5
Elise
I’ve thought a lot about how I wanted things to go if I ever ran into my ex-husband again. A lot of the scenarios I cooked up involved being forty pounds lighter and wearing some kick-ass heels so I could step on his self-worth with them.
When I went to some therapy, I decided I didn’t care, actually. Because I wasn’t ever going to see him, never, ever again. I didn’t need to make him know what he missed out on, to grovel and tell me how he was wrong and full of regrets. I don’t need that, and, more importantly, I don’t want that anymore. I don’t even like wearing heels.
All the blood draining from his face when he looks at me feels pretty damn good though.
Except that a moment later, I realize we’re still standing in the dining room. I’m at a job. I have half an urge to tell him to go away because he shouldn’t be here, like this is just some non-sequitur in a work-stress-dream.
Deanna was just telling me about all her plans for Logan’s wedding, the various hors d’oeuvres she wants served while guests arrive at the reception, what tables we’ll need to set out, how she’s going to arrange furniture best for that. I was so excited to show her how good of a cake I can make; I talked her into letting me use her kitchen to try the recipes out. The first two of the three cake recipes are in the oven, and the vanilla-bourbon recipe smells amazing. We’re making plans while they bake for how the kitchen will be stocked to accommodate all the extra food.
“Dude,” Aiden says, the youngest of the two brothers, as I look around to him, Logan, and Deanna. I’ve always been able to see the resemblance when they stand in the same room, the way they all have the same angular nose and divoted chin, but it’s a little too present right now.
Slowly, it clicks into place.
This must be what it feels like to have a stroke or an aneurysm, I think. I’ve had nightmares kinder than this. I swivel my gaze to each of them, and land on Deanna. My boss looks as puzzled as I feel.
That’s his mom. Holy shit.
“Shawn?” Deanna looks at her son with a face full of concern, glancing back at me. “What are you doing here?”
I stare back at Deanna, looking at her with new eyes.
A moment ago, she was just a woman who I met at my first catered event when I first moved here. She stepped into the kitchen as the event was winding down and I was cleaning up. Sometimes guests come into the back to ask for recipes. Often enough those conversations turn into new jobs, and Deanna had been thrilled to learn I lived nearby, and wouldn’t I love to partner with a small, local brewery for regular events?
And now she was the woman who would have disowned her son for having married me.
“You two know each other?” Logan supplies as the silence in the room stretches uncomfortably long; that is the understatement of the century.
My mouth opens to try to form some kind of answer, but words don’t work.
I swallow. My heart is thundering in my chest. I don’t know how to answer that question.
I know every freckle on that man’s ass. I know he thinks he doesn’t snore when he sleeps, but he does, and he gives himself the hiccups if he tries to rush through his morning routine, and if you tickle the spot just above his left hip, he will drop whatever he’s holding.
With every growing second, I feel like the floor is dropping out beneath me and hope it will just swallow me up and get me out of here. Simultaneously I’m sweaty, hot, cold, and clammy.
I meet Shawn’s eyes, and mentally beg him, pleading with my eyes, do not, do not, DO NOT tell them. I live here. I need this job. I need everything to stay as it is.
He has never been particularly good at receiving my messages.
“That’s—” he stammers, his voice coming out a little strangled, “Elise.”
Deanna’s brow wrinkles in confusion. “Yes, this is Elise.”
“She works at the brewery,” Aiden puts in, unhelpfully.
“Partners with,” I correct, almost out of rote memory. “I cater some events.”
“She makes these AMAZING stuffed mushrooms bites—” Aiden starts to say, because he has eaten entire trays of those, when Logan cuts him off with a hand on his shoulder.
Shawn takes in a sharp breath, his shoulders relaxing the slightest bit. What did he think I was doing here?
It only digs in a little that apparently his mother doesn’t even remember my name from when he tried to introduce me to the family all those years ago. Then again, why would she?
But wouldn’t Deanna remember me? She remembers everything when she talks to me.
After the amount of hurt these people caused me, the hours of therapy I spent sobbing over the fact that somehow, without meeting me, they had decided I wasn’t good enough for them.
It made me pick myself apart, looking for what was so wrong with me—I couldn’t just suddenly reconcile it all with the completely normal and nice and warm people I’d been cooking for and working with for years.
A sort of numb apathy rolls over me. I want so badly to exit this moment that I decide actually, yeah, I’m just going to leave.
“I left my oven on at home,” I say to no one in particular, and I don’t care that it’s obviously a lie. As if I’d come back after they’re all done realizing who we are to each other.
I take a few steps out of the kitchen, brushing past all of them with as little eye contact as possible.
The moment I’m out of sight I break into a jog, the anxious awkwardness seeping into my every movement, especially when I hear raised voices escape the dining room.
