Chapter 5

I t was full-on snapping turtle. I watched his anger rise up and his neck start to jerk and I knew this was going to be bad.

“What?” Briggs asked. “What was that?” His head turned back and forth but his gaze stayed focused on me. “What did you say?”

“I’m sorry,” I answered. “I’m sorry that I had to say it and I think it was hard for you to hear. I’m really not trying to hurt your feelings but you need to know the truth.” I’d thought about it for hours and had come up with many unambiguous terms that I could use so that there would be no confusion, no going back, no claiming that I’d led him on or sent mixed messages.

There was only one bottom line: I was breaking up with him and I had come over to explain that it was over. I didn’t relish going through my speech for a second time; it had been hard enough to get it all out even once. But he seemed confused as well as upset and he deserved clarity. I didn’t want to argue, I only wanted it to be done.

Ok, here I went. “I’m sorry to say this,” I began anew, “but I don’t want to be your girl—”

“That does not make any sense. I think you are de-lu-sion-al.” He was already splitting his sentences into angry syllables and also had the careful-enunciation tone. The first word had come out with so much force that he’d spat some on the final T sound.

“I don’t think I’m delusional,” I told him. “I’m sorry, Briggs, but I—”

“You’ve lost touch with re-al-it-y,” he shot out. “You’re behavior is odd enough that if I trusted your parents, I would call them and let them know. Since they’re useless morons, I won’t bother.”

“My parents are not—”

“Your entire family is asinine,” he told me, and now he was so mad that he’d forgotten to enunciate. “Your mother is an idiot and your father is weak. Your sisters are all useless shrews.”

“No, let’s not talk that way.” I got that he was upset, as anyone would have been, but there was no need for name-calling and I tried to say exactly that. “Briggs, please. There’s no need—”

“Why are you doing this?”

I’d already explained to him that it was a decision I’d been coming to for a while, that I felt we weren’t compatible in the long-term, and that I wished him the best and hoped he’d find happiness with someone else. I truly did believe those things and I started to say them again. “I’ve spent a lot of time—”

But again, he didn’t want to listen. “Do you think that you’ll find someone better than me? You won’t.”

It was like dealing with Mr. Campbell, who also got angry and vicious. It was because of his physical limitations—they infuriated him so he lashed out verbally. I didn’t take it personally (at least, I tried not to). Briggs was lashing out because I’d hurt him. I would have been very upset if he’d broken up with me, right?

No, I would have felt relieved. I’d tried to hint around this for the last week or so, saying things about needing to talk, that I had an important issue to discuss and that I wasn’t happy. He had mostly ignored me until today, when he’d agreed to hear me out. Actually, he had only said that I could come over and have dinner (which meant me cooking for us), so I’d made a big meal of his favorite things and hoped that might put him in a better mood. The strategy hadn’t worked and I’d started to think that it had been a bad idea to break up with him in his own house. I’d been feeling sorry that after this evening, he’d think of his itchy couch as “the place where Addie dumped me.” I felt a lot less sorry after what he’d just said about my family, though.

“I’m not looking for anyone else,” I answered. “It’s just not going to work for me, and I apologize for that.”

“You won’t find anyone who will put up with your stupidity,” he said. “No one else is going to listen to your whining.”

“My whining? I don’t—”

“I thought you were going to beg me to marry you again,” he told me, and then started to nod. “I get it. That’s what this is about, right? You’re trying to twist my arm into a wedding?” Now he scowled. “It’s pathetic! I’m too young to settle down with a woman like you right away. You act like we’re middle-aged but I’m in my prime. We’ll do it eventually. We’ll make it legal, have kids. But you need to calm the hell down about it before I change my mind.”

“I don’t want to marry you and I’ve never begged,” I said. “I came here to break up, not to force you into more commitment. And I’m going to go,” I said, and stood up. He didn’t appear to even like me—why would he have wanted us to be together? “This is for the best.” It was for me, for sure.

“You think you can do this? You think you can walk right out of here and leave me?” he asked, and I froze. His voice was rising higher in pitch and volume, sounding like it had when he’d tried to start a fight outside of Amunì.

