Chapter Eight Starting Again
The first Monday after the breakup is the strangest workday of my life. Not because anything dramatic happens. Because nothing happens at all.
I walk into the bank at seven fifteen. I count my drawer.
I set up my station. Melissa arrives and tells me about her weekend.
Becky waves from the service desk. Ben drops a box of donuts in the break room.
The morning happens the way every morning happens and the only difference is that Travis’s door stays closed.
He’s in there. I can see the light under his door.
But he doesn’t come out for his usual rounds.
He doesn’t stop by my station with coffee.
He doesn’t lean on my counter and ask about my weekend.
He stays behind that closed door like a man who doesn’t know how to exist in a room with the person he underestimated.
I feel fine. That’s the part that surprises me.
I expected to feel something heavier. Sadness or regret or at least the dull ache of missing someone who was part of my daily life for over a year.
But when I check in with myself, really check in, I don’t find any of that.
What I find is space. Room to breathe that I didn’t know I was missing.
Melissa notices before anyone else. She waits until there’s a gap between customers and then leans over.
"No coffee delivery this morning?"
"Travis and I broke up."
Her eyes go wide. "What? When?"
"Last Wednesday."
"Last Wednesday? Kaitlyn, that was five days ago. Why didn’t you tell me?"
"I needed a few days to process. It’s not something I wanted to talk about at work."
She looks at Travis’s closed door and then back at me. "Are you okay? What happened?"
"I’m okay. Really. And I’d rather not go into the details right now, if that’s alright."
She reaches over and squeezes my arm. "Of course. But you know I’m here if you need to talk."
"I know. Thank you, Melissa."
She goes back to her station and I can tell she wants to ask more. She’s fighting every instinct she has because Melissa is a person who processes life by talking about it. Keeping a secret physically pains her. But she respects me enough to hold back and I appreciate that more than she knows.
Becky finds out later that day. She doesn’t ask questions. She just walks over during a quiet moment and sets a cup of tea on my counter. "Chamomile. It’s good for rough weeks."
"Thanks, Becky."
"Anytime."
The week passes in this new rhythm. Travis and I coexist at the bank with a careful professionalism that borders on choreography.
We don’t speak unless it’s work-related.
We don’t make eye contact in the hallway.
We don’t acknowledge each other in meetings beyond what’s absolutely necessary. It’s not hostile. It’s just empty.
He tries once. On Thursday afternoon he appears at my station while I’m reconciling the day’s transactions.
"Can we talk?"
"About work?"
"About us."
"There’s nothing to talk about, Travis."
"Kaitlyn, please. I’ve had a week to think and I know I was wrong. I know that. But can we at least sit down and have a real conversation about where we stand?"
"We don’t stand anywhere. That’s where we stand."
He opens his mouth and then closes it. He nods slowly and walks back to his office. I watch him go and I feel a brief flicker of something that could be pity if I let it. But I don’t let it. Pity is what happens when you forget what someone did and I haven’t forgotten.
By the second week, the strangeness starts to fade.
My new normal takes shape. I come to work.
I do my job. I go home. I call Kendra or Jennifer in the evenings.
I cook dinner for myself and eat it at my kitchen table and I read the books I’ve been meaning to read for months.
I start running in the mornings before work.
Three miles along the old rail trail on the edge of town.
Not because I need to burn off anger but because the quiet of the trail at six a.m. is exactly the kind of solitude I never realized I needed.
I start sleeping better. I start eating better.
I start laughing more easily and worrying less about things I can’t control.
The performance is over. The constant effort of pretending to be happy while feeling betrayed, that’s gone now.
And in its absence I’m discovering that my actual happiness was waiting underneath all along.
I just couldn’t see it through everything I was carrying.
Kyle comes in on a Tuesday, three weeks after the breakup. He walks to my station and sets his deposit bag on the counter. I start processing the slip and we make the usual small talk about weather and work and whether Harold Briggs has told me any good stories lately.
Then Kyle pauses. He looks at my neck and I know exactly what he’s looking at.
The silver necklace Travis gave me for our six-month anniversary.
I stopped wearing it the day after the breakup.
