Chapter 3
JULIETTE
My apartment sits in a brick building a few blocks from downtown Alexandria. I’m close enough to walk to the shop, far enough that the rent doesn’t immediately send me into a spiral—largely because Charlie mentioned an available unit in passing and then quietly made sure I met the right person.
It’s small but cozy, with just enough space for me and Theo to exhale at the end of the day.
Everything in this place has a past: the couch discovered at a yard sale that I reupholstered myself, the coffee table that’s actually an old trunk pretending to be furniture, the lamp my friend Vivian insists is “vintage” but I know is just old.
Nothing matches, but it all works. Plants soften the edges—pothos trailing down the top of the fridge, a fern perched on a stool because I ran out of surfaces, a stubborn succulent clinging to life on the windowsill.
The kitchen barely qualifies as one, but it smells like garlic and tomato sauce, and for tonight, that feels like enough.
“So what’s his name again?” Vivian, my best-friend-because-she-told-me-she was, says, stretched out on my couch like she pays rent here, her phone already in her hand. “S-T-O-C-K…Stockton? Stockton, right?”
“What are you doing?” I ask, narrowing my eyes as I drain the pasta.
“I’m looking him up,” she says cheerfully. “Of course.”
“Vivian.”
“What? You can’t just casually drop ‘There was a professional hockey player in my plant shop the other day…’ and expect me not to investigate.” She laughs. “I’m single, and they are usually hot.”
“I asked you to come over to help me plan my son’s birthday party,” I say, turning off the stove. “Not to internet-stalk a man you’ve never met.”
She looks up, entirely unrepentant, flipping her sunlit blonde hair back as her blue eyes flash. “I can do both.”
“You cannot,” I say. “You’ve proven this repeatedly. Last week, you were texting and walking when you ran straight into a parking meter. The week before that, you put your phone in the fridge and your yogurt in your purse.”
“Please. At least I figured out the yogurt before it started to stink.” She flips the phone around to show me her screen, wearing a smug expression reeking of I told you so.
“I already know his stats, his height, and the fact that half the city thinks he’s hot.
He was voted Alexandria’s Most Eligible Bachelor a few months back.
” She turns the phone back around so she can look at the photo of Sawyer herself.
“I must say, I agree with them. His butt looks like an actual peach.”
“Vivian!”
“What? Fruit is good for you.” She grins.
This is so Vivan. Her love language as a friend is to torture me slowly, like a sister.
“But, fine, let’s stick with the assignment.
” She closes her phone and puts it on the table beside her.
“Ten years old. Double digits is a big deal. Do you already know what he wants?”
“I do,” I say, dumping the pasta back into the pot. “Which is the problem.”
She sits up, interest piqued. “Lay it on me.”
“Hockey tickets. Skating lessons. All of which made me deduce that he’ll want actual hockey lessons and team camaraderie eventually. And”—I sigh—“he added a dog to the list today. Casually. Like dogs are free.”
Vivian bursts out laughing. “Of course he did.”
“How do I afford tickets to games, lessons to play hockey, and a dog?” I ask, gesturing wildly with the wooden spoon. “Plus everything else. Rent. Groceries. Life. Shoes that mysteriously stop fitting overnight.”
She waves a hand. “We’ll figure something out. We always do.”
“That’s not a plan.”
“It’s a vibe, a gut feeling to trust our intuition,” she says. “Also, look on the bright side.”
I raise an eyebrow. “There is no bright side to a surprise dog request.”
“At least he didn’t ask for a horse,” Vivian says. “Because I genuinely don’t know where you’d put a horse in a two-bedroom apartment.”
I snort despite myself. “Pretty sure the HOA frowns on livestock.”
“Very anti-horse,” she agrees. “Though imagine Theo’s face.”
She’s right. He’d freak out. But no. “Sorry, Viv. No horses, not today and probably not ever.”
“Party pooper.” Vivian leans forward, elbows on her knees, officially in problem-solving mode. “Okay, let’s pivot. What if we do something at the Smithsonian? You take a bunch of his friends, wander around, maybe ice cream after. Educational and fun.”
“Ten-year-olds doing educational things for a birthday?” I freeze mid-stir. “Absolutely not.”
She blinks. “Wow. That was fast.”
“I’m not wrangling a pack of tiny humans with opinions on the Mall in spring,” I say, pointing my spoon at her like it’s a weapon.
“That turns into a school field trip immediately. Other parents get involved. Clipboards appear. There may be cherry blossoms surrounding us, but I can guarantee no one’s happy. ”
“Fair,” she concedes. “Okay, pivot again. Bowling party.”