“I’m not trying to hurt your feelings,” I explained. “I’m sure—”

“You’re a bitch. Do you think other men will put up with a bitch like you? And you’re ugly, a squat little clown. I could hardly stand to look at you sometimes.”

“Briggs!” I gasped in shock, and he took a step closer, looking just as angry as he had on the night that Granger had thrown him out of the restaurant. No, he was even angrier, like there was fire burning behind his eyes.

“Sit your ass down, Addie!”

I had to get out of here. “No, I—”

He put his hands on my shoulders and shoved me, hard. I fell back onto the couch and it didn’t hurt, but I was shocked. He’d never done anything like that! Well, once he’d put his fist in my face and shaken it when I’d said something he really didn’t like; he’d slapped his knuckles against his other palm a few times when I’d disagreed with him; after the big argument at my parents’ house on the Fourth of July, he’d held his fingers in front of my neck to mimic choking. He’d been angry but I’d never thought he would lay a hand on me, and now I asked myself why I’d been so confident of that. Looking at his face and at the hatred I saw there, I didn’t know what he would do next.

So I started to placate, to put on the same performance as when I tried to talk him out of tantrums and back into being the man I’d thought I was in love with.

“You know that you’re better than this,” I said, making my voice low and soothing. “You don’t need to get physical, not someone as smart and capable as you are. We should talk this out.”

“Talk? Don’t you think you’ve said enough?”

I shook my head. “I want to listen, I meant. I want to hear what you have to say.”

“I have plenty to say to you!”

I nodded. “Let me get you a…” What was it called? My mind had stopped working right, fear preventing me from finding the words. I knew what might calm him down, but I couldn’t think of the name. “The thing you drink from with alcohol in it, made of glass—”

“See how stupid you are? You can’t remember how to say ‘bottle of beer.’”

“I think you’re right,” I said. “You’re a lot smarter than I am and you’re so handsome, too. I don’t know what I was thinking when I said that stuff before. Can we forget it?”

“No, I’m not going to fucking forget it. I’m never going to forget it.” He reached for my shoulders again and shook me hard, rattling me back and forth. I put my own hands on his to try to pry them off.

“Briggs, please don’t do this,” I said, but my voice sounded so weak. I raised it because he had to hear me before this situation got even worse. “What would your mom say?”

He stopped jerking my shoulders but his fingers dug in. He stared at me, panting, and then spoke again. “We’re not breaking up. This is not over. You can go now, but you’re not leaving me and you’re not getting away with this.”

I did go. I ran, too scared to even look behind myself until I got to my car, and then I saw him standing on his porch under the light and watching me. It had been a terrible idea to come to his house, just so stupid. My hands shook as I started the engine and then I pressed too hard on the accelerator so that I almost hit another car parked ahead of me. Next, I almost collided with a truck stopped at a red light because I kept looking in the mirror to see if he was following—would he follow me?

I had to slam on the brakes to avoid that accident and then I took a circuitous route home, turning right and then left and almost getting myself lost to make sure that Briggs wasn’t behind me. The parking lot at my building wasn’t well-lit and with how I’d taken the extra-long way, he definitely could have made it there before me. He definitely could have been hiding somewhere, so I drove up and down the rows, looking for a person crouched between cars or in the shadow of the dumpster. But he could have been in the stairwell, too, or waiting on the third floor in the little alcove that had been where the telephone was kept in the olden days. He could have been anywhere.

“Addie!”

I jumped and almost fell out of my chair when Mr. Campbell barked out my name the next day. Despite the problems he had with his lungs, he had still managed to speak pretty loudly and I was on edge. Part of that was due my emotions running wild and part was due to a lack of sleep, since I had been up almost the whole night before. I’d blocked the door to my apartment but I also had the old fire escape outside my room, a rusty contraption that I wouldn’t have trusted in an emergency—but if Briggs had put his mind to it, I was sure that he could have climbed up. One of the qualities I’d put in the list of things I loved about him was his persistence. The thin pane of glass that separated me from the world outside wouldn’t have stopped him.

“Where is your mind? You act as if you’ve lost it,” Mr. Campbell complained, his voice sharp. “You’ve read that same sentence twice. Move on!”

