every day I don’t get found out, the excitement wins a little more of the morning.
Paul is the one I most want to win over, and the one least inclined to let me.
The man treats every new face like a personal insult until they prove otherwise.
But I show up early, I don’t flinch when he barks, and I’m good, and slowly he thaws.
Yesterday he gave me an approving nod, which from Paul is roughly equivalent to a normal person writing you a heartfelt card.
He’s taken to bringing me coffee in the mornings now.
The first time it happened I nearly fell out of my chair.
Richard, in the office, is a different man entirely.
Professional. Distant. “Ms. Anderson” in meetings, polite and cool, never a touch, never a look held too long.
I get it, I do. I’m the new assistant who very obviously arrived in his car and moved into his house, and the whole building is already whispering, and the last thing either of us needs is to feed it.
So we play it straight. Mr. Reed and Ms. Anderson, all business.
But every so often I catch him looking. Just for a second, before he drags his eyes back to whatever he’s supposed to be doing, this dark, intent look that goes straight through me and lands somewhere low in my stomach.
He never says anything. He doesn’t have to.
That look is a promise about later, and it’s the thing that makes the waiting bearable, the thing I think about when I knock on his door at night.
Today there’s a project. The SunCove charity gala, big annual thing, and most of it has landed in my lap, which I am thrilled about because it’s exactly the giant logistical headache I’m secretly excellent at.
Hundreds of guests, a silent auction, a seating chart with more political landmines than a peace summit, a hundred small fires to put out before anyone important notices there was a fire.
It is the most fun I’ve had at a desk in years.
I’ve got color-coded spreadsheets. I’ve got a contingency plan for the contingency plan.
Paul looked at my master timeline yesterday and said, “Huh,” which I’ve learned is Paul for “I’m impressed and it pains me. ”
Richard drops a folder on my desk.
“Cross-check the model list against the confirmed guests,” he says. “Make sure we’re not seating anyone next to their ex or their lawyer. Last year was a bloodbath.”
“On it, Mr. Reed.”
He pauses half a beat at the Mr. Reed, jaw ticking. I keep my face perfectly innocent. He walks away, and I win that round.
The guest list is straightforward. The model list is attached behind it, the girls booked for the promo shoot, and I start clicking through, half paying attention, until one name stops me cold.
Carmen Halter.
Right there, her own name, plain as day, booked for my event.
I sit back in my chair. She’s a local model, and this is the biggest gig in the city this season, so of course she put in for it. Half the working models in town probably did. There’s no reason it has to mean anything.
My stomach drops anyway.
***
I leave work an hour early to go see Mrs. Potts, because if I sit at my desk one more minute staring at Carmen’s name I’m going to lose it, and because I’ve been meaning to visit her since I got back into the city and keep not doing it.
I decide on the drive over that this is going to be a regular thing now, every week, no excuses.
She earned it. She’s the one who believed me when nobody else did.
She opens the door before I even knock, like she’s been watching the street.
“There you are,” she says, and pulls me into a hug that smells like lavender and the inside of my whole childhood. “I was wondering when you’d finally come by.”
She makes tea. We sit at the same little kitchen table where, a few weeks and a whole lifetime ago, I told her about Henry and the baby and Carmen, and she didn’t doubt me for a second. The same table where she squeezed my hand and said the world wasn’t always fair but it had a way of evening out.
It’s the most relaxed I’ve felt all week, if I’m honest. There’s no act to keep up here, no Ms. Anderson, no holding my face neutral across a meeting table, no carefully not reading into a man’s handwriting.
Mrs. Potts has known me since I was a kid riding my bike past her flower beds, and she liked me then and she likes me now, and there is nothing I have to earn at this table.
I didn’t realize how much I needed an hour of that until I was sitting in it.
“Henry’s been by, you know,” she says, setting down my cup.
“Three or four times now. Stands on my porch looking like death and asks if I know where you went. I tell him I haven’t the faintest idea.
” She says it with a small, fierce satisfaction that makes me love her even more.
“He looks terrible, for what it’s worth. Like he hasn’t slept in a month.”
“Good,” I say, and I mean it, and I don’t even feel bad about meaning it.
“I’ll say it, I never did care for that man,” she goes on, topping off my tea.
“All that time, that little smile of his. He used to talk right over you at the block party like you weren’t even saying anything.
Every year you got a bit quieter, a bit smaller, and I’d want to give the both of you a good shake.
” She pats my hand. “You’re not small now, though.
First thing I noticed when you walked up. There’s all of you again.”
I have to blink hard and look at the sugar bowl for a second, because I am not going to cry at Mrs. Potts’s kitchen table over a compliment.
“That Carmen’s been around too.” Mrs. Potts sniffs, mercifully moving on.
“The two of them were out in the driveway last week, going at it. Screaming, both of them, loud enough the whole street could hear every word. I couldn’t make it all out, but it wasn’t a happy little family, I can tell you that much. ”
I file it away next to the name I found on the model list this afternoon. Carmen, booked for my gala. Carmen, already screaming at Henry in driveways. The dream life she stole from me, going exactly as well as I’d quietly hoped it would.
“You look happy,” Mrs. Potts says, studying my face over her tea. “Different. Lighter. Whatever you’ve got going on over there, it agrees with you.”
I think about the mansion and the job and the dark look across the meeting table and the note on the pillow I haven’t figured out how to feel about yet.
“I’m getting there,” I say.
She squeezes my hand, same as always. “That’ll do, sweet girl. Getting there is most of it.”
She refills my cup without asking and pushes the plate of shortbread an inch closer, the same shortbread she’s been making since I was small enough to need a booster cushion at this table.
For a while we don’t talk about Henry or Carmen at all.
She tells me about her tomatoes, which are losing a war against the squirrels, and the new family that moved in across the street, and the church rummage sale she’s been roped into running.
It’s the most ordinary conversation in the world and I could cry from how much I needed it.
“You know you can come by any time,” she says, walking me to the door at the end. “You don’t have to wait for an invitation, and you don’t have to have news. An old woman likes the company.”
“I’m going to make it a regular thing,” I tell her, and I mean it. “Every week. You’re stuck with me.”
“Promises, promises.” But she’s pleased, I can tell, her whole face folding up soft. She hugs me again on the porch, that lavender hug, and holds on a second longer than usual. “Whatever’s making you lighter, hold onto it,” she says into my hair. “You deserve all the happiness in the world.”
***
It’s late by the time I get back, and the gala’s only days away, so I take the folder up to my room to keep working. I prop myself up in the enormous bed and pull the lists back up on my laptop, ready to finish the cross-check I abandoned this afternoon.
And there it is again, still there, still real.
Carmen Halter.
I tell myself what I told myself this afternoon. She’s a model, this is the biggest event in the city, she put in for it like everybody else did. It’s a coincidence. It doesn’t have to mean anything.
But Carmen has never once in her life let a coincidence go to waste.
And she doesn’t even need one, because the whole reunion watched me walk out of there on Richard Reed’s arm.
That crowd has done nothing but talk since.
All it takes is one person mentioning to Carmen that little Emily Anderson landed on her feet working for, and sleeping with, a man like that, and she will not be able to stay away.
She’ll have to come see it for herself. She’ll have to come ruin it.
So I don’t know if she’s walking in there in a few days as a stranger doing a job, or walking in there for me. That’s the part that keeps me staring at the screen long after I should’ve shut the laptop.
Either way, she’s walking in.