“My mom is not her responsibility, Hailey. She’smymom.” Mack was surprised at how strongly he meant this.
“I know that, and I totally get how you must feel. But this woman took on the responsibility when she set up the arrangement; otherwise you would’ve worked something else out.”
“Like what? Put my mother in some state-funded hellhole? Dropped out of school to try to take care of her myself? You and I would never have even met then.”
He had backed them into a dangerous corner and was relieved when she led them out, however roughly: “You don’t know that every state-funded care home is a hellhole. So help me God, Mack Evans, you are going to be the one to take care of this. This is not going to be another thing that I have to deal with. And in case you are completely delusional, we do not have ten thousand dollars a month. Not even close. This is not a great time for the firm.”
In silence, they trailed the girls around the dusty Lakewood Park baseball diamond and past the picnic pavilion smoky with afternoon barbecues, then alongside the adventure playground and the teeming community pool. They followed the familiar sidewalks until they reached their old house, and Mack felt a pang of longing for its shadowy porch, the kitchen with its uncomplicated, working appliances, and his office in the third bedroom where he looked out at clouds and treetops. Hailey didn’t give the place so much as a sideways glance, and the girls had already sped past it and were banging on their former neighbor’s front door. Mack could smell the grill and hear his friend’s voice coming from the backyard; salvation was near. He swallowed his remark about hoping more couples would start hating each other in time for the last quarter of her financial year, and instead leaned in and pecked Hailey on the lips. “It’s gonna be okay.”
And he felt sure that it would be, at least until he was finally forced to tell her about his tutor group, and especially about Mackenzie Ewing. Then it might not be okay at all, though that would be entirely up to his wife and whether she believed his side of the story.
9
Hailey
Something was wrong. September was well underway and yet Mack was not going back to school. He wasthinking of taking the semester off.His mental health was not good, he’d said, like he was reading a public service announcement. This thing with his mom was preying on his mind, it was impossible to concentrate, he would be doing his students a disservice. He felt he needed a leave of absence, and the department had agreed to it.
No one had asked Hailey if she agreed to it.
For three mornings in a row, she watched Mack get the girls up for school. She said goodbye to him as he made their waffles, watched him through the glass in the front door sip his cheap instant coffee as she dug around the porch for her Prada wedges. He was crouched over his phone in his sweatpants and his smelly old Duke T-shirt, and he looked sneaky and anxious, Hailey thought, like one of her clients whose explicit texts with his mistress were about to be read out by opposing counsel.
As she was pulling out of the driveway, Mack came sprinting out.
“Babysitter,” he shouted through the closed car window. “Did you call her?”
They went three rounds—again—on why Hailey couldn’t just cancel the babysitter indefinitely, on said babysitter’s contract, and on what would happen when Mack went back to work, because hewasgoing back to work. Hailey couldn’t help feeling disgusted at his ten-day-old stubble and his glorified pajamas, and she burned with shame when she realized that she wasn’t the only one checking out the state of him: Betsy Wakefield stood on the strip of lawn between their houses as her two beribboned daughters climbed into the back of her Mercedes.
“Morning!” she called out to Mack and Hailey, and Mack replied with the same. “Have a great day at school, girls,” he added, turning back to Hailey.
“You too, Mack!” Betsy shouted back. Though it was impossible, Hailey felt sure from the tone of Betsy’s voice that their neighbor knew just what a freeloader Mack had suddenly become. How could she not? He was the picture of failure this morning, rumpled and whiskery and sour. Were there to be no more button-downs with rolled-up sleeves, no more stories about his Gen Z students being offended? He was really going to stand here and beg for the babysitter’s job? If Mack didn’t snap out of this, he might never need his sexy reading glasses again, and then Hailey really would leave him. Already three days had felt an eternity.
She waited until Betsy had driven off down the street. Her daughters were at the same school as Mabel, though no one had yet broached the subject of a carpool. It really was a waste of time and gas for both households to drive to the same place every morning, though, so Hailey would have to sort it out when she got a free half minute. She turned her attention back to Mack. “How long are you thinking this leave of absence is going to last exactly? The whole semester?”
