There but for the grace of God, she thinks, pausing in front of the door to silence her phone. Then, taking a deep breath, she steps inside the restaurant.
She recognizes Rick Walker immediately, sitting alone in a booth with his back to the door. There’s something strikingly familiar about the poised, pensive posture: elbows propped on the table, raised cup clutched in both hands, head bent.
Either he’s got her right where he wants her, or he’s in for one hell of a nasty surprise.
“Table for one?” a waitress asks, and she shakes her head and points toward Rick.
“I’m joining someone.”
The woman waves her on, but Rowan hesitates, unwilling to approach him. She reminds herself that she’s anonymous here; no one is watching her, judging her. But it isn’t easy to push aside the guilt and trepidation.
At last, she walks over to the table and steels herself for the confrontation whose script has been running through in her head all night.
“Rick?” Her voice works. So far, so good.
He looks up, lights up with a grin that crinkles the corners of his eyes just as she remembers. He sets down the mug—-tea, she sees, noting the string dangling over the edge. He always chose tea over coffee.
“I’m surprised you don’t,” he said once, soon after they met.
“Why?”
“Because you grew up in an Irish household.”
“So you assume we drank tea?”
“You didn’t?”
“Sure we did. And whiskey, too, and we ate corned beef and cabbage every night and wore kilts and danced jigs . . .”
“And hid pots of gold at the end of the rainbow, right?”
“Exactly,” she agreed with a laugh.
Snippets of that lighthearted exchange float into her head as he gets up to embrace her like a long--lost friend.
“Rowan. It’s so good to see you. I almost didn’t recognize you without your hair.”
“I still have hair.” He does, too, but it’s thinning.
“I meant your long red hair. But you look great. Sit down.”
She’d been worried until this moment that she’d take one look at him and become infatuated all over again. But that isn’t the case, and it’s not just because he’s a middle--aged man now. His looks were never the draw in the first place. It was more that Rick understood her—-or rather, she perceived that he understood her—-far better than Jake did at the time.
Unlike her husband, he knew his way around the kitchen and the supermarket; the playground and the pediatrician’s office; the preschool parking lot and—-perhaps most important—-the circle of moms. Neither of them could relate to the designer stroller–pushing crowd that populated their suburb. Rowan and Rick seemed to be the only two parents on the playground who hadn’t grown up in Westchester, didn’t come from money, and didn’t have doting parents willing to write fat checks and babysit the grandkids. Nor had they swapped demanding corporate careers to spend days at home with their toddlers. They used to laughingly speculate that some of those moms managed their kids the way they used to manage their corporate minions.
Jake would never have grasped the humor in imagining a brisk memo delivered to a sandbox with a cc to a crib, bearing the subject line “Potty Training Objectives” or “Naptime Agenda.”
Rick got it. He got her.
She used to wonder whether she’d married the wrong man.
Now I’m positive I didn’t, she thinks as she sinks into the booth, missing Jake already. What a difference fourteen years—-a lifetime—-has made. She’d give anything to be at home where she belongs, instead of here with Rick, exhuming memories.
The place feels familiar. They sometimes took the kids out for lunch after preschool pickup, to a diner just like this one. Maybe that’s why he chose it.