Oh my God. She’s stalking Nate.
This makes much more sense. I warned him about being too nice to her, and now she is doing the same thing to him that she did to Art Tuttle. And if he’s not careful and doesn’t handle it right, he’s going to end up exactly like Art.
I’ve got to warn him. He has to deal with this right away.
I excuse myself from the table, and Shelby is likely happy to be able to discuss anything besides Addie Severson. There are still about ten minutes left in the period, and Nate is almost certainly in his classroom. We won’t have much time to talk, but I can at least give him a heads-up before he has her in his class.
The halls are mostly empty, since we are in the middle of fifth period, and the heels of my Givenchy leather boots sound like gunshots as they echo through the empty space. I pass a girl with far too much black eye makeup, but that is far from the worst thing these teenage girls do. When I get to Nate’s classroom, the door is closed, which strikes me as a little strange. I peer through the window on the door, and sure enough, Nate is inside. But he’s not alone.
He’s with Addie Severson.
I raise my hand to knock on the door, but before I do, something stops me. I take a step back, ducking slightly out of sight. If Nate was looking hard, he would see me. But not with a quick glance.
Nate and Addie are deep in conversation. I don’t know what they’re saying to each other, but it looks like she’s crying. What is he saying to her that is making her cry? Then again, it doesn’t take a huge amount to make a teenage girl sob. Taking away their phone usually does it, in my experience.
And then Nate reaches out and takes her hand.
Okay, this isn’t necessarily suspicious. She’s crying, and he’s comforting her. Granted, it’s not the most appropriate way to comfort your student, but it’s not the worst thing I’ve ever seen. Although he’s not patting her hand. It seems more like he’s holding it. At least sixty seconds have gone by, and his hand is still touching hers. Why is his hand still touching hers? This has reached the upper limit of appropriateness.
But then something happens to make me forget all about the hand-holding. Something happens that makes hand-holding seem like…well, hand-holding. Something that makes me want to throw up the few leaves of my salad that I managed to choke down.
He’s kissing her.
No, he’s not just kissing her. It looks like he’s trying to figure out how her lunch tasted. That kiss… That’s not a first kiss. That’s a kiss between two people who have kissed many times before and probably done a lot of other things.
And now it all makes sense.
I understand why Addie hates me so much. I understand why she was sneaking around the bushes on the side of my house. I understand why every time I try to tell Nate about something she’s done, he defends her. I understand why my husband has zero interest in sex with me except when he wants me to do something to help her.
That bastard is cheating on me. With her.
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Chapter Forty-Eight
EVE
I DON’T KNOW if I’ve ever been this angry in my entire life.
Part of me wants to burst into the classroom and bust them on the spot in front of the students and teachers who will soon be filtering out of classrooms. It’s what he deserves after all. I imagine the shock on his face, morphing into humiliation as everyone discovers what he has done.
But I don’t do it.
I recognize that if I bust Nate here now, I will ruin three lives: his, mine, and Addie’s. He deserves to have his life ruined, but I don’t. If I make a scene and expose him this way, I will never be able to continue working in the school. It will be too humiliating. And his shame will taint me as well.
As for Addie, the truth is she doesn’t deserve it either. Whatever else I can say about her, she is only sixteen years old. She’s a child. It’s not her fault she fell in love with her handsome English teacher. It was Nate’s responsibility to keep this from happening.
That’s why I don’t expose the two of them in front of everyone. But I do one thing: I take a photo.
The age of consent in the state is sixteen. So Nate won’t go to jail for this. It’s not statutory rape. But his teaching career will be over. My husband will be disgraced, and everyone will find out about it.
My life as I know it is over.
I walk back to my own classroom in a daze. I don’t know how I am going to teach a math class in five minutes. I’ll have to assign the kids some problems to do and just make them work on it for most of the period. All my lesson plans are out the window.
I reach the door to my classroom just in time to bump right into Addie Severson. She’s got a little smile playing on her lips—recently bruised from kissing my husband—but the smile drops right off her face when she sees me. She doesn’t want to be in this class any more than I want to have her here. She bows her head and walks quietly to her seat, dropping her bag on the floor.
I have to remind myself again that this isn’t her fault. Nate took advantage of her vulnerability. I’ve been a teacher long enough to know that some girls are more suggestible than others. Some are more likely to succumb to a crush on their favorite teacher.
It’s not her fault. It’s not.
“I’d like you all to take your textbooks out, and we’re going to work on the problems on page one thirty-seven,” I tell the class. “Quietly.”
I assign far too many problems to do, knowing that they’ll be working on them until the bell rings. There are other math teachers who do this with alarming frequency, but I’ve never resorted to this tactic before—I’m desperate. I drop down behind my desk, and the first thing I do is dig out my phone. After a brief hesitation, I send a message to Jay:
I need to see you tonight.
I sit behind my desk, holding my breath, waiting for his response, not sure if he’ll be able to message me in the middle of the day. Thankfully, it comes a few minutes later:
I’m not closing the store tonight so we can’t meet there.
I don’t care. We can drive somewhere.
Are you sure, Eve?
Please.
We arrange an out-of-the-way place to meet. Jay is absolutely the only person I can talk to about this. If I tell anyone else, the secret will be out. But I trust Jay to be discreet. I know too many of his own secrets.
Jay will help me figure out what to do. He may not know anything about school politics, but he has common sense, and he’s a good person. But one way or another, I am not going to allow Nate to get away with this.
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Chapter Forty-Nine
EVE
AFTER SCHOOL IS OVER, Jay and I meet in the parking lot of a McDonald’s not too far from the shoe store.
We park at opposite ends of the lot, and I walk over to his car and slip inside the passenger seat, and he drives off. Under other circumstances, I might find the secrecy thrilling, but right now, all I can see is my husband’s mouth on that little girl’s lips.
“Thank you for coming,” I tell him as I dig the heels of my boots into the carpet. I’m not entirely sure what he blew off for me, but I appreciate it.
“So what’s going on?” Jay asks me.
I open my mouth to tell him the entire story, but before I can get a word out, I burst into tears. Jay glances over at me, a slightly panicked look on his face. He keeps driving until he finds a quiet street without any houses overlooking us. He pulls over and parks the car.
“Eve.” He reaches over to envelope me in a hug. “What happened? Talk to me.”
I sob into his big, strong arms as he strokes my hair to calm me down. It takes several minutes to get myself under control enough to tell him the entire story. He knows the first part, about the problems I’ve had with Nate and how distant he has been, but then when I get to the part about finding Nate and Addie kissing in the classroom today, his body stiffens. He pulls away, his eyes wide.
“You’re kidding,” he says. “You really saw that?”