Chapter Thirty-Two Soraya
Chapter Thirty-Two
Soraya
Your heart is your North Star, your compass, and your truth.
—Rules for Witches
The lavender dress had seemed perfectly reasonable in that shop, and she’d felt pretty in it. She still did. She just had this concern that it was too much.
That she was too much in it.
No. No, she wasn’t going to do this. She’d bought this dress in a moment of total empowerment, and she wasn’t going to backslide now.
She looked hot. She was owning it.
The boys had gone back to their old family home to stay with David for a couple of days, and she couldn’t say she blamed them. The apartment was tiny, and it didn’t really have an excess of room. But things with them felt so much more okay now. So much less precarious. Even with the date.
They knew about it. There was no other shoe she was waiting to have dropped. No big secret waiting to come out. At least not on her end.
Maybe David had a hundred more secrets. Who could say?
When they actually sorted out the legal part of the divorce, she might fight him for the house, depending on how she felt at the time.
But probably not.
Which meant she would always have the house that wasn’t as nice.
But she would have herself. So even if she couldn’t give the boys the best material possessions, she was going to try to be the honest parent.
The one who showed them that they could fail and get back up again.
That they could be wrong. That they could make mistakes and it wouldn’t undo them completely.
She’d spent so much of her life afraid to do the wrong thing. Here she was, sitting in the consequences of her husband’s wrong thing. So maybe she would make a mistake. Maybe Declan would be a mistake.
She needed to find a way to be okay with that. Doing what she wanted. Going with what felt right to her at the moment, even if it wasn’t right forever. It was so categorically not the way she had ever done anything before. Following her own intuition . . .
That would be a new experience.
The knock on the door nearly made her jump out of her skin, and she checked herself in the mirror one more time before opening it up.
His gaze flickered over her, down her legs, and she was glad she’d gone with the short dress.
It hadn’t felt like her when she put it on, but the pleasure she felt about being admired was very real and made it feel like the right choice. The choice that fit her now.
“We can just walk down the street. I thought Indonesian food sounded good.”
“Yeah. It sounds great.” She drifted nearer to him, their shoulders bumping. Her heart jumped. “I don’t know if we’re supposed to hold hands or not.”
He looked at her. “Do you want to?”
“Yeah. I would.”
He took her hand, like it didn’t require any thought at all. “So, you got married very young,” he said as they walked down the hall together, down the stairs. He didn’t waste any time.
“Yes, I did. And it ended very badly.”
“I gathered that. You said you were going to tell me the story.”
So she did. The whole thing. Which wasn’t cool, reserved, or socially appropriate for how well she knew him. She kept on talking all while they got seated for dinner and while they ordered. She didn’t finish her story until they were halfway through their order of corn fritters.
“So, that’s me,” she said. “What about you?”
“Are we going to stick with the theme of just putting it all out there?”
“I think we should.”
“My son died. Five years ago.”
“Oh.” She put her hand against her heart. “I’m sorry . . .”
He cleared his throat and looked down. “Yeah. He loved board games. We used to play together. That’s how I ended up starting the store. I was an ER doctor before that. But I couldn’t do emergencies anymore. Not after that. Marriage ended, and I moved here.”
“How old was he?”
“Fifteen. About the same age as your younger boy.”
Soraya’s eyes filled with tears. “That’s awful. I’m so . . . I’m so sorry.”
“I can talk about it. Much easier than I used to be able to. But one of the good things about moving to a place like this, where nobody knows you, is that you can choose who you talk about it with. I think that was what ended my marriage, honestly. We couldn’t escape it.
Our grief, each other’s grief. For some people, it brings you together. It just drove us apart.”
She was on a completely different date than she had imagined she would be on. “I’m so sorry. I feel like that’s not enough.”
“The good news is, nothing makes that okay. So there’s actually nothing you can say to make it worse or better. Just don’t freak out and not want to date me anymore.”
“Why would I do that?”
“My sadness usually makes other people uncomfortable.”
“Not me.” She wasn’t entirely sure that was true. She didn’t think it was discomfort making her breathing labored. It was something else. Yeah. It was something else.
Just sadness for him. Curiosity about the man he’d once been.
Before the loss. Because it had clearly changed him profoundly.
It made so much sense that he was a doctor.
She had thought he had that sort of controlled manner about him, a confidence.
The kind of guy who would be great in an emergency.
“So when you said you didn’t do this all the time after we . . .”
“I really don’t. Not since my divorce, honestly.”
“Really?”
“I was never big on hooking up. Everything in the years since have been so heavy. It’s one of those things—you either keep it to yourself or you have to tell the other person. And the minute you tell someone something like this, it’s a lot more serious.”
“Yeah. I understand that. I haven’t experienced that. But I’m sort of dysfunctional and traumatized by the way my marriage ended, and also by the way my church treated me. So I’m probably the exact wrong sort of woman for you.”
He laughed. “I don’t know about that. I saw you, and I was instantly . . . I want you.”
“Well, that is nice. Maybe we can be mutually dysfunctional until we figure something out.”
“I’d like that.”
“Do you want to talk about him?”
It must be a terrible thing to be in a town where no one knew who his son was. Where he couldn’t easily share memories about him.
“I’d like that,” he said.
They finished their meal and took a walk, and he told her all about Brody.
About the games he liked to play, and how he was great at drawing and Xbox.
That his birthday was in October, and he really liked ice cream.
About the Dungeons & Dragons campaigns they’d done together.
Which led into a long story about how Dungeons & Dragons had gotten Declan through high school.
“Are you actually a geek?” she asked.
“Guilty,” he said. “I was horrendously awkward for all of my teenage years.”
“You’re just too attractive for me to believe that.”
“It got me into a lot of trouble—please forgive me for not having false modesty here—because I could get a girl to go out with me, but she didn’t necessarily want to hear about Star Trek.”
She laughed. His stories wove in and out of his loss, sad memories and happy ones, and by the time they finished and found themselves back at the apartment, she was afraid she was enchanted by him.
“I’m glad you decided to go out with me again,” he said.
“Me too.” She sighed. “I was kind of afraid that God was punishing me for having sex with you.”
To his credit, he didn’t turn and run away. “I see. What do you think now?”
“I’m willing to risk it. But if another building burns down after we do it this time, we might have to rethink some things.”
He laughed. “Are you serious?”
“I don’t actually know.”
“I’m willing to risk it if you are.”
“I am,” she said.
“How about we do it at my place this time?”
“Okay.”
She let him lead her into his apartment and left worries about Judgment Day for another time.