Cadence checked her phone as she meandered toward Honey Bee Bakery. Izzy was with Cadence’s parents today, so she wanted to make sure that nothing was amiss. There were no texts alerting Cadence to any of the many disasters that young children were wont to cause, but looking at her phone meant that she almost bumped directly into someone coming the other direction.
“Woah there, Cade!”
Her head jerked up to see Tyler, her… husband? Ex-husband? Possible soon-to-be ex-husband?
Cadence banished the thoughts of their uncertain relationship and gamely gave Tyler a smile.
“Hey,” she said. “What’s up?”
Immediately, she wanted to snatch the words back.What’s upseemed like such an inadequate thing to say to someone with whom you’d shared a life, a home, a child… and the perpetual heartbreak that had plagued them as they’d embraced that they would only ever have theonechild, no matter how often they tried for a second.
Once upon a time, Tyler had been her best friend. Before Izzy, he’d been her unquestioned number one person… and after Izzy, they’d been a perfect little trio. And yet the strain of wanting more of that love had increasingly driven a wedge between them. More and more, Cadence had felt like she was living with a stranger.
Even so, it was somehow weirder tonotlive with him, to have Tyler become the person who she only saw in brief moments at drop-off and pick-up time with Isabelle.
“Oh, not much,” Tyler replied, looking like he felt as awkward as she did. “Was thinking I’d run a few errands this morning. How about you? Isabelle with your parents?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I just took a hot yoga class, so they’re hanging out with her this morning,” she added, because she couldn’tnotexplain her appearance. She hadn’t dared look in a mirror as she’d practically bolted from the yoga class, but she could only assume that she looked a fright, red-faced and covered in sweat. The yoga outfit that had looked so cute this morning was certainly a little worse for the wear too.
It was not, all in all, the way one wanted to look when encountering one’s maybe-ex.
When he looked her over, however, Tyler let a smile flicker across his face, his true smile, the one she hadn’t seen in so long. It made her heart leap in her chest, but she ignored it. That was probably just habit, after all.
“So, hot yoga. Did you, uh, lose a bet?” He bit his lip, obviously trying not to laugh.
“No, you menace!” Cadence accused, only just stopping herself from reaching out to push his shoulder playfully. She couldn’t do that, not anymore.
“Wait, wait, wait,” he said. “So you are telling me thatyou, Cadence Meadows,voluntarilywent into a boiling hot room to exercise for an hour.”
“It’s not that far-fetched!”
“Ah,” Tyler said, holding up a finger. “Itwouldn’tbe so far-fetched if I did not know for a fact that you hate the heat.”
“I don’t hate the?—”
He interrupted her. “Florida for my parents’ thirtieth anniversary party,” he said with the air of a man who was winning an argument.
“That wasFloridain thesummer,” she protested. “It was, like, a hundred and five degrees! And, oh, I don’t know, twenty thousand percent humidity.”
“I feel like your numbers might be a little bit off there,” he quipped. “But sure. Forget that one. How about that time in our first apartment when our heat was on the fritz?”
“Nobody wants a radiator to make a room more than eighty degrees,” Cadence pointed out. “Andyouwere afraid it was going to blow up.”
“True,” he admitted, “but that was because I was afraid that we would blow up with it, not because I was afraid of a little sweat.”
She honestly didn’t have a good response to that, so she just rolled her eyes dramatically, making him laugh.
It felt… weirdly good to bicker with Tyler, especially about something as trivial as liking the heat or not, instead of the wearing fertility issues that had plagued them for so long. He’d teased her like this a lot when they’d first started dating, until she’d accused him of tugging her pigtails to get her attention.
“Sure,” he’d said back then, totally unconcerned. “Because you’re the girl I like. Duh.”
She’d never minded the teasing, but now, after all the history between them, it felt rather melancholy.
The problem was, she decided, that she and Tyler hadn’t stopped being together because they’d stopped loving one another. She was certain that would have been hard in its own way, but…
Maybe she was biased, given her situation, but she felt that it must be harder, certainly, to have a marriage fall apart becausethingsfell apart, not because you didn’t care about the person anymore. Still, she forced herself to pull in a deep breath and push her wandering thoughts aside. That was the kind of thing to reflect on with a blank journal page in front of her, not while she was standing in the street trying to have a conversation with her ex-ish husband.
“Anyway,” she said, pasting a smile on her face that felt only the smallest bit forced, “at the risk of letting you get the upper hand, I think you’re right. Hot yoga? Not for me.”
