“Your mother?”
“No, my—wife. Ex-wife. I’ll call you later, I promise.”
“Okay.”
I hung up. The words, ‘my wife…ex-wife’ played over and over again in my head. If he was going to get back together with her, at least I didn’t have to stick around for that humiliation. The part that left me unsettled was the doubt. Did he still love me? Was he trying to find a way to work things out?
I waited until midnight, and he didn’t call.
The next morning,I called my sister first thing.
“Hey, are you at work?” I asked.
“No,” she said, “that job didn’t start yet, which is good because Nick may be taking a gig out of town.”
“What? Wasn’t the whole thing with him that he was going to stay in one place for you?”
“It’s a really good gig, apparently.” Laura’s voice was dry. “I mean it’s good money, I’ll give him that. But.”
“But,” I agreed. There was a long moment.
“How are you?” she finally asked.
“I’m okay,” I lied. “I just found out that my work is getting rid of its work-from-home policy.”
“What? Starting when?”
“Next week,” I said. “I have to be in on Monday. Every Monday. One day a week, which feels even more insulting somehow. Like it’s so obviously just for show.”
“Oh, Abby, I’m sorry,” Laura said. “I knew you were hoping to stay up there for a while longer.”
“It was always a bit of a fantasy in the first place,” I said. “Thinking this could work out.”
“It sounded like you were having fun, though,” she said.
“Anyway,” I said, “I’ll be back in New York, whether I want to be or not, so…I’ll be in a better place if you need me to fly down there or whatever, to see Hannah. I miss her. You too, of course.”
“Well,” Laura said. There was a long moment. “I decided to move back to New York too.”
My heart dropped. “What? I thought things were going okay. Why didn’t you tell me right away?”
“I knew you would say I told you so.”
“Laurie…”
“It was like he had this whole idea about how things were supposed to be if we moved down here. He picked our neighborhood. He decided we were going to buy a house. And as soon as I wanted to veer from that, he didn’t…I think financially, the only way he could make his whole thing work was if I stuck with his plan, and he…” There was a long moment of silence. “He always does this. He always ends up taking a gig, and he lied to me about it. This time was supposed to be different. So the bottom line is, if he wants to see his daughter, he has to come up to New York and make the effort. I can’t give up my entire life to try to make this work.”
My heart was racing, and I wasn’t sure why. “What are you going to do? Try to get your old job back?”
“Maybe. I don’t know yet. I gave up my apartment, so I’ll have to try to find somewhere else before school starts up there. I just want Hannah to start the year with her classmates. I think she’s miserable here. Georgia already started the school year, so it’s going to be a rough transition for her.”
“You guys can stay at my place if you come back to the city. You know that.”
“Really?” Laura asked.
“Really. It’s okay,” I said. I caught a little sob in my voice. I hadn’t even known I was upset.
“Are you okay, Abby? We don’t have to stay.”