I rubbed my eyes and couldn’t remember where I’d been on the page. “I need to get a glass of water,” I said, because I also needed a break from him. He seemed to sense that I was struggling today and that escalated his behavior even more. He’d been nitpicking everything, from the state of my hair to the fact that I’d forgotten to put on socks.

“Go pull yourself together,” he snapped.

Mina was in the kitchen when I went in. She also wasn’t pleased with me, and she hadn’t been since we’d argued about my breakup. I hadn’t yet told her what had happened the night before, which I knew she would have been upset about. No matter her previous opinion of Briggs—if I’d said that he’d called me names, that he’d pushed me, and that I was scared, she would have gone to the police herself.

But I hadn’t told her. I just didn’t want to discuss it.

“Don’t bite your nails,” she said as I got out a glass.

“Don’t tell me what to do. About anything!”

“Someone woke up on the wrong side of the bed,” she mentioned, and I took my water to go, right back into Mr. Campbell’s study where he got mad that I kept stumbling over the name “Havisham.”

“Have you forgotten how to speak?” he demanded, then gave me a list of things he needed from the drug store, immediately. “It’s better than having you sit around here mangling classic works of literature,” he informed me, so I went out into the rainy, chilly afternoon to fetch the items that he suddenly couldn’t live without. I decided to take my time and hope that he would be napping when I got back, because it was now close to the hour of the day that he demanded to be left undisturbed and refused to admit that he was using the time to rest.

I wasn’t that lucky. When I finally returned, there were several strange cars in front of the house, an area where most people were not allowed to park. Deliveries and employees used the back door, which Mr. Campbell called the “tradesman’s entrance.” Their presence at the front meant that the people who had arrived in these vehicles were guests, and that was odd because he rarely had…oh, I recognized who had come. They had moved to a new set of fancy cars since the last time they’d been over, but I spotted a Wharton Business School sticker prominently displayed on the rear window of one of them and another one for Lamb’s Academy.

Mr. Campbell’s grandnieces and nephews were here, uninvited, so something had to be up. I let myself into the tradesman’s entrance and went to find Mina before I delivered the drug store purchases.

“Shit’s hitting the fan,” she said, and returned to cutting the delicate sandwiches that our employer always wanted to serve when he had guests, expected or otherwise. “Can you carry these into the sitting room while I finish the drinks?” Maybe we’d been bickering, but we would put that aside for now because unexpected visitors called for all hands on deck. Our four hands. I nodded at her and took the tray and a small stack of plates, knowing that I would be walking into situation that was tense and unpleasant for the potential heirs and delightfully entertaining for Mr. Campbell. He loved it when they kissed his butt and he loved to insult them while they did it.

“You’re looking so healthy, Uncle Eben,” one of his grandnieces was lying to him when I walked in. She was Berthe, named after Mr. Campbell’s mother in what was, I assumed, an attempt to curry favor—because no one really named their kid Berthe anymore.

Mr. Campbell, who was missing his nap, looked more like death warmed over right now, but the other grandniece and the two grandnephews were nodding as if Berthe was preaching the Gospel. “I think you’re looking simply wonderful,” one of the grandnephews chimed in. Mr. Campbell called him and his brother Tweedledum and Tweedledee—he called them that right to their faces, and said that he couldn’t be bothered to learn their names even though he’d known them for almost sixty years.

“You were always the handsomest member of the family,” Berthe continued, and slid in a compliment to herself by adding, “I take after the Campbell side.” She certainly took after him in terms of stature, because she was so short that her feet dangled above the floor as she sat in her chair, like a child.

“Here are the tea sandwiches,” I murmured as I put down the tray. Mr. Campbell glared at me until I moved it an inch to the right, and then he nodded slightly as if that had made all the difference in the world. He would never have spoken to me (the help) in front of guests, but he had his ways of making his opinions clear. I placed a sandwich on a little plate for him and set it near his elbow, but I knew that he probably wouldn’t eat anything and neither would his relatives. He never had an appetite and the rest of them were busy trying to best each other, and putting food in their mouths would hinder that. It meant there would be a lot of leftovers so I knew what I was having for dinner tonight.

