“Huh.” Sam took a bite of bagel and chewed. Nellie’s stomach clenched when she began to unwrap her own sandwich. Her appetite had vanished.
“I thought she was completely out of the picture. This is totally random, okay? But those weird phone calls I’ve been getting . . .”
“It’s her?”
“I don’t know,” Nellie whispered. “But isn’t it a coincidence that they started right after I got engaged to Richard?”
Sam didn’t seem to have an answer for that.
“And there was this moment this morning after I said hello when all I could hear was breathing. It was just like those other calls. Then this woman asked for Richard, so . . . I sound sort of crazy when I say it aloud.”
Sam put down her bagel and gave Nellie a quick, hard hug. “You’re not crazy, but you need to talk to Richard. They were together a long time, right? Don’t you deserve to know about that part of his life?”
“I’ve tried.”
“It isn’t fair that he shuts you down like that.”
“He’s a guy, Sam. He doesn’t feel the need to talk things to death like we do.” Like you do, Nellie thought.
“Sounds like you haven’t talked about it at all.”
Nellie let that go. She and Sam rarely argued. Nellie didn’t want to dig into this. “He told me they just grew apart. It happens, right?”
But Richard had said one more thing. It seemed especially significant now.
She wasn’t who I thought she was.
Those had been his exact words. Nellie had been taken aback by the disgust twisting Richard’s face when he’d uttered them.
Her roommate would certainly have some thoughts on that.
But Sam was wearing the same inscrutable expression that had come over her features when Nellie told her about the house Richard had bought. She’d worn that look the day Nellie came home wearing the engagement ring, too.
“You’re right,” Nellie said lightly. “I’ll ask him again.”
She could tell Sam wasn’t through with the conversation, but Nellie felt protective of Richard. She’d wanted Sam to reassure her about Richard’s ex, not point out the flaws in Nellie’s relationship with him.
Nellie grabbed a few shopping bags that were wedged into the narrow slot between the refrigerator and the wall. “I need to run to the school. I’ve got to start packing up my classroom. Want to come?”
“I’m wiped out. Think I’ll nap.”
Things still weren’t right between them.
“Sorry again I bailed on you. It was a really great party.” Nellie nudged her best friend with her shoulder. “Hey, are you around tonight? We can do face masks and watch Notting Hill. Order in Chinese. My treat . . .”
Sam still wore that look, but she accepted the unspoken truce. “Sure. Sounds fun.”
What was Richard’s ex like?
Slim and glamorous, Nellie thought as she approached the Learning Ladder. Maybe his ex enjoyed classical music and could identify the top notes in a bottle of wine. And Nellie bet his ex was confident about the pronunciation of charcuterie, unlike Nellie, who’d had to point at it on her menu once.
Nellie had brought her up soon after she met Richard, curious about the woman he’d shared his life with before her. They’d been trading sections of the Times on a lazy Sunday morning after they’d made love and showered together. Nellie had used the extra toothbrush Richard had bought for her, and she was wearing a T-shirt she’d left behind on an earlier visit. It had made her wonder why there weren’t any traces of Richard’s ex left in the apartment. They’d been together for years, yet no lone elastic hair band had been forgotten in the cabinet under the bathroom sink, or tin of herbal tea languished in the back of the pantry, or pretty throw cushion softened the severe lines of Richard’s suede couch.
The apartment was completely masculine. It was as if his ex had never spent time in it at all.
“I was thinking. . . . We haven’t talked much about your ex. . . . Why did it end?”
“It wasn’t any one thing.” Richard had shrugged and turned a page of the business section. “We grew apart. . . .”
That’s when he’d spoken the line that Nellie couldn’t get out of her head now: She wasn’t who I thought she was.
“Well, how did you guys meet?” Nellie playfully batted down the newspaper he was reading.
“Come on, sweetheart. I’m with you. The last thing I want to talk about is her.” His words were gentle, but his tone wasn’t.
“Sorry . . . I was just wondering.”
She’d never brought her up again. After all, Nellie had topics from her past she didn’t want to talk about with him, either.
Richard would have landed in Atlanta by now, Nellie thought as she unlatched the gate encircling the playground and walked toward the preschool. He might be in a meeting or alone in his hotel room. Was he consumed by images of Nellie’s ex, just as she was fixating on his?
She couldn’t imagine how wrenching it would feel to see Richard kiss another woman. She wondered if Richard thought Nellie might turn out to be a different person from what he thought she was, too.
She reached for her cell phone to call him, then stopped. She’d already left a message. And she wasn’t going to question him about his ex’s visit. He’d earned her trust, but she’d shaken his.
“Hey there!”
Nellie looked up to see the church’s youth leader holding open the door for her. “Thanks,” she said, hurrying toward him. She gave him a big smile to compensate for not remembering his name.
“I was about to lock up. Didn’t think anyone from the school would be here on a Sunday.”
“I was going to start cleaning out my classroom.”
He nodded, then glanced up at the sky. Thick, shifting clouds blotted out the sun. “Looks like you just beat the rain,” he said cheerfully.
Nellie headed into the basement, flicking on the overhead light as she descended the stairs. She wished she’d come here straight from Richard’s, when the church would’ve been full of parishioners. She hadn’t expected it to be empty.
As she entered her classroom, she nearly stepped on a lone paper crown. She bent over and picked it up, smoothing out the creases. Brianna’s name was on the inside, written in the shaky letters Nellie had taught her to form. “Remember, the B has two big bellies that stick out,” Nellie had told her when the little girl kept reversing the direction. Brianna had been so proud when she’d mastered it.
The Cubs had made the crowns to wear during the graduation ceremony. They’d stand in a wiggling line behind a curtain until Nellie put her hand on their little shoulders one by one and whispered, “Go!” Then they’d march down a makeshift aisle while their parents stood up and cheered and snapped photos.
Brianna would be upset she’d lost hers; she’d spent a long time affixing stickers to it and had used a half bottle of glue to attach a different-colored pom-pom to each point. Nellie would call Brianna’s parents to let them know she’d found it.
She tucked the crown in one of her shopping bags, then stood in the atypical quiet.
Her classroom was modest, and the toys were basic compared to the ones most of the children had at home, but her students still bounded in every morning, tucking their lunches into cubbies and hanging their little jackets and sweaters on hooks. Nellie’s favorite part of the day was show-and-tell, which was predictably unpredictable. Once Annie had brought in a miniature Frisbee she’d found in the medicine cabinet. Nellie had returned the diaphragm to Annie’s mother at pickup. “At least it wasn’t my vibrator,” the mother had joked, instantly endearing her to Nellie. Another time Lucas had opened his lunchbox, revealing a live hamster, which had immediately seized its chance at freedom and leaped out. Nellie hadn’t been able to find it for two days.
She hadn’t thought it would hurt this much to leave.