Chapter 20
CHAPTER TWENTY
I’m going to die, Cadence thought as she stared down at her yoga mat. I am going to collapse into a puddle of my own sweat and drown. Goodbye, world. This is it for me.
Cadence knew her thoughts were a bit melodramatic, but goodness, it was so very hot in this room.
The warmth had felt just north of pleasant when she’d first entered the room, and as class had begun, she could sense the appeal.
The heat had loosened her muscles, making her feel strong and flexible.
But then she’d kept exercising, and the heat had been relentless inside and outside her body, and now she felt like a popsicle on a summer’s day.
She snuck a glance at the clock at the back of the room even though she had to come out of the downward-facing dog position that everyone else seemed to hold so easily in order to do so.
Only seven more minutes. Thank goodness.
Cadence survived the last few minutes by thinking of ice water, ice cream, the polar ice caps.
Anything that was cold. And when the teacher called the class to an end, she was the first out the door, her yoga mat gathered hastily under one arm.
She leaned against the wall outside, the spring breeze the most refreshing thing she’d ever felt…
after the water she was gulping down, of course.
A wiry older man who had been, at one point in the class, executing a perfect headstand, shot her a grin as he exited the yoga studio.
“First time?” he asked.
“And last time, I think,” she said, laughing.
He chuckled too. “It’s not for everyone.
Me? I’ve got the bug. I do this nearly every day.
” Cadence shuddered at the thought. “That’s how my wife feels,” he added, noting her gesture.
“I couldn’t get her to come with me to a class for love or money.
But don’t worry. You’ll find something that’s right for you. ”
He gave her a friendly nod as he walked away, looking far too spry, and not nearly sweaty enough, for someone who had spent the last hour in that baking hot room.
Cadence felt cheered by his parting words. She would find something that was right for her.
But what she wanted to find right now was a pastry, one that was full of sugar and butter and deliciousness.
She deserved it, she felt, after that last grueling hour.
Cadence checked her phone as she meandered toward Honey Bee Bakery.
Izzy was with Cadence’s parents today, so she wanted to make sure that nothing was amiss.
There were no texts alerting Cadence to any of the many disasters that young children were wont to cause, but looking at her phone meant that she almost bumped directly into someone coming the other direction.
“Woah there, Cade!”
Her head jerked up to see Tyler, her… husband? Ex-husband? Possible soon-to-be ex-husband?
Cadence banished the thoughts of their uncertain relationship and gamely gave Tyler a smile.
“Hey,” she said. “What’s up?”
Immediately, she wanted to snatch the words back.
What’s up seemed like such an inadequate thing to say to someone with whom you’d shared a life, a home, a child…
and the perpetual heartbreak that had plagued them as they’d embraced that they would only ever have the one child, no matter how often they tried for a second.
Once upon a time, Tyler had been her best friend.
Before Izzy, he’d been her unquestioned number one person…
and after Izzy, they’d been a perfect little trio.
And yet the strain of wanting more of that love had increasingly driven a wedge between them.
More and more, Cadence had felt like she was living with a stranger.
Even so, it was somehow weirder to not live with him, to have Tyler become the person who she only saw in brief moments at drop-off and pick-up time with Isabelle.
“Oh, not much,” Tyler replied, looking like he felt as awkward as she did. “Was thinking I’d run a few errands this morning. How about you? Isabelle with your parents?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I just took a hot yoga class, so they’re hanging out with her this morning,” she added, because she couldn’t not explain her appearance.
She hadn’t dared look in a mirror as she’d practically bolted from the yoga class, but she could only assume that she looked a fright, red-faced and covered in sweat.
The yoga outfit that had looked so cute this morning was certainly a little worse for the wear too.
It was not, all in all, the way one wanted to look when encountering one’s maybe-ex.
When he looked her over, however, Tyler let a smile flicker across his face, his true smile, the one she hadn’t seen in so long. It made her heart leap in her chest, but she ignored it. That was probably just habit, after all.
“So, hot yoga. Did you, uh, lose a bet?” He bit his lip, obviously trying not to laugh.