Dinner was also on the minds of the guests as they fought over their great-uncle. “Victoria and I were hoping you’d be able to come to our house to dine on Easter,” Tweedledum said, which caused Berthe, their cousin Matilda, and his brother Tweedledee to glare at him and then declare that no, that wasn’t fair because they also wanted their beloved relative to grace them with his presence. I couldn’t imagine a more wretched holiday than one with Mr. Campbell eating nothing, criticizing everything in sight, and hating everyone else present, but they would do whatever they could to get closer to his money. Good luck, I thought, and I hoped that the inheritance they would receive was worth this groveling.

On my way out of the room, I ran into the third grandniece, Gwenyth, rushing because she was arriving late to the party. She glared as she pushed past me with her shoulder but was all smiles as she entered the study.

“Uncle Eben! You look so healthy!” she announced, and I shook my head and returned to the kitchen.

“What’s happening?” I asked Mina. She answered my question after she carried out the tray of beverages that Mr. Campbell always required for guests: a carafe of decaffeinated coffee that he liked to serve lukewarm, tap water in a crystal decanter, and sugar-free orange pop. There was only one bottle of that and it was for his use only, and the family knew not to even ask. They also knew not to drink too much, since they were not allowed to use any of the twelve bathrooms in the house (or the powder room, either). They swallowed small amounts of weak, tepid coffee along with their pride.

She put down the empty tray and rolled her eyes. “Those people make me feel like I did last winter when I had the stomach flu. He was emailing them before he went to the lawyer last week and he started it up again when you left to get his new hemorrhoid cream. It’s about the alumni bulletin for Lamb’s Academy.”

Oh, then I understood. His former high school was another of Mr. Campbell’s points of interest, and he always had me read aloud to him from Lamb’s Gazette , the school magazine. First, he wanted to hear the news from each of the classes, which were listed by year of graduation. For his class year, “Eben V. Campbell” was the only name left (there weren’t even any “in memoriam” notices anymore). He always had me report on his activities to the woman in the Lamb’s development office so his information would be published there and they faithfully complied. The school kissed his butt just like his relatives did, because they were also gunning for a big bequest. They even sent a wreath of flowers on his birthday every year, and he always complained that it was funereal. I bet they were hoping so.

Anyway, after we went through the news, he also had me read aloud all the names of the alumni donors. He was listed first, of course, as the largest benefactor, and he liked all his nieces and nephews to appear just below him in the Platinum Circle tier. This year, Berthe had been only in Gold and Tweedledum’s name hadn’t shown up at all. I remembered thinking that it was going to cause a problem for them, and here it was.

“He emailed all of them and he called out Berthe and Dum for their lack of generosity. They were obviously going to come over to suck up and the rest of them saw their chance to try to get ahead,” Mina finished. She fiddled with the baby monitor and we heard a stream of compliments through it that were enough to turn my stomach a little too, and she quickly lowered the volume. “If they’re still laying it on so thick, then he hasn’t started to yell at them. They’ll be here for a while.” She turned on the stove under the kettle and then faced me. “Now,” she began, and I knew where our conversation was headed.

“I don’t want to talk about Briggs,” I announced.

“Then you can listen to what I have to say instead,” she answered.

“Mina, no!” I said, forgetting that I wasn’t going to talk about it and jumping into an argument. “Why are you so interested in me being with him? It can’t be just about astrology. Why are you so invested in our relationship?”

“I’m not invested,” she said. “But I think you don’t understand how rare it is to find someone that you’re compatible with. Did you ever stay with a boyfriend as long as you’ve been with Briggs?”

“No,” I admitted.

“What was your longest relationship before you met him?”

“I didn’t ever have a boyfriend before him. I went out a few times and I had dates, but…”

“So you don’t know how things are supposed to be. You don’t understand that there’s a give and take, that things aren’t always perfect.”

“Things really aren’t perfect with him. They’re very far from perfect!”

“You’ve sat in that same chair many times and listed off the good things he does. What happened to all that?” She watched as I shrugged. “Do you think that you’re without flaws?”

“I know that I’m not. I don’t expect him to be, either.”

She didn’t say anything as I bit my nails, but she tapped her own on the mug she held. “Is this about that other guy?”

