Chapter 10 #2
"Are you following me?" she asked, but she was smiling.
"I was here first." He nodded toward the stairs. "Buddy lets me dig through the back stock before he puts it out. Standing arrangement."
He was wearing an old T-shirt that might have once been black, and jeans worn soft at the knees. He looked like he'd been up for hours, which probably meant he'd just gotten out of bed.
"You're down here at—" She glanced at her phone. "Nine in the morning, digging through a basement?"
"Best stuff goes fast. You snooze, you lose." He shifted the records. "What about you? Didn't take you for a vinyl person."
"I'm not. Or I wasn't." She looked down at the album in her hands.
"Paul's Boutique." He tilted his head approvingly. "Good choice. Most people go for Licensed to Ill, but this one's the real gem."
"I finished the book last night," she said, not sure why she was telling him.
"Which one?" Clint leaned against the bin.
"The mystery." She shook her head. "Woke up this morning not knowing what to do with myself."
Clint set his records on top of the bin beside her. "That sounds about right."
"Does it?" Her eyebrows rose.
"When you've been working on something that long, it becomes part of how you think.
Then it's done and you have all this space where it used to be.
" He stepped closer, eyes on the bin rather than on her.
"After we finished our last album, I kept waking up in the middle of the night thinking I should be at the studio. "
"How'd you get past it?" Jen asked.
"Started writing new stuff. Different stuff." He glanced at her. "That fantasy you mentioned. The off-brand one. You still working on it?"
"It's grown. A lot." Jen straightened slightly.
"Good." Clint nodded. "That's how you know it's real."
She slid the Beastie Boys album back into the bin then pulled it out again. "Last time we talked, you said I already knew what I wanted to do. That I was just afraid."
"Sounds like something I'd say." He smiled, just slightly.
"You were right. I knew. I just couldn't admit it while the mystery was still hanging over me." She flipped the album to read the track listing. "But I finished it. And I don't have that excuse anymore."
"So what's next?" His voice was gentle.
"That's the terrifying part." Jen exhaled. "I don't know."
"Also the good part." He shifted his grip on the records. "Hey. Thursday. The residency. You should come."
Her head lifted. "Yeah?"
"The new stuff I mentioned? It's been landing. Thursdays especially. The crowd's different, more listening than dancing." He looked almost shy. "I'd like you to hear it. If you want."
"The Hard Rock's not exactly around the corner," Jen pointed out.
"Forty minutes." He shrugged. "Less if you hit the lights right."
"Okay," she said.
"Okay?" Clint looked surprised.
"I'll come. Thursday."
His smile this time was slower, more careful. "I'll leave your name at the door."
"You don't have to do that," she said.
"I want to." He hesitated. "Jen. The fantasy book. Whatever it is, wherever it goes, keep writing it. The thing you're not supposed to be making is usually what matters most."
He walked toward the counter without waiting for a response. She watched him go, saw him set down his stack and start talking to the owner, gesturing at one of the albums, falling into what was clearly a familiar argument about condition and value.
She carried the album to the register.
The guy looked up when she approached, gave a small nod to Clint, and rang her up without comment. Nine dollars. She paid in cash, and he slid the record into a brown paper bag with a logo she didn't recognize.
"Good album," the guy said, and it sounded like it physically pained him to offer a compliment.
"Thanks."
"Don't play it on anything cheap." He handed her the bag like he was entrusting her with a family heirloom. "You'll ruin it."
"I'm not even sure I still have a turntable."
He stared at her. Clint, behind her, made a sound that might have been a laugh.
"Then why are you buying it?" the guy asked.
"I have no idea," Jen said honestly, and walked out before he could take it back.
Olivia stopped walking when she saw the nail salon.
She'd been up all night, Lily's words playing on a loop.
They kissed. For a long time. Dan outside their house at two in the morning.
Rachel in her car. Everything he'd sworn hadn't happened, happening.
Eventually the house had woken up around her, and she'd slipped out the door without saying goodbye to anyone.
Now she was here. A place called Polished, its windows lined with neon-pink cursive and photos of manicured hands. The sign said WALK-INS WELCOME.
She went inside.
The woman at the front glanced over. "Good morning. Walk-in?"
"Yes." Her voice sounded strange to her own ears. Flat. "Mani-pedi."
They led her to one of the massage chairs along the wall, the kind with the built-in footbath.
