“Well, I already advanced past you,” I said, and she looked at me for a moment and then nodded.
“Touché,” she said, and raised her can of Coke. “But I’m correct that it’s twaddle. After the song got so hot, I asked Rashelle about your ex, the criminal. Not your current criminal,” she specified.
“Silas isn’t a criminal. What did she say about Dax?”
There was quite a bit. It was mostly guesswork, since I’d never confided any of my relationship problems to my coworkers, butRashelle had been able to piece together quite a story. For example, she assumed (correctly) that he cheated on me. He also made me drive some piece of crap car and kept the good one for himself, and he wasted my money so that we’d had to live in a terrible apartment on an awful street.
“We could have lived somewhere else!” I protested angrily. “You shouldn’t encourage her to gossip.”
“She didn’t need encouragement.”
No, I was aware of that. And from an outsider’s perspective, it had probably been like watching a movie. The problem was that there was no guaranteed happy ending, and that was all I wanted to see.
“You’re a great attorney,” Octavia said suddenly. “I told her that those stories had to be wrong, because someone with so much professional success wouldn’t have been such an idiot in her personal life.”
“No, I was definitely an idiot,” I stated. “My ex-fiancé really was a horse’s patoot. He did cheat, and he did lie. He took my money, too.”
“Yes, yes. He didn’t respect you, he didn’t listen to you, he had no regard for your feelings, he broke promises, et cetera,” she said. “I find it disappointing that you wasted your time with him.”
“So do I,” I said. I was disappointed with myself and I was sorry that I hadn’t seen what was so obvious to the rest of the world...no. “I did see it,” I conceded. “I thought I could fix it.” I had never admitted it to myself, but I had believed that if Daxcould love me, if I was able to force it somehow, then—what? Then would I be good enough? It was pathetic.
“Camille, we’re professional, powerful women. Are we really going to sit at lunch and bemoan the loss of your philandering idiot of a boyfriend?”
“No!” I said. “I’m not bemoaning anything.”
“Well, I don’t have the time to fix your relationship drama. Love yourself first, boundaries, blah, blah. Miss?” she hollered at our server. “I’ll need a to-go box for this. I have a lizard.” She started to get into his diet again, frozen rodents and all.
I decided to ignore her, which she didn’t really notice. But as we waited to cross the street to go back to our building, Octavia said something else that interested me. “How odd. It’s the same car.”
“What?”
“That black SUV was in front of our building when we came out. Now it’s back, on our side of the street. It was parked just down the block while we were eating, too.”
I thought of Dax again. I still wasn’t bemoaning—I was remembering how he’d sent some of his friends here to this building to bother me. But according to Silas, my ex hadn’t been around lately. He had been quiet on all his socials, too, which I knew since I regularly checked. He definitely hadn’t texted or called me in months, but as we crossed the avenue, I looked at the black car. Had it really been following us?
I was still thinking about it that night as I ate dinner at home, for which I had arrived on time so that Silas, Lyra, and I couldbe at the table together. It was something that Beckett did, too: he always left early enough to make sure that he was home to eat with his wife, Juliet, and soon, there would be three of them in that palace of a house they had. She had texted me today to say that she and her sisters were working on finding a bunch of single guys for me, and she’d also talked a little about her pregnancy. I thought of a baby—
“Cammie?” Lyra waved her hand in front of my face. “Cammie!”
“Sorry,” I told her, coming out of my daydream. “What were you saying?”
She had wanted to know if I would help her go over her vocabulary list, which I would (of course) and she also wanted to know if I would drive her and Boris to school the next morning, so that they didn’t have to take the bus.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because he and his grandma always have her famous tuna fish casserole on Thursday nights, so on Friday, he has to bring tuna leftovers in his lunch bag,” she explained. “It’s not as bad as herring, but it stinks and everyone on the bus yells about it. The driver won’t let us open the windows until it gets warmer.”
“Temperatures are supposed to rise next week, getting near fifty,” Silas offered, but that wasn’t soon enough to save the kids on the bus tomorrow.
“Maybe I could talk to Mrs. Alford about that,” I suggested, but Lyra answered that it was too late because they were already having the casserole right now. Boris always ate as much as he could so that there wouldn’t be anything left for lunch, butthere was only so much tuna that a boy could take down. And his supposed enthusiasm for the dish only further convinced his grandmother that it was his favorite food, and that she should keep making it weekly.
“Please drive us?” she begged me, and I had a hard time saying no to her little face.
“Pushover,” her brother said, pointing his fork at me, but he wasn’t one to talk. The Saturday before, he had stayed up until two in the morning finishing the basement so that Lyra and Boris could spend their Sunday playing down there. It really did look nice, and next on the renovation schedule was her bedroom. That meant she would temporarily be with me, which I was thrilled about.
We finished dinner and I started cleaning up, still thinking. The water poured over the dishes and I remembered scrubbing different pots and pans after I’d made meals for Dax—since he hadn’t believed in the division of labor, I had been doing the cooking and also the cleaning. I had also done the shopping to buy the food, and I paid the bills for the water to wash them and electricity to see what I was doing. When I looked back now, I recognized that it was nothing like the movie life I’d wanted. Had I ever been happy with him, when it was all so much work? Not just the dishes, but trying every day to get him to feel—
A hand rested on the small of my back and I jumped.