I hadn’t said much to her about Granger Moore except that I’d been to his restaurant and that we’d had a beer. Apparently, it had been enough to give her a clue. “This isn’t about anyone else except for me and Briggs.” As I said the words, I told myself that they were true, and then I repeated them as extra reinforcement. “This isn’t about anyone but me and Briggs.”

“So you aren’t thinking that you’ll be able to replace him?” She sounded very doubtful. “It isn’t about another man stepping into his shoes?”

“Where is that girl?” we heard Mr. Campbell ask irritably. “I need a throat lozenge.”

Our conversation was over, but I thought about her question for the rest of the day. It was the conclusion that Briggs had jumped to also, that I was breaking up with him because there was someone else. That wasn’t right, I told myself again that evening as I drove to Amunì. Granger and I were supposed to go to dinner, a make-up meal for the one that we hadn’t had together on the day we’d gone bowling. He wasn’t technically open on Mondays so this should have been his day off, but he’d had to come in to work out an issue with one of the line cooks and something else about a refrigerator that might have been going on the fritz. He told me to text him when I was close and he came out with an umbrella when I pulled into the employee parking lot in the back.

“Hi. I’m almost done here,” he said as he opened the driver’s side door.

“I’m not in a hurry.” I got out of the car into the storm. I’d already gotten rained on when I’d made the run to the drug store, and a little more water wasn’t going to make things much worse. It was much too late to repair the Nicola-waves in my hair that I’d created that morning, and my nose might have been a little pink—definitely not red, but with little extra color because I’d been upset several times already.

“How was your day?” he asked.

“It was ok,” I said. “It was all right.”

He looked at me for a moment and then said, “Sure. Come on in. You should wait in the office so you don’t have to hear me and my former station chef.”

“What do you mean? Is it going to get physical?”

“No, of course not. You think I would get in a fight with an employee? I meant that I’ll be swearing, not beating him,” he said, and then was showing me into the empty, cold office. “I’ll be right back.”

I, however, had been in exactly this situation before, on the day when we were supposed to have gone to lunch but then he’d been stuck for three hours dealing with other problems. I settled in now for a wait. I had a book and two seed catalogues I’d recently gotten in the mail but I couldn’t really focus on anything, even though the book looked interesting and the catalogs advertised a few new kinds of tomatoes and some zinnias that I would normally have been interested in growing, if I’d had garden space.

Instead, I stared a lot at the white walls and then also at the framed picture of Granger with his wife. I thought about what Mina had said today and what had happened the night before with Briggs. She wouldn’t have argued with me about staying with him if she’d known what he’d done, I knew that she wouldn’t have. I probably should have told her but I hadn’t told anyone, not even my sisters. I didn’t want people to know because it felt so embarrassing. No—it felt shameful. I was ashamed of myself for sitting there and taking that from Briggs, and I was ashamed that I had picked someone who would do things like that in the first place.

And I was scared.

So instead of reading or dreaming about plants, I sat and looked at the picture of Granger and his wife, happy together in the not-so-distant past. I thought a lot as I waited there, but I couldn’t come to any conclusions about anything.

“Addie? Addie, are you ok?”

I looked up, squinting through contacts that seemed to have shifted in my eyes and automatically rubbing my neck where a crick had formed. I must have fallen asleep on the desk…yes, I definitely had, because there was a small, unfortunate puddle of drool on its clean surface. Oh, sugar, it was gross.

Granger hadn’t seemed to notice that, though. He did seem concerned, but it wasn’t about me contaminating his nice desk. “Were you asleep or were you…is that just how you look when you wake up?”

How did I look? “I guess so,” I said in confusion, and immediately felt over my hair in case that was the problem. It didn’t seem to be.

He walked closer and bent to peer at me. “Your eyes,” he said, and my fingers went there to feel instead. I encountered puffy dampness that probably did look terrible.

“It’s ok. Are you done?” I asked. “Did you figure out all your issues?”

“Were you—”

“What time is it?” I looked for my phone, because it felt as if it might have been midnight. “How long have I been in here?”

“For a while because it’s late. I took a lot more time than I planned to.” He took a step away, which gave me a little more breathing room. “I should have woken you up.”

“I didn’t sleep well last night,” I explained, and tried to fix myself as best I could, wiping my pinkies under my eyes to clear away any makeup that had slid down with the tears that seemed to have fallen while I was asleep, and then patting at my hair again.

