Eli and I shared a look. Then we dug into our lunch.

“So this is okay?”

“I love Ruby’s,” I said around a mouthful of lumpia. They were the perfect combination of crispy outside and spicy inside, like a spring roll only Filipino style. “Nick and I used to go on the weekends when we were first married because we could get so much food for so little.”

Eli waited a beat before he responded. I realized I put him in an awkward conversation spot, but with his usual directness, he rolled with it. “Why did you guys stop?”

I glanced at Kara on the floor, but she seemed completely out of it. I didn’t know why I didn’t want her knowing I opened up to Eli about my divorce. It still felt weird to me and I didn’t think I wanted Kara to look at it like a good thing.

I wasn’t sure it was a good thing.

“Probably for the same reason we stopped doing most other things.” I reached down to fiddle with one of the sauce containers, making my fingertips sticky. That wasn’t exactly fair. “I don’t know, actually. We always had fun at Ruby’s. We just stopped going. Maybe we got too busy.”

“Or maybe you stopped wanting to spend time with each other?”

I swallowed a large bite of rice and spiced meat and tried not to choke. Was he right? Instead of feeling the pain that I should or the insecurity in the truth of his words, I felt irritated.

My first thought was, “What did he know about me?”

What gave him the right to make judgments on my marriage?

But I swallowed again and tried to push those thoughts away. He was just being my friend. And he probably was right.

“Maybe,” I said noncommittally. “Honestly, I’m still trying to figure out the majority of reasons our marriage didn’t work out.”

He leaned in and I felt the warmth of his body as his arm grazed mine. “You know, you don’t have to torture yourself with all the whys and why nots. This is hard enough on you.”

I looked up at him, noticing the shaved line of his jaw and the smooth skin over high cheekbones. He was wearing his glasses today and the fluorescent classroom lights glinted off his lenses, hiding his eyes from me.

“Does that work?” I asked quietly. “If I tell myself to stop analyzing everything, will I listen?”

His smile was filled with sorrow from his own past pain. “No,” he said with a gruff rasp. “But you can try. Maybe you’ll do better than me.”

We finished up our lunches over small, easy talk. Surprisingly enough, I didn’t lose my appetite. I ate as much of my lunch as I could until my stomach felt distended and I knew I would have to fight through a food coma to teach my afternoon classes.

We woke Kara up and Eli offered to walk her to her classroom since she still looked on the verge of puking her guts and every ounce of alcohol from last night up.

Once they were gone, I had about five minutes until the bell rang, so I dug out my phone from my locked drawer and stared at the screen for two minutes. I clicked my nails against the back of it as I cradled it in my palm. Curiosity and a masochistic sense of self-analysis buzzed through me in a way I couldn’t ignore.

Finally, I texted Nick, asking, I just had Ruby’s for lunch today. It was so good. Why did we stop going there?

A minute later he texted back, They had an Ebola outbreak last year.

Shut up!!!

He sent back a smiley face and for another minute I thought that was the end of it. The bell rang, but I couldn’t bring myself to stand up and greet my class. I kept staring at my phone, waiting for more.

Just as students started to filter into the room, my cell vibrated in my hand and I caught his one last text before I needed to put it away for the rest of the afternoon.

I wish we wouldn’t have stopped.

Chapter Eight

15. We can never agree on anything.

“I can’t believe you guys are getting a divorce.” The high-pitched whine shrilled through the phone. I wanted to chuck it against the sidewalk.

“Fi, believe it.”

I stepped out of my car and stumbled back a step when the force of the late afternoon wind smacked me in the face. For a minute, I couldn’t hear anything on Fiona’s end because of the static and interruption from the wind.

“Hold on!” I yelled to Fiona, my college roommate, as I fumbled with the keys to the side door.

Our tiny house only had an unattached garage, which made weather a real concern trying to get in and out of the house. Since Illinois only had about three good months of weather during the year before it turned either surface-of-the-sun hot or subarctic, it made leaving the house at any time obnoxious.

Except near Lake Michigan. Then it was only differing degrees of violently windy.

When we had looked at houses, Nick tried to convince me that the garage would be an issue, but I hadn’t been willing to listen. I fell in love with this house from the street. I adored the cute coziness of it, the original but updated wood floors, the brand new kitchen that was small but modern. I loved the loft style bedroom upstairs and the office with French doors on the first floor.

We had always known we wouldn’t live here forever. This was not a house you could raise a large family in and when we were house hunting, we assumed we would have a large family.

That was something we could both easily agree on.

But we had needed something to start with, something that was just the right size for the two of us and something we could easily afford with our tight budget.

This house had been perfect.

And despite everything that happened, I still thought it was perfect.

Except for the garage situation.

“Sorry,” I huffed once I’d made it through the door. I dropped my tote bag filled with papers and notebooks that needed to be graded, my laptop, my purse and my lunch bag on the ground as soon as I stepped inside. My arm felt like it was going to break off. Annie danced around my feet, licking my legs and begging for attention. “I’m here now.”

“I just can’t believe it,” she moaned. “You two are so perfect for each other.”

My neck immediately started hurting. “I’m not sure that we are.”

“But, K! What happened?” She asked the question then murmured something to her fussy baby.

Fiona and I didn’t get to talk very often, but usually we could spend hours gabbing about nothing or everything or good times from our college years.

Today, though, I hoped her baby’s cries meant she needed to get going. I really didn’t want to have this conversation. I really wanted to talk about anything but my divorce or Nick or me.

The baby cried again and pain seared over my heart. “Shh,” Fiona crooned. “That’s a good boy.” To me she said, “This has been my fussiest baby yet. He is just never satisfied.”

I masked the brokenness in my voice by joking, “Because he’s a man.” I bent down to pet my own baby girl.

Fiona laughed at my joke and the baby settled down. “So tell me what happened. Last time we talked, you guys were doing great!”

We hadn’t been great. We hadn’t been great in a very long time. But I had never told her that.

I resigned myself to telling her the story. She wasn’t going to let it go, so I might as well give her what she wanted as quickly as I could, then get her off the phone so I could wallow in my own pity. Except that when I turned the corner and walked into my kitchen the topic of our discussion was sitting at the kitchen island helping himself to my chocolate cherry ice cream.

“Holy shit!”

“Are you okay?” Fiona asked on the other end.

Nick gave me an apologetic wave but didn’t make a move to stand up. “Uh, um, er, yeah.”

Fiona’s voice echoed through the kitchen as I pulled the phone away from my ear. “K, what’s going on?”