“No, you menace!” Cadence accused, only just stopping herself from reaching out to push his shoulder playfully. She couldn’t do that, not anymore.
“Wait, wait, wait,” he said. “So you are telling me that you, Cadence Meadows, voluntarily went into a boiling hot room to exercise for an hour.”
“It’s not that far-fetched!”
“Ah,” Tyler said, holding up a finger. “It wouldn’t be so far-fetched if I did not know for a fact that you hate the heat.”
“I don’t hate the—”
He interrupted her. “Florida for my parents’ thirtieth anniversary party,” he said with the air of a man who was winning an argument.
“That was Florida in the summer,” she protested. “It was, like, a hundred and five degrees! And, oh, I don’t know, twenty thousand percent humidity.”
“I feel like your numbers might be a little bit off there,” he quipped. “But sure. Forget that one. How about that time in our first apartment when our heat was on the fritz?”
“Nobody wants a radiator to make a room more than eighty degrees,” Cadence pointed out. “And you were afraid it was going to blow up.”
“True,” he admitted, “but that was because I was afraid that we would blow up with it, not because I was afraid of a little sweat.”
She honestly didn’t have a good response to that, so she just rolled her eyes dramatically, making him laugh.
It felt… weirdly good to bicker with Tyler, especially about something as trivial as liking the heat or not, instead of the wearing fertility issues that had plagued them for so long.
He’d teased her like this a lot when they’d first started dating, until she’d accused him of tugging her pigtails to get her attention.
“Sure,” he’d said back then, totally unconcerned. “Because you’re the girl I like. Duh.”
She’d never minded the teasing, but now, after all the history between them, it felt rather melancholy.
The problem was, she decided, that she and Tyler hadn’t stopped being together because they’d stopped loving one another. She was certain that would have been hard in its own way, but…
Maybe she was biased, given her situation, but she felt that it must be harder, certainly, to have a marriage fall apart because things fell apart, not because you didn’t care about the person anymore.
Still, she forced herself to pull in a deep breath and push her wandering thoughts aside.
That was the kind of thing to reflect on with a blank journal page in front of her, not while she was standing in the street trying to have a conversation with her ex-ish husband.
“Anyway,” she said, pasting a smile on her face that felt only the smallest bit forced, “at the risk of letting you get the upper hand, I think you’re right. Hot yoga? Not for me.”
It was another mark of the chasm of time and history between them that he didn’t gloat teasingly about her telling him he was right. Instead, he tilted his head, giving her a contemplative look.
“What made you try it?” he asked. She couldn’t help but wonder if there was something lurking beneath the surface of the question.
She forced herself to stay sunny. “Oh, you know. Just looking for a change.”
Tyler flinched, so tiny it was imperceptible to anyone who didn’t know him as well as Cadence did. She felt that flinch in her heart. It was precisely how she felt whenever she thought about a future without the family she had imagined for so long.
Quickly, both to change the subject and because she realized that she’d been a bit rude, she asked, “And how are you? How’s the apartment? Izzy only tells me about her room, of course.”
Cadence had stayed in the house where they’d all lived together, which was a blessing and a curse. On one hand, moving was a nightmare, and she was pleased to provide that stability for Isabelle. On the other, memories lurked around every corner.
Tyler paused, like he wasn’t sure how to answer. For a moment that felt like an eternity, his gaze searched hers, looking for… something. She didn’t know exactly what. Then he gave a lopsided smile, the one she’d seen so very many times.
“Oh, you know, that’s probably for the best,” he said. “Izzy’s room is basically the only thing that’s done. You know that old saying about how the barber has the worst haircut in town? Well, I know I’m only an electrician, but the concept applies.”
“After a long day of improving other people’s houses, you come home not exactly in a rush to improve your own?
” she asked, not without sympathy. It had taken her ages to decide on décor for their—now her—house for the same reason.
She’d worked at the gallery all day, and then had felt that planning what to put on her own walls was an absolutely impossible task.
“Yeah, exactly,” he said. “It’s very… well, I’d say ‘bachelor chic’ but there’s nothing chic about it, I’m afraid. More like ‘somebody really lives here?’”