“I made some dinner when I saw how late it had gotten. I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I meant for us to get out of here and go somewhere, like we said we were going to.”

“That’s ok.” I stood, still feeling confused.

“I checked on you and saw you were napping, and I planned to come right back—does that hurt?” He reached toward my face but then let his hand drop. “You have a big mark there.”

“It just shows because I’m so pale. It all shows.” I rubbed hard with my fingers at the place he’d signaled. “There’s nothing wrong.”

“Ok. Come on out,” he invited, and I followed him into the empty dining room. We sat at a different table from where I’d been with my sister, the one that was practically in the kitchen, and also a different one from where I’d sat with Briggs. My eyes went across to where we’d been on my birthday, the place that I considered the true beginning of the end of our relationship. I might have thought about things for months, I might have been annoyed, I might have been questioning and even angry, but if we hadn’t come here for that dinner? I wouldn’t have said the things that I had the night before, I was sure of it. After all, I was the person who wouldn’t move out of her apartment after the ceiling had almost been washed away—

“Addie?”

“Sorry, I was just thinking about the water damage to my apartment.” I focused on the table, which was set with plates of food that looked great. I just wasn’t very hungry.

“What happened?”

“Last winter, pipes broke in my building and there was some damage,” I answered. “But I didn’t want to move, even though my stuff got ruined. I just don’t like change very much.”

“You stayed there after a flood,” he clarified.

“It wasn’t so bad,” I said. “Only my mom called it a flood. But there are other things, too. I know I should get a better job. Every time I talk about Mr. Campbell in front of my family, my sister Nicola pretends to look at her wrist at an invisible watch there—you know, like time’s almost up for him, and when it is, I won’t have a job or severance or anything.”

“Time’s up? That’s harsh.”

“Nicola is kind of…well, she says that she’s honest, but sometimes it’s hard to take. But she’s also right, because planning to be his assistant for the rest of my life obviously won’t work. It’s not a solid situation and I know that I should have a career like she does, and Sophie and Juliet, too. Even Brenna seems to have some upward mobility.”

“So change jobs.”

“I know that I should,” I agreed, “but once I get going with something, I don’t like to mess with it. You never know if the other options could be worse. My sister Grace is always thinking that the grass is greener on the other side and she’s always making the jump to something new, but she often seems to find that there’s no grass there at all. There’s only a barren field filled with cow pies instead of an amazing new opportunity.” I glanced down at the table. I shouldn’t have been talking about cow pies over food.

Granger nodded a little, but he was also looking at me pretty strangely.

“Are my eyes still weird?” I asked.

“Yes. I also don’t know what you’re talking about. Why are you saying all this now?”

“It’s because I had an argument with Briggs last night and it threw me,” I said. “I thought about it for seven months and I finally said some things to him, but it didn’t work. It wasn’t the right thing to do, which I found out.”

“What does that mean?”

“He didn’t take it well,” I said. “Everything feels up in the air and unsettled and I don’t like it.”

“Breakups suck no matter what side you’re on.”

“We didn’t actually break up,” I explained, and his eyebrows lowered. “It’s a very big step to end a relationship when you’ve been with someone for so long. Has it ever happened to you? Have you ever gotten dumped? How did you react?”

“Sure, it happened to me. When I left for…once when I went out of the country for a few months, my girlfriend at the time broke up with me. I was too busy to be that worked up, though. I’ve ended things with a few other women and I remember being sorry when they were upset.”

It didn’t sound like he’d ever felt as if the whole ground floor had been knocked out from underneath him. “I thought that things would be better after it was over,” I said. “I thought I’d tell him that we were done, and then I’d be relieved and happy.”

“But you’re not done?”

“No, and I’m definitely not relieved and happy,” I said. “I don’t know what to do now. Mina is furious about it.”

“Mina is the woman who’s the housekeeper where you work,” he clarified, and I nodded. “Why would she care about you breaking up with that guy?”