I push out the front door and down the long driveway, past my car, and I’m down the street. I can’t stop. I wave my arms around like it can burn off the sheer amount of ick I’m feeling. I make some truly bizarre noises trying to let that awfulness out of my chest—something between hysterical laughter and choked horror.
I think I would take being chased by a wolf over this, honestly. Now that I think about it, that dream was not nearly as bad as this.
There’s the sound of a door slamming and when I look back, there he is again, back to haunt me. Like the first time I saw him today wasn’t enough.
“Elise! Elise, wait,” Shawn calls after me, and my entire body stiffens.
I hold still, not for him, but the sound of his breathing, shaky and hard, reaches me before he does. I close my eyes. Even if I hadn’t seen him in the house, I would know him by the sound of his breathing, even a decade unheard. I can pick it out from anyone else’s by the barest trace of voice that rides in each breath.
I turn around and look at Shawn. Really look at him.
Time has really done a number on my memory of him, turned him shorter and scrawnier and just . . . less. Because I couldn’t have married a man that dreamy, that just didn’t seem realistic. But he’s tall with a head full of chin-length dark curls; those round tortoiseshell glasses don’t make him look nearly as dorky as I remember.
Maybe my memory didn’t do me the injustice of remembering just how stupidly gorgeous the guy who divorced me was, but it’s staring me in the face right now, making me feel like an absolute mess. His hair is even doing that gorgeous thing where it falls just right around his face.
At the same time, he seems like a stranger. Maybe it’s in the way he’s aged or how he’s holding himself. There’s just enough there that’s different.
I realize my teeth are gnashing through my inner cheek after glaring at him too long.
I don’t know what words will unsolder my jaw. What do I even have to say to him now? I don’t want to dig up all that pain.
It would be all too easy to fall into old patterns, to shout at him, “You know, maybe this was going to be the consequence all along of never introducing me to your family. That your mom could meet me one day and hire me to cater a wedding. You really should have seen this coming, Shawn.”
“Elise, slow down, just hang on, can we, can we—”
He fumbles through half-posed questions that sound like he was going to say “talk” or “start over,” and I’m not ok with either of those options.
I’m seized by this terrible déjà vu. The tangled, raw mess that the end of us was. Conversations that were unproductive and led nowhere. Solutions picked apart until they were just as bad as their original problems. All the things I held back because I couldn’t bring myself to ask for better from him.
I can’t be here. I need to get out of here.
“No. Shut up,” I say, because my brain has nothing kinder in the bank.
He actually does, blinking at me in surprise.
I take in a deep breath, and then let it out. I look at him for a beat. I was kind of hoping something else would just happen to come out on the exhale, and when it didn’t, I have to try again.
“I’m leaving. Don’t call me,” I tell him, even though I’m pretty sure he does not have my number anymore. Or that I blocked him years ago. I probably should have just said that I need space to breathe and think, but I don’t have the capacity.
I don’t feel like providing any answers. His mom can sure as hell explain to him how I ended up in that house for the last two years, and I’m sure he can figure out the rest from there.
To his credit, he takes a step back, and slowly nods. He crams his hands into his pockets.
I don’t flee.
I turn around, telling myself that I’m not shaking either, when I get my keys out of my pocket and struggle to find the right one.
I get in the car, and I want to just drive. I don’t know where I would go. Do I just run out on this job? Deanna and Aiden and Logan? Do I pack my things and move the fuck away again? I could use the downpayment I had nearly all saved up for my cottage, but I’d have to start my catering business somewhere else and that would eat into my savings again.
No, that was desperate, deranged thinking. I can’t just throw away everything I’ve built because Shawn showed up, can I?
Not to mention, I’ve never abandoned a job in the middle of the day before. The cakes are still in the oven, I still have to wash the stand mixer bowl and implements before I head to the brewery for today’s house brews tastings.
What tasting? How am I going to wander back inside and get the cakes out of the oven and dodge questions that will most certainly rip the whole life I’ve built to shreds?
It stings to think about abandoning the brewery’s catering contract when the Hayes have been so good to me. Like when I got sick right after Thanksgiving and was stuck in bed for a couple days and couldn’t fulfill my end of the agreement that weekend. The memory overwhelms me, thinking about the stack of movies Aiden brought over with Logan in tow, carrying a quart of wonton soup, and later Deanna dropped off a box of herbal tea so fancy I still can’t bring myself to open the packaging.
No, no, don’t think about it.
The feelings start to reach my eyes, and I know I can’t be here. Not when it feels like an asteroid of emotional damage is headed my way, and I need to get out of its path.
