I wish I knew. Our last few conversations had been filled with awkward pauses, and I’d felt more like I was suffering through a bad date than talking to someone I’d known forever.
We’d been friends since the day she walked into my seventh-grade English class. She was the new girl, but stood tall and had an air of confidence that was unusual for a girl in middle school. It wasn’t until we’d had our first sleepover, when she scrutinized her flawless face in my vanity mirror—the side that magnified it—that I realized she’d been putting on an act that day, probably hoping she, as much as her classmates, would believe it. While the teacher introduced her, she’d caught my eye and smiled, and I noticed a worn copy of All Night Long from the Sweet Valley High series under her arm, a book I’d read countless times. We’d been best friends ever since, surviving junior high, high school, and even college together. And when she’d called about the reunion, I’d promised I wouldn’t flake on her, even though I had absolutely no desire to go.
“Hey, I can feel you judging me over there. We’ve both been busy, you know.”
Destiny raises her eyebrow. “Mmm . . . okay.”
“Oh, come on. You know how insane my schedule’s been and she’s got three kids.” I crinkle my nose at the thought of her domesticated life. I love Rachel. But she always seems so . . . frazzled. “And I may have had to cancel the last few times we had dinner plans, but I’m not going to flake on her, she’s my oldest friend. It will be good for us to spend some time together. And John too,” I add, referring to her high school sweetheart and husband, also a friend of mine.
Destiny nods her head with approval. “And it will be good for you to flirt with some men your own age.”
“We both know that’s not going to happen!” I say with a laugh, but there’s a part of me that hopes there will be someone my own age to flirt with. Someone mature and kind who doesn’t care if I can get him a job. Someone who wants to know the part of me that has nothing to do with TV.
CHAPTER 2
* * *
rachel
The house is quiet. The bedroom is dark. When it’s peaceful like this, I can almost convince myself that I’m satisfied with my life.
I look over at John, the light coming through the blinds hitting him across the face. He still looks like the man I fell in love with over twenty years ago, just a little bit older. His brown hair is graying slightly at the temples and there were more lines around his blue eyes. His jawline is still strong, his body still toned from his daily runs. He’s aging well, the bastard. Me, on the other hand, not so much. My age shows in the lines in my forehead and the stretch marks on my belly.
I feel every one of my thirty-eight years. I reach for John’s hand, but just as I do, his alarm goes off and he’s in the shower before I can even muster a hello. My hand is still resting where his body used to be. The baby cries as if on cue. The day has officially begun. And this is a day I’m not ready for at all. Because at the end of it, I’m going to be wearing a Hello My Name Is sticker and feeling fat in a prepregnancy dress.
“Don’t you have your high school reunion tonight?” Audrey, my sixteen-year-old, asks at breakfast.
“You must feel so old!” My fourteen-year-old, Sophie, chimes in.
“God. I can’t even imagine!” Audrey rolls her eyes and fake gags.
“Can’t imagine what?” John rushes into the kitchen and takes a swig from my coffee cup.
“What it’s going to feel like to be twenty years older.”
“It feels old.” John laughs, looking in my direction. “Gotta go,” he says, kissing the baby, then the girls, but not me. I run my finger over a crack in the granite countertop and add it to my mental to-do list, right below the leaky faucet in the girls’ shared bathroom, the loose floorboard in the entryway, and the temperamental water heater that needs to be replaced. We’ve definitely outgrown our once-cozy Spanish-style house nestled on the corner of a cul-de-sac in Culver City—the closest neighborhood to John’s pharmaceutical sales territory in Santa Monica we could afford when we bought it over a decade ago. But even though he had long since been promoted to regional sales manager and was no longer pounding the pavement with the latest and greatest antibiotic or asthma inhaler, we were still here.
“I’m out of here too.” Audrey grabs her car keys off the counter. I still can’t wrap my head around the fact she’s driving. Wasn’t she just a gap-toothed seven-year-old? And now she’s taller than I am with legs for days—legs that cause John to get a frightened look in his eyes whenever he takes notice of them. Her hair falls down her back in long, loose natural curls and her eyes are a piercing blue, like John’s.