CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The champagne was a twelve-dollar bottle she had bought at the grocery store on the way home… and she didn't care even slightly.
Nancy had been saving it, in the loosest sense of the word.
It had been sitting in the refrigerator for three weeks, purchased on a whim during a moment of cautious optimism that she hadn't quite been ready to act on yet.
Tonight felt like the right occasion. She'd pulled it out the moment she got home, peeled the foil, worked out the cork with both thumbs, and poured herself a glass right there at the kitchen counter.
That had been forty minutes ago. She'd since changed into pajamas, washed her face, and was now standing at the bathroom mirror with the glass raised.
"Okay," she said to her reflection, and took a long sip.
She was fifty-three years old and she had just slept with a man she genuinely liked.
It had been wonderful, and she figured she was allowed to stand in her own bathroom and acknowledge it out loud to no one in particular.
They had been on three dates and yes, she supposed it had moved fast. She’d spent part of the drive home rehearsing the argument she'd need to make when she told her friends, preparing for the raised eyebrows and judgy looks.
But the honest answer was that it hadn't felt fast in the room.
It had felt like a natural conclusion to three evenings that had already been more honest and easier than most of the conversations she could remember having in the last several years of her marriage.
When the decision had been made between them, it had not been verbal. It had been purely physical. She’d been almost embarrassed at how quickly she climaxed. She’d trembled so much afterward that he’d asked several times if she was okay, and she’d had to urge him to keep on going.
She looked at herself in the mirror and laughed a little at that, quietly and without embarrassment.
Four years was a long time and she had started to wonder whether that part of herself had simply gone offline permanently.
Now she knew it hadn't. The knowing was its own small, private triumph, separate from everything else about the evening and maybe the best part of it.
That, and the anticipation of seeing him again.
She raised the glass once more at her reflection, drank, and set it on the edge of the sink.
Her divorce had been final for three years.
She had spent most of that time being very sensible about everything, which was what everyone around her had encouraged her to be.
She'd done the Fresh Horizons program and completed every step.
She'd started therapy with a woman she actually liked, which had taken three tries to find.
She had even rebuilt the friendships that the marriage had slowly dissolved—or, rather, the ones that had mattered.
She had taken cooking classes at the community college, had started cooking real meals again instead of eating crackers over the kitchen sink at nine o'clock at night.
She had been, by almost any measure, impressively functional.
She had handled the end of a twenty-one-year marriage with more grace than it deserved.
She had done the work, and dammit, she had earned tonight.
Her phone buzzed on the counter beside the sink.
She picked it up and saw the notification: a like on the post she'd made in the Fresh Horizons forum earlier in the evening, before she'd left for the date.
She'd posted something brief and deliberately vague, just a few sentences about feeling ready for something new, and someone had come across it and hearted it.
She looked at the username without fully registering it, still smiling.
Someone in that group had taken two seconds to respond to it.
After everything that forum had given her in the past year, the small gestures still meant something.
She set the phone face-down on the counter, picked up her champagne glass, and finished what was left in it standing at the mirror.
Still feeling a bit randy, she wondered if she should post something a little subtle and vague about how the night had ended.
She figured there was no need. There was no need to brag. Plus, the admins might flag it.
Nancy carried the glass out of the bathroom and down the short hall toward the kitchen, thinking vaguely about whether there was anything worth eating in the refrigerator.
She'd been too wound up to eat much before the date and her stomach was making its case now.
There was leftover pasta she thought, maybe some cheese.
She was running through the options with the pleasant, unfocused energy still cascading through her body from the way the night had gone.
She was almost to the kitchen when there was a knock at the front door.
Nancy stopped walking, turning her head toward the door.
It wasn’t that late, so a knock wasn’t totally unheard of.
She glanced at her watch and saw that it was 7:42.
The date had been for appetizers and drinks, and had started at four.
Somehow, it made her feel as if the night, now at quarter to eight, had just begun, really.
Still, she stood in the hallway and went through the short list of people it could reasonably be at this hour.
Her neighbor Claire occasionally came by late, but she always sent a text first. Her daughter lived forty minutes away and never dropped in unannounced.
She wasn't expecting anyone, and she hadn't buzzed anyone up.
She moved toward the door. On any other night she would have called out who’s there before touching the handle.
It was a habit she had built carefully over sixteen months of living alone, a small, automatic precaution that had become second nature.
But the champagne had softened the edges of her caution, and she was still warm from the evening, still carrying that bundled buzz of excitement.
She felt, for the first time in a long time, like a woman with no particular reason to be guarded about anything.
She unlocked the deadbolt and pulled the door open.
It took her a moment to understand what she was seeing.
The face in the doorway was not Claire, and was only vaguely familiar—maybe a face she’d seen in passing at some point.
Her brain spent a disorienting second trying to place it in a context that made sense.
She knew this face, but not from any situation that explained its presence here, at her front door, at this hour.
She started to form some confused version of a greeting, but by then, she knew it wouldn’t matter.
The warmth of the evening left her completely when she realized with a terrible and absolute clarity that she should have asked who was there before she opened the door.