Olivia leaned back into it and let the water run warm over her feet while someone started on her hands at the little table beside her.
Two women working at once, efficient and focused, not interested in small talk.
She stared at the TV above her, some home renovation show with the sound off, and let her mind go blank.
She wasn't okay. Wouldn't be okay for a while.
But she was clear. That was what surprised her. After months of confusion, of trying to decide if she could forgive him, of weighing what was fair and what was possible, she'd finally arrived somewhere solid.
"Color?"
Olivia blinked. The woman doing her feet was waiting, gesturing at the wall of polish.
She scanned the rows of bottles without really seeing them. Pinks, reds, neutrals. All the safe choices she'd been making for years. Then her eyes landed on a bottle in the corner.
A bright blue. Electric, almost cobalt. She'd picked it up once at a salon back home, and Dan had made a face. That's a little much, isn't it? She'd put it back and gotten the pale pink instead.
"That one," she said. "Same for both."
When her feet were done, they moved her to a table to finish drying her toes and complete the manicure. She sat there watching the blue go on her fingernails, one hand and then the other, while couples walked past the window outside and the renovation show played silently above her.
Outside, twenty minutes later, she stood on the sidewalk with her nails still tacky and her phone in her hand. She didn't remember pulling it out.
Olivia dialed Dan's number.
He answered on the second ring, cheerful and oblivious. "Hey, babe. I was just thinking about you. How's the trip going?"
Olivia let him talk. Let him ask about the weather, the house, whether the kids were having fun. He sounded normal. Sounded like the man she'd been married to for seventeen years, the father of her children, the person she was supposed to be saving this marriage for.
"Lily told me something the other night," she said when he'd run out of pleasantries.
A pause. "What?"
"She saw you. In January. Outside the house." Olivia's voice was steady, steadier than she felt. "With Rachel. At two in the morning."
The silence stretched. She could hear him breathing, could almost see him on the other end of the line, trying to figure out what to say. What story to tell.
"Olivia, it wasn't—"
"Don't." The word came out sharper than she intended.
"Don't tell me it wasn't what I think. Don't tell me I misunderstood.
Our daughter saw you kiss another woman outside our house in the middle of the night.
She's been carrying that for five months because she was scared to tell me.
She's fifteen years old, and she's been keeping your secret because she was afraid of what would happen if she didn't."
"I was going to tell you. I just—" His voice cracked.
"You looked me in the eye. In the counselor's office. You swore it was only emotional. That nothing physical happened." Her eyes closed. "And I believed you. That's on me. But the lying—that's on you."
"It was only once," Dan said. "It didn't mean anything."
"It meant everything." She waited for her voice to shake. It didn't. "I've spent six months trying to forgive you for something you told me was just texts. Just feelings. Just a mistake that didn't actually cross any lines. And the whole time, you were lying."
"Olivia, please. We can work through this. We can—"
"No." The word was soft but final. "We can't."
"You can't just decide that on a phone call." She could hear him pacing. "We should talk about this, face to face, when you get back—"
"I'm done, Dan." She heard herself say it and knew she meant it. "Not done talking. Not done for now. Done. I can't keep trying to save something you already broke."
"The counseling, the effort, doesn't that count for anything?"
"It might have," Olivia said. "If you'd told me the truth."
He didn't answer. Traffic hummed faintly on his end, the familiar silence of the house she'd left behind.
"The kids—" he started.
"The kids will be fine. They're strong, and they have both of us, and they'll be fine." She exhaled. "I'll call you when I get back. We can figure out logistics then."
"Olivia, wait—"
She hung up.
The phone stayed in her hand, screen going dark. Seventeen years, ending outside a nail salon in Sea Isle City. She braced for the collapse, the tears. They didn't come.
Instead, she felt still. The noise in her head—the arguments, the justifications, the endless calculations—had simply stopped.
Olivia started walking. No direction, just motion. Past houses with their beach chairs stacked on porches, past kids on bikes, past a dog-walking service with four leashes tangled together. The town moved around her, oblivious to the fact that her marriage had just ended in under five minutes.
Her phone buzzed once, twice, three times. She didn't look.
After a while, she made her way back toward the house. The shape of it rising against the sky, already starting to feel like theirs. Someone was on the rooftop deck. Voices drifted up from the pool.
The blue polish was perfect. Bright and unapologetic. The kind of thing Dan would have called "a little much." She smiled at her hands and kept walking.