Maybe if she’d been more attentive to his needs, he wouldn’t have strayed.
He regrets having said that to her during their last fight, the one during which he’d confessed—-all those years later—-that he’d stopped loving her years ago and fallen in love with Rowan.
Yeah. Communication isn’t his forte. Either he says too much, or too little, or the wrong thing.
“I’ll help you work on those communication skills,” Bob offers. “And I want you to think about taking my advice. Like I told you yesterday, if you would just reach out to the -people who care about you, you might—-”
“I did that.”
“And . . . ?”
“We’ll talk.”
“See? That’s good. It’s a good start.”
Realizing Bob misunderstood, Rick doesn’t bother to correct him. He meant he would talk to Bob about the kids, not that the kids had agreed to talk to him when he’d reached out to them.
He’d followed Bob’s advice and made four phone calls—-to his stepsons, and to his son and daughter. All four went straight into voice mail. None has been returned so far.
He spends the rest of the afternoon alternately trying to figure out how to get out of having dinner with Bob and looking forward to it.
It’s been ages since he ate in a place with cloth napkins and a wine list that extends beyond house white and house red. Besides, brunch yesterday was a good distraction from thinking about Rowan. Maybe dinner tonight will be an even better one.
“And who can tell me the year the first settlers arrived in Mundy’s Landing?” Rowan asks her class as their afternoon history review winds down. “Raise your hands, please. No shouted answers. Let’s see . . . Shane?”
“Sixteen sixty--five?”
“Good. And do you know where they came from?”
“Holland?”
“No, the Dutch had lost control of New Netherland the year before to which country?”
“England!” Billy blurts, resulting, predictably, in a reprimand from Amanda Hicks, whose hand has been waving in the air since the history review began.
“You were supposed to raise your hand! Ms. Mundy, he was supposed to—-”
Mercifully, Amanda’s final tattle of the day is curtailed by the final bell.
-“People,” Rowan calls above the explosion of chatter and scraping chairs, “please hand me your review sheets on the way out. And I’m still missing a few permission slips for our field trip. They were due on Friday. You need to get them in or you’re not going!”
Predictably, she’s inundated by questions about the review sheets, the homework, the permission slips, including “What permission slips?” and “What field trip?”
At last, she’s alone, holding a sheaf of papers, including a permission slip that appears to be from last September’s field trip, and a single boot someone just found on the floor under a desk and no one recognizes.
She closes the classroom door and then locks it, something she never does—-not from the inside, anyway. But she has only a few minutes before she heads down to the tutoring room, and the gift bag she stashed in her desk earlier has been on her mind all afternoon. It’s time to find out whether it’s an offering from her Secret Santa, or her Secret Stalker.
First things first. She tosses the boot into the lost and found crate with all the other single boots and shoes—-and there are many. Then she puts the papers on her desk, tosses the old permission slip into the blue recycling bin, and plucks out the things that don’t belong there: an apple core, a cellophane wrapper, a mitten. The garbage goes into the garbage can, the mitten into the lost and found.
You’re procrastinating. Just look inside the bag.
She opens the drawer, takes it out, and takes a deep breath.
Go ahead. Hurry up.
She gingerly pushes aside the white glitter--dusted tissue paper tufting from the top.
What if there’s a layer of yellowed newspaper beneath it?