"He's flying out tomorrow morning to meet the partners." She says it slowly, carefully, laying each word down flat. "Evan says it's just a meeting. He wanted me to know that part. Just a meeting... for now. And he says Finn's been torn up over it all day. Agonizing."
Just a meeting. Tomorrow morning. Agonizing.
She looks at me. "Have you seen him today? Has he tried to reach you?"
I shake my head, feeling numb. "No. Nothing."
You know what a man does when he's torn up about leaving somebody he cares for? He tells her. He sits her down at her kitchen table and gives her the chance to be part of the decision. Part of his life—the way a real couple does. Agonizing is what you do instead of that. Agonizing is private. I wasn't even invited to the agony.
A jab of anguish centers behind my sternum.
He knew this morning. That was hours ago. The whole day has passed since he's known. He's known longer than that, in some manner, because deals like that don't assemble in a day. They take weeks. They take about as long as he and I have been... doing whatever it is he thinks we've been doing.
Evidently, he wasn't calling that falling in love, if he's leaving tomorrow and I'm hearing it not from him, but from my friend, when there are just hours before he has to go.
"Okay," I say. My voice sounds fine. That surprises me. "Okay. Thank you for telling me."
"There's more." Annie's hands twist together in her lap, and now she looks like the words physically hurt on the way up. "I don't want to say the next part. I want you to know I thought about not saying it, and I couldn't do that to you, because you'd want to know, and you deserve to hear it from someone wholoves you." She hesitates. "Evan mentioned a bet. Finn and his poker friends. The billionaires he hangs with back in the city. They have a bet going—a million dollars each—about being the last one of them to fall for somebody. The last one to stay single takes the prize." Her voice drops like it's ashamed of itself. "It's Finn's bet, Darcy. He invented it as a joke."
The room goes very quiet, or I do.
I want to say that's ridiculous. Instead I stay silent, hearing the terrible click of a puzzle piece I've been holding since the eighth grade, finally finding its slot.
A joke.
God, am I that stupid? Because I know how this works. I have always known how this works. Boys like Finn Bardot make bets with their friends, and girls like me are the material. I learned that at thirteen, when a nickname followed me down a hallway and everyone laughed, including him. Dictionary Darcy. So smart. Such an easy target.
I don't want to believe it. Part of me simply cannot believe it.
Thirty years old and I outbid the whole town at an auction with my dream project's nest egg. For him. Somewhere out there is a table of billionaires who might have laughed at that, too. Maybe that was the whole game. Maybe I was the game. What's a better punchline than the girl who made herself a joke for you, twice, seventeen years apart?
"Darcy." Annie has moved. She's crouched next to my chair, her hand over mine on the quiz stack. "Say something."
"It didn't feel like a joke," I say, my voice wooden and toneless.
"I know."
"It felt real." I look at her because I can't look at anything else in this room, not the whiteboard, not the doorway, nothing that will still be here tomorrow when he isn't. "Annie, it felt so real with him."
"I know, honey. I know it did."
But believing something is real proves nothing. It felt real to my mother too—right up until my father chose a woman from a title company and a condo in Sarasota, and my mother found out the way everyone in this town finds out everything, which is to say last. I was there for the aftermath. I watched her hand back sympathy casseroles and learn to fix the furnace out of a library book, and she never once cried where I could see her, which is where I learned that trick, too.
I've told myself my whole life that I would never be blindsided the way she was. So I kept my eyes open. I noticed everything. And here I am anyway, blindsided. Devastated. The last to know.
"What do you need?" Annie says quietly. "Tell me what you need. I'll drive you home. I'll stay. Or I'll leave you alone. I'll key his stupid Ferrari. Name it."
"I need to pack up here," I hear myself say. "I need to go home and try to grade these papers. And I need to not cry until I'm home with the door closed behind me because I can't take any more humiliation in one day."
"Okay." Annie helps me. She slides the quizzes into my tote, and she finds my water bottle under my desk, and she does it all without saying one more word, because after twenty years she knows exactly when I need her to talk and exactly when I need her to be a quiet pair of hands. She loves me. It's the one fact in this room I'd still bet on.
And the worst part—the part I can't argue my way around, the part sitting at the bottom of everything like a stone—is I do love him. Still. Right now, this minute, knowing all of it. I love him so much that some traitorous part of me is already coming up with his side of it. I can't let that idiot part of me finish, because I have believed a man's kind face before. I have watchedwhat believing that man also did to my mother, and I know exactly what it costs.
An hour ago I had a speech.I love you. I want to be with you. Whatever that looks like.
I know what it looks like now. It looks like a mountain in Colorado with his name on the deed, and a classroom in Mattichogue with mine on the door, and a handful of weeks that meant two different things to the two people inside them.
I'm zipping the tote when my phone lights up on the desk.