“She likes him,” I answered. “He came over last winter and jump-started her car when it was dead. Mr. Campbell was yelling at her to get it out of his driveway, even though it was parked in the back and he had to get up and shuffle to a different room to even see it. He was just being ornery but Mina wanted to go home and then Briggs stepped up.” He had come over to help mostly because he wanted to see the inside of the Campbell mansion, but I hadn’t shared that fact with her. And he hadn’t gotten to see anything, anyway, because Mr. Campbell was still at the window and watching us after the car was running. He had the night nurse open it and relay a message that as our shifts were over, we should leave immediately and take our grease monkey with us.

“Also, she did Briggs’ birth chart and she believes that it proves that he and I are pretty good together,” I continued. “I know that you don’t believe in astrology, but she really does and I think it hurt her feelings that I wasn’t guided by something she takes so seriously.”

“And literally. Is that how that stuff usually is? I remember that my wife used to read her horoscope sometimes and it was always vague shit, like you could have seen truth in it if you’d wanted to, no matter what actually happened that day.”

“What was her sign?”

“Uh…I think something about a lion. Is that right? Is there a lion sign?”

“What was her birthday?”

“End of November,” he answered, so she was a Sagittarius, nothing to do with a lion. “Why can’t Mina read the chart like it could go either way?”

“Because it’s not that way for her. It’s an answer, not a vague suggestion. She’s sure that she’s right about me and Briggs and she thinks that I’m trying to deny fate, and she’s also looking forward to our wedding and to me starting a family.”

“You want that, too?”

“Yes, I do,” I answered. “I thought I’d get married and have kids with Briggs, and that’s hard for me to give up on. My sister Sophie got seriously burned by a guy and now she’s done with them entirely. I don’t want that to happen to me.”

“You have plenty more time. You’re twenty-six.”

I wondered briefly how he knew that, but he was still talking.

“You have years before that will be an issue,” he said. “You can have a family on your own if you want to, without any man at all. You definitely don’t have to run out and start looking for someone new right away.”

“That’s what Briggs thought I was doing,” I said. “He assumed that I wanted to end things with him because there was someone else, and Mina accused me of the same thing. They thought that I was interested in a different guy, that I was leaving him for a specific person.”

And then there was a silence that was as awkward as any we’d had between us. Granger stared at me and I watched realization dawn in his light blue eyes, and then his features assumed an expression that I could only have described as…

Holy Mary. It was pity.

“I don’t mean you,” I spoke up, but that statement didn’t seem to do anything but make his silence worse. “I wasn’t thinking of you when I talked to him. Not at all. I wasn’t thinking of anyone but myself and how I was unhappy.”

Neither of us had touched our plates and I stared at mine, not wanting to make eye contact anymore. “You and I are very different,” he said. His husky voice had a cautious tone. “I’m not looking to get married and have children.”

“Not ever?”

“No, not ever. I was married once and I won’t do it again.”

I paused. “Well, that doesn’t affect me at all. Your future plans aren’t anything to me.”

“That’s good,” he said, but he still sounded wary.

“We’ve only seen each other a handful of times. Why would I have ever thought about you?”

“You wouldn’t have,” he said. “My life is entirely this restaurant. I don’t have time for anything else.”

“And you don’t want anything else. This is your dream, and you’re making it happen. You know, I really need to go.”

“You don’t want your dinner?” he asked, looking at our uneaten food.

“No, thank you. I’m not very hungry.” I stood up and he did as well. “No, please don’t walk me out.”

“I wouldn’t let you go into an alley alone at night.”

“I’m fine on my own,” I said. I had been before Briggs, after all, and I would be great without him. Someday. No, we hadn’t split up, but it was definitely coming. The writing was in neon letters that jumped right off the wall! And Granger? Of course I wasn’t thinking about him. Why would I have wanted to be with anyone when I was so wonderful and happy on my own? I walked slightly ahead, past the quiet kitchen and into the parking lot in the back, where I stopped at my car.

“Good luck with everything,” I told him.

“Is this some kind of final goodbye? It sounds like it.”

“I think so,” I said. “You’re obviously very busy, and so am I. We both have things that we should focus on. You need to run your restaurant and I need to…” I needed to figure out everything. “I think you’re going to be so successful,” I told him. “Especially at bowling. You really have the touch.”

“Maybe I should buy my own shoes. Addie…”

“Yes?” I waited, but he shook his head. “Bye,” I said, and that was final.