I stare at her.
“What?” she says. “Kids love bowling.”
“Theo doesn’t,” I say. “He says the shoes smell like sadness, and honestly, he’s not wrong.” I sigh, leaning back against the counter. “I don’t know if I can pull something together right now. Even if I could…he just doesn’t like bowling.”
Vivian taps her fingers against her phone, thinking. When she holds a finger in the air, I stop her.
“If you’re going to suggest that Mexican restaurant down the street Theo likes, don’t. If they put that sombrero on his head, I guarantee he won’t like it. He’ll want to know who else wore it and if it was cleaned before they put it on his head, too.”
“So wise.” Snickering, Vivian shakes her head. “All right. What if we keep it simple? Maybe you take him to a Dominion game, just the two of you. They could put something on the jumbotron for his birthday—” She stops herself mid-sentence, her cheeks flushing bright pink. “Or not.”
I don’t respond. I don’t even move. I’m frozen to the spot where I stand, wooden spoon in my hand, pasta steaming on the stove, my body reacting before my brain can catch up.
My shoulders go tight. My stomach drops.
My pulse skids like it’s hit the ice while driving ninety miles an hour without warning.
It’s not normal to have a physical reaction to the word jumbotron.
Yet, I do.
I swallow, set the spoon down carefully, like if I move too fast something might break. “That’s not really an option.”
Vivian’s expression softens immediately. She knows that tone. The one I use when I’m closing a door I don’t want reopened.
“Okay,” she says gently. “Scratch that.”
I nod, even though my chest still feels too tight. “Sorry. I know you’re trying to help.”
“I am,” she says. “And we will figure this out. He’s not asking for something unreasonable. He just wants what he wants.”
“I know,” I say quietly.
Vivian tilts her head, studying me. “You okay?”
“Yeah,” I lie. “I am. Or…I will be.”
Her eyes flick toward the window, toward the city beyond it. Toward the shop. Toward Monday. “You know you have done, and are doing, everything right, don’t you?”
I turn my body at a slight angle so Vivan can’t see the tears welling up involuntarily. I know what she’s saying, and what she’s trying to do. She’s a great friend for her loyalty and love. But she knows my scar, the wound inside of me that is cut so deep I’m actually scared it’ll never heal.
“Hey,” Vivan says as she walks over to me and puts an arm around my shoulders. “Don’t go there. Don’t think about it.”
“I hear you saying these things, but you need to understand that when you get humiliated by a jumbotron, well, it seems you never really recover from it.” This I know from first-hand experience, because I keep waiting for the sting to cease and desist. I know it will one day, it’s just not here yet.
“There are a lot of ways for people to find out a spouse is cheating on them, but to have it happen so publicly…” Vivian doesn’t finish her sentence, she simply shakes her head.
Three years ago, after we picked up our lives and moved to Virginia, my peaceful, calm, “happy” world blew up.
We’d moved so David could take a position he’d been promoted to.
It was a job he’d always wanted, and even though I was about to start my own landscape design business back in Chicago, he begged me to put those plans on hold.
Move for him, for us. He would be in a better position to take care of us as a family, he said.
Theo could go to a better school, and I would love Virginia.
We had been living here barely six months when The Moment happened.
"I still can’t believe it was a Kiss Cam,” Vivian says, reading my mind the way she’s learned to do. “Of all the ways to blow up a marriage—”
“A Kiss Cam,” I repeat, stirring the pasta with more force than necessary. “Capital K, capital C. Like some kind of perverse proper noun that will follow me forever.”
“At a Caps game,” she adds, because apparently, we’re doing the full recap tonight.
“Section 112,” I say flatly, since we’re going there. “Not that I’ve memorized it or anything.”
Vivian winces. “Babe—”
“No, it’s fine.” I set the spoon down again, gripping the edge of the counter.
“It’s actually kind of impressive when you think about it.
The sheer statistical improbability. What are the odds?
You move your family across the country for a promotion, you’re home with your six-year-old building LEGO sets, and your husband is at a hockey game—for work, he said—and then boom.
Kiss Cam. Blonde in a Capitals jersey. Tongue. Viral by the end of the night.”
“Ten million views,” Vivian says quietly.
“Twelve,” I correct. “But who's counting?”
She looks at me with those eyes that say I’m so sorry this happened to you, and I have to look away because if I hold her gaze for one more second, I’m going to fall apart over marinara sauce, and that feels too on-the-nose even for my life.