“I wish I could.” He tugs at the bottom of the T-shirt he loaned me last night and raises his eyebrow. “But I’ve got to get to the station. The guys texted that it was a rough night, so I want to get there a bit early and relieve them.”
I smile as I watch concern fill his eyes. “I love how much you love your job,” I say, thinking about my classroom that I’d just returned to last week. How good it felt to take in each and every one of my new fourth graders’ faces, to sit in the chair behind my desk and watch them as they read their textbooks, to let myself get excited about a field trip we were taking to the discovery museum. The school had offered to extend my leave of absence, but I needed to get back to teaching. It was what reminded me I was still me.
Nick kisses me again. “Stay as long as you want, okay? It’s Sunday! Enjoy yourself. I set the espresso maker out for you. I know what a beast you are without your caffeine.”
“I’m not that bad.”
“Says you.” He laughs when I swipe at him, and I watch him walk out of the room.
A few hours later as I’m leaving, I see the woman from the night before hovering in the hallway outside of Nick’s front door. She flashes me a surprised look, then rushes away, but she abruptly stops and turns her body halfway around, as if she doesn’t know which way she’s going.
“Did you need something?” I ask. “Nick’s not here . . .”
“I know. I saw him leave earlier.” She stares down at her cherry-red wedge sandals, then looks back up. “I was coming to see you actually,” she says as she takes a few tentative steps in my direction.
“Me?”
She rolls her eyes.
I think about the strange look she gave Nick last night. How she sized me up. “I know you must be upset about seeing Nick with someone so soon after Dylan . . .” I pause, remembering the conversation I had with Isabella. How hard it was for her to see I’d already moved on. “But it’s complicated.”
She crosses her arms.
“Listen . . .” I stop, realizing I don’t know her name.
“Briana,” she says.
“Look, Briana, I get it. You’re upset about Dylan. My husband died too. They were in Maui together, having an affair. I’m not sure if you realize that. But that’s how Nick and I met—we were both devastated to discover the people we loved weren’t who we thought.”
“You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
Her harsh tone stuns me. We stand there for a few moments, neither of us breaking eye contact, and finally, I speak. “Where do you get off coming here and attacking me? We’re all upset. We all lost people.”
“You really think Dylan was over there cheating on him when she died?”
“What else would you call it? They were engaged.”
“Oh my God. You really don’t know.” Briana takes a step backward as if she suddenly needs to distance herself from my ignorance.
“Know what?” I ask.
“Dylan and Nick had broken up months before she went to Maui.”
I feel as if the air is being sucked out of my chest. I struggle to take in a breath. They weren’t engaged?
Briana seems oblivious to my shock. “Dylan dumped him because . . .” She doesn’t finish her sentence.
“Because she wanted to be with my husband, James,” I finish, almost instinctively trying to defend Nick.
“I think she hoped he would leave you,” she adds, and I fight back my tears. Was that what James had been planning? To leave?
“Are you . . . are you sure they had broken up?” I ask, trying to find the logic in it. But my mind keeps drifting back to Nick, the sweet man who’d reached over and wiped a drip of ice cream off my chin, then kissed me where it had been just to make sure it was gone.
“She told me everything—the night before they left for Maui. She was so upset. Nick had started stalking her—he wouldn’t accept that it was over.”
Nick . . . a stalker? I shake my head.
“You don’t believe me? Why would I make it up? I’m taking a big enough risk coming here.”
“What does that mean? A risk?”
She looks past me as if she’s worried someone might be coming. “After she gave him the ring back, he freaked out.” She lowers her voice slightly. “She told me he followed her, threatened her. She thought about getting a restraining order.”
Restraining order? Against Nick? Are we even talking about the same man?
I grab the doorjamb, thinking about James—how he’d lied to me for so long. How I’d been so oblivious. Nick can’t be a liar too. There’s no way I could be that wrong twice in a lifetime.
Briana stares at me for a moment, and I silently pray that she’ll tell me she’s mixed up, she doesn’t have her facts straight, she’s sorry she bothered me.
“I realize you don’t know me,” she says. “I could be some crazed ex-roommate making shit up. And you don’t want to believe it. But it’s true.” She sighs. “I wish I still had her journal. It was all written in there. But it’s gone—her parents have it.”
“Journal?”
“I’ve said too much already.” She makes a face like she’s sorry. “Just be careful, okay?” She gives me one last long look, then hurries down the hallway, disappearing into the stairwell.
I call after her. But the door slams behind her, and this time she doesn’t come back.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
DYLAN—BEFORE
She didn’t know what it was about this particular cloudy Monday morning, just three months after accepting Nick’s proposal, that was giving her the courage to break up with him. All she knew for sure was that ever since the night James had invited her to Maui, her engagement ring felt even tighter, her chest even more compressed, her heart even less invested. She wiped the foggy bathroom mirror and stared at her reflection, wondering how she could’ve been so in love with Nick and could barely conjure that feeling now.
They’d met just eighteen months before, when she’d moved from Phoenix. The first time she’d seen the firefighter in her building was when he’d gotten off his motorcycle in the parking garage. She’d watched him guide his bike in and put his helmet away with such care, she was almost entranced. Another time she’d been behind him in the line at Peet’s, staring at his dusty cowboy boots, never having known a man who had owned a pair. She found them sexy.
And then one day she’d been standing by the mailboxes, and she heard a male voice make a joke about all the junk mail in her hand. It turned out the voice belonged to the firefighter. She’d always had a thing for civil servants. Something about the uniform, about them protecting people, keeping them safe. Police officers. Paramedics. Even a security guard once.
He’d asked her out somewhere between small talk about how many trees the vast amounts of junk mail were killing and their mutual agreement that the hazelnut coffee at Peet’s was their favorite. And even though when she told Briana about her date, her roommate had made a snide remark about not shitting where you eat, Dylan had just laughed. Because there was something about him. It might have been the way he cocked his ear toward her whenever she spoke, like she was about to say something important. Or maybe it was the way his eyes crinkled when he smiled, which was often. Whatever it was, she wanted to know more.
He’d taken her to the movies and to get ice cream after. She was home by nine. And it had been the best date of her life.
How things had changed.
She’d become tired of living two lives—the safe one she had with Nick, where he rubbed her feet after her shifts while guilt consumed her. And then there was the dangerous life she had with James—slippery and uncertain. But she had finally decided it was the one that she wanted.
She sat on the toilet seat lid and traced the word journal on the cover of her leather-wrapped volume with her fingernail. She’d spilled coffee on the corner and pages of the diary were stained a light caramel color, but that was one of the things she loved most about it. That it was flawed just like she was—just like the people she wrote about inside its pages.