So, I drive. I get on the road and leave down the lonely, winding road from the house. I glance only once in the rearview mirror, watching my ex-husband’s posture wilt.
I don’t know what makes me stop. Exhaustion sweeps through me, and my hands feel shaky on the steering wheel. I don’t really think about putting the car in park—it just happens.
I don’t know what I need. Maybe someone else to drive, to take the wheel on this whole situation. I dig into my jeans’ back pocket and thankfully find my phone. Now that I’m looking around, it looks like I left my bag at the Hayes House, and I’m not going back for it right now.
Whatever. Right now, I just need a moment to be a baby and call my mom and cry.
It rings, and it rings. And it rings.
And then it stops.
I hesitate a moment before I call my stepdad, if only to tell him to put my mom on the phone, but it seems like his phone is off. The call doesn’t even go through.
I call my dad, also no pick up. I hang up before it asks me to leave a message. I’m not sure I can explain what just happened coherently. I nearly chew through my lower lip trying to figure out if it’s worth it to call my half-siblings or stepmother, to get stuck trying to catch them up on history.
I give it a try, and it cuts off after the second ring.
At first, I think the call dropped, and try the number again, watching the screen. But it barely makes it through one ring before CALL REJECTED flashes briefly across the screen.
Of course. None of them have time for me. Why would they?
A wave of feeling so potent it borders on dizzying moves through me. I drop my phone in the passenger seat and just lean my head against the steering wheel until it passes.
Shawn is still waiting outside, when I look up; he’s moved closer, actually, and somehow it still looks like he’s holding himself back. He’s not quite pressing his face to my car door window, just peering in a little too close. I can’t decide if that’s restraint from him or not.
I steel myself, ready to be angry with him for following me specifically when I said not to. But I’m so tired from the last ten minutes, I can’t bring myself to go through the emotions.
Once upon a time, I’d been charmed by the slight Boston accent and gray sweatpants always hanging off his hip bones. Now I’d lived in Massachusetts long enough that it didn’t have as much of an effect on me. Hopefully.
His eyebrows go through a number of reactions as I sigh and roll down the window. We’re going to have to talk eventually. He’s literally the last person on the planet I want to be near right now, but somehow, he’s the only person waiting to hear what I have to say.
I stare at him, rain dripping down his face like some kind of sad kicked puppy. “Hi.”
“Hey.”
“You look . . . healthy?”
Feeling uncharitable, I reply, “That bad, huh?”
He startles back a step trying to recover from that conversational landmine. “No! No I just meant, like, I didn’t know if saying you looked good was ok or not, but I didn’t want it to sound like I didn’t think you—”
He rambles himself into a corner, gesturing with his hands until he decides to just stop talking and put his hands back in his pockets.
“It’s, uh. It’s been a while,” he tries again.
“Yeah.”
“Do you need to borrow a phone? Maybe we’ve got different providers if you need to call someone—”
“No, they were all busy.”
He crouches down, probably kneeling on the wet asphalt to get down to my car’s level. His chin still hangs just over the edge of the car door.
“Listen. I wasn’t actually invited back here for the wedding. I can leave. If that would make things better—”
I shake my head, unable to come up with the words. I don’t care. Him actually being present isn’t what I’m most upset about. It’s what it means. Instantly, the last few years I’ve lived here feel like a lie.
“I just . . . can’t believe you’re working for them. Of all places to find you . . .” He trails off, looking still somewhat shaken.
“It’s not like I realized this was your family when I took the job.” I sigh. “I mean, for fuck’s sake, they invite me to movie nights. They were my friends before they were your brothers.”
He looks incredulous. “That’s literally not how that works.”
“That’s not the point. It’s . . . my employer is now also your mom. And I don’t know how we’re going to come back from that little revelation.”
I end on a tired look that feels too familiar for these conversations. Now I have to figure myself out of this one. I look at him, expecting the same helpless expression he always wore when we got into serious conversations. I always had to clean up the disasters.
He shakes his head though, and something feels different. “We don’t have to. I didn’t tell them. I mean, they know we know each other clearly, because you ran out when I showed up. But we can keep that to ourselves. You can keep your job as long as you need.”
“I don’t need you to fix this,” I tell him pointedly. “Just stay away from me. I’ll figure it out from there.”
He’s quiet for a long moment. I can’t fully blame him for ruining things, or showing up, but I want to. And I think he knows how much I want to blame him for ruining everything all over again.
“Alright. I won’t fix things, but I don’t want to make them worse,” he offers quietly, and I have a hard time holding back a comment that he most likely will. He watches me carefully. “I just want to stay for my brother’s wedding. I’ll stay away from you, and I won’t tell them about us.”
Us.
The word makes me grit my teeth.