To be honest, she really wasn’t the most beautiful dog in the world, but she was really close. And she was beyond spoiled, making her intolerably high maintenance and prissy. But she was mine. I loved her as much as I loved any human.
She was a petite beagle with big floppy ears that perked up when she was interested in something and huge chocolate eyes that conveyed more emotion than I thought a dog should be capable of. Her shiny coat was a mixture of caramel and white and was nice and silky because Nick insisted on the expensive dog food and weekly baths.
I named her Anne after my favorite teacher, Anne Shirley, from the Anne of Avonlea books. But Nick had started calling her Annie from the very beginning and the nickname stuck. She was my Annie-girl and when all other people failed me, she was my rock.
I swept down and rubbed her ears with my two hands. Immediately the stress of the day started to melt from my shoulders and the dishes, the bills left discarded on the table and my looming divorce didn’t feel so impossible anymore.
“What did you do all day?” I asked her with a soft voice. “Did you miss me?”
A deep, masculine voice came out of her, answering my question, “I doubt that. She was too busy eating my socks.”
I let out an ear-splitting scream and fell backward on my butt. After a few seconds of blind panic in which I contemplated the distance to my nearest butcher knife, sanity returned. I eventually recognized the voice and that it hadn’t come from my dog.
It had come from my husband. My soon to be ex-husband.
I hadn’t seen him in four months and now he was here. I had to brace myself before I could look at him.
“Nick! God!” My hand landed on my chest and I pushed down, trying to slow my racing heart. “You scared the hell out of me!”
He leaned over the white-tiled island and stared at me with listless eyes. “I thought you heard me come in.”
I pressed my lips together and tried to ignore the pang of pain that hit me low in the gut. His eyes used to be his most expressive feature. They could glisten with humor or darken with lust in the span of three seconds. They were what had pulled me so deeply into him so quickly. All he had to do was look at me and I had been his.
Until now. Now they stared at me as if I were the most uninteresting thing on the planet. They didn’t light up when I walked into the room. They didn’t dance with some sarcastic thought spinning around in his sharp mind. They didn’t heat with desire or harden with frustration.
They just barely glanced at me, shuttered and apathetic.
“I didn’t,” I snapped. My heart hadn’t found its normal beat yet and my voice sounded frustratingly breathless.
He moved around the island and held out his hand to me. I reluctantly took it and tried to be civil.
We had promised each other a peaceful divorce. This was something we both wanted. We had no reason to be anything but nice to each other.
Once I was standing, he looked me over again but refrained from speaking his opinion. I tried to swallow back my annoyance. After living with him for seven years and hearing every little insignificant thought that came out of his mouth, it bothered me that he had suddenly learned restraint.
What did he think about my outfit? Did he notice I’d lost weight? Could he see the dark bags beneath my eyes?
Did he think I was losing sleep because of him?
Habits, I reminded myself. These were just familiar patterns from our marriage. I was used to being able to ask him his thoughts, which he always gave freely.
Now we acted like strangers, even though we knew each other more intimately than I knew any other person.
“What are you doing here?” I finally asked when it didn’t seem he wanted to explain his presence.
“I didn’t think you were going to be here.”
His casual words lit a fire inside of me that I couldn’t ignore. My polite words tasted bitter and acrid in my mouth. “Teacher’s meeting was canceled tonight. Mr. Kellar had a family emergency.”
“Is everything alright?” Finally, some kind of sympathy flared in his blue eyes, but it wasn’t meant for me.