It lived on my nightstand for a week and then I put it in a box in the back of my closet because I didn’t want to look at it anymore.
"You know what," he says, then stops himself. "Never mind. It’s not my business."
"What?"
"I just noticed you’re not wearing that necklace anymore. The silver one you used to have on every day."
"You noticed that?"
"I notice a lot of things." He says it quietly and without any weight behind it. Then he shakes his head. "Sorry. That was forward."
"It wasn’t forward. And you’re right. I stopped wearing it. Travis and I aren’t together anymore."
He doesn’t react the way I expected. There’s no surprise, no relief, no poorly concealed interest. He just looks at me steadily and his expression softens.
"I’m sorry to hear that. Are you doing okay?"
"I’m doing really well, actually."
"Good. That’s what matters."
He takes his receipt. He starts to leave. Then he stops and turns back.
"Kaitlyn, this is probably terrible timing and you can absolutely say no. But would you want to grab dinner sometime? Nothing fancy. Just the diner on Oak Street or wherever you like. I’ve been wanting to ask you for a while and I keep chickening out and I figured if I don’t ask today I’ll just keep finding reasons not to. "
The honesty of it is so disarming that I almost don’t know how to respond.
There’s no smoothness. No polish. No carefully calculated approach.
He’s standing in front of me in the middle of a bank lobby asking me to dinner and he just admitted he’s nervous about it.
It’s the most direct and genuine thing anyone has said to me in months.
"I’d like that," I say.
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. How about Friday?"
"Friday’s great. I’ll pick you up at six? Or we could meet there, whatever you’re comfortable with."
"Six works. I’ll text you my address."
He smiles. Not a big smile. Not a performance. Just a real, quiet, honest smile that reaches his eyes and stays there.
"Okay. Friday at six. I’ll be there."
He walks out and I stand behind my counter with a receipt in my hand and a feeling in my chest that I haven’t felt in so long I almost don’t recognize it.
It’s anticipation. The good kind. The kind that doesn’t come with anxiety or second-guessing or the nagging fear that I’m being played.
Just a simple, clean want for something that feels right.
Friday arrives faster than any Friday in recent memory.
I change clothes three times before settling on a dark green blouse and jeans.
I keep my makeup simple. I wear my hair down.
I put on the small gold earrings Jennifer gave me for my birthday two years ago and I look at myself in the mirror and I think I look like someone who is starting over.
Not starting from scratch. Starting from a better place than before.
Kyle pulls into my parking lot at exactly six o’clock. He’s driving his green Ford and he’s wearing a clean button-down with dark jeans and boots that look newer than his usual pair. He gets out and walks to my door and knocks.
"Hey," he says when I open it.
"Hey."
"You look really nice."
"So do you."
We drive to the Oak Street Diner, which is exactly as unpretentious as it sounds. Vinyl booths, laminated menus, coffee served in thick ceramic mugs. The kind of place where the waitress calls you "hon" and the meatloaf is better than anything you’ll find at a restaurant with tablecloths.
We sit across from each other and we talk. Really talk. Not the polite, surface-level conversation of two people making small talk across a bank counter. We talk about our families and our jobs and the parts of our lives that don’t fit into a two-minute transaction window.
He tells me about growing up on the Frederickson farm. About learning to drive a tractor at twelve and fixing fences with his dad on Saturday mornings and how his mom made biscuits every Sunday that he’s been trying to replicate for ten years and never gotten right.
I tell him about growing up in Sugar Ridge with Jennifer and Kendra. About working summers at the ice cream shop on Main Street and how I took the bank job thinking it was temporary and then woke up six years later still there and actually happy about it.
"That’s the best kind of job," he says. "The kind that surprises you by being exactly what you needed."
"I never thought of it that way."
"I think about my job the same way. I didn’t plan to run the ag supply store. I thought I’d go to college and move away and do something completely different. But my dad needed help and I came back and now I can’t imagine doing anything else."
"Do you ever regret staying?"
"Not for one second. Everything I care about is right here."
He says it simply, looking at me across the table, and I feel the meaning of it settle between us without either of us needing to name it.