Across the street, Grady and Deborah Sinclair emerged from their house in matching golf attire. Though they looked way too young for it, Hailey had heard they were retired, and they certainly seemed to do everything together. They waved a curt good morning in unison. Neither of them ever smiled; maybe that was what marriage did to you. Especially when you stopped working.
Mack bowed his head and backed away from the car. “Hailey, just...please. Just give me some time to deal with everything.”
Even with the sneaky shadow that flashed across his eyes again, even with his vague mutterings and his refusal to give her any concrete details, Hailey was still suddenly overcome with the urge to get out of the car and give him a hug. He looked so diminished standing there, a little boy who’d lost his father and then his mother and was all alone in the world except for Hailey. And despite everything he had been through, Mack wasneverdiminished. He never seemed to find life too much, and he was never too far the other way, either, never inflamed with unrealized ambition. Mack had always cruised happily through the middle of his existence, and whenever he’d needed to, he’d reached out and pulled Hailey along beside him, away from the spiky ups and downs she was prone to. His unflappability was like a drug, and Hailey felt its withdrawal acutely.
Which made her even madder. What right did Mack have to choose this moment to finally let something get to him? Something that was his own damn fault? He had sleepwalked right into this situation with his mother, and now he was going to neglect Hailey too?
“As long as they keep paying you, I guess you know what you need,” Hailey called out to him as she rolled her eyes and rolled up the window. The way Mack fled toward the house didn’t exactly fill her with confidence.
* * *
Marla, their rock-star paralegal, jumped on her as soon as she got to the office.
“I tried to call you,” the woman said in a breathless tone Hailey had never heard her use before. “He’s here. I don’t know why he’s here, but he’s here. David Rainier.”
Hailey’s hand shook, and her Starbucks splashed across her dress. Panic gripped her insides: Had she set up a meeting with David Rainier and forgotten? Was Rebekah about to descend on them too? Marla the paralegal would never have allowed such a slipup, and she rushed to reassure Hailey: “There’s nothing in the schedule. He says he just wants to talk, to meet you. I put him in the big conference room.”
“Okay.” Hailey had kept a freshly dry-cleaned blouse in the cupboard behind her desk ever since the Feldman divorce; Bruce Feldman’s now ex-wife had had a penchant for throwing cups of coffee at him in the heat of the moment, and though it had cost her dearly in the end, more than once Hailey had been caught in the crossfire and had to spend half a day drenched in French roast. Forever after she was prepared, except that today she was wearing a dress and there was no skirt or pair of pants in that closet. Instead, she attempted some creative folding to hide the stain as she made her way to the conference room, passing the perplexed faces of two senior partners lurking in the hallway. They’d want a full report; David Rainier and his bill-dodging wife were now the whole firm’s problem.
He was a big problem, too, bigger than she’d pictured—at least six foot four when he stood up to shake her hand, wide shoulders and arms bulging at the sleeves of his crisp white shirt. She took in his flawless smile, an expensive watch, a gold wedding band, of all things. Brown eyes framed by a thick head of dark hair. His LinkedIn photo and the selfies Hailey had seen from the social media research did not do him justice, so even though her brain was already tying itself in knots over all the things he could possibly say to cheat her out of a quarter million, Hailey did not have to force her own smile as she shook his hand: he looked like a worthy opponent.
He did not apologize for coming unannounced, and Hailey had no idea how long he had been waiting for her. She decided to let him speak first, but Rainier had the same plan; after accepting Marla’s offer of coffee (he took it black), he fixed Hailey with a look that bordered on the intense, and then hewaited. Hailey took the seat on the corner next to him—across the table was too adversarial—and they battled out the silence until Hailey cracked.
“So. Here you are.” She wasn’t about to indulge him with aThanks for coming in today, or anI hope you weren’t waiting long.
