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“We weren’t really dating. It’s complicated.”
“Hm.” She drank something on the other end of the phone, probably coffee. The slurping grated on me, and I glanced at the clock. It was only six in the morning her time, so I forgave the coffee. “But you were in love with her.”
“What?” My eyes popped open at her assertion. “No. What makes you say that?”
“Probably just the hiding and moping and being hungover on a Monday thing. And you’re a guy who falls in love.”
“I don’t love her. I don’t even know if I like her. She makes it impossible to love her. We’re completely wrong for each other, which I should have seen from the beginning.”
Again, my sister was quiet. “What did you see in the end?”
The question threw me in unexpected ways. What had I seen? I’d been furious with RJ, on top of being annoyed with all the problems at that wedding. She’d avoided me all week and then gotten mad when I didn’t spoon-feed her some information I’d sent her via email. I wanted to say that, but when I closed my eyes, all I could see was her expression, the hurt in her eyes. I couldn’t shake from my head the way her eyes looked afterward, when it seemed she might cry after I told her she was heartless. I remembered the way she hid the hurt in the twitch of her eyebrow, the tiny movement of her mouth. When she asked me if it was too hard to care about her and I didn’t respond. Truth was, I hadn’t regretted something more than when we met and I told her to smile. I’d been a split second away from reaching for her, from pulling her into my arms and laying myself bare. “I didn’t see anything.”
I’d felt bad after refusing her offer. I’d thought about calling her and turning back a hundred times, but I’d second-guessed myself. I’d wondered when she’d go cold again, and then I’d gotten angry when she said she expected me to apologize. My body tensed as I lay back down on my bed, thinking about it all over again. “I didn’t see anything,” I repeated. “The best advice you ever gave me was to date nice people who don’t bring drama to my doorstep.”
“When did I say that?”
“When we moved in with Uncle Harold and Aunt Bette.”
Caitlin sounded amused and incredulous. “When I was sixteen?What the hell did I know when I was sixteen? That’s not why you stayed with she-who-shall-not-be-named, is it?”
It was, at least in part. Sarah was a nice person who avoided conflict, and she shied away from drama. RJ wasn’t the opposite of Sarah, but she was different, and the ways I would find myself concerned about being bored with Sarah never existed with RJ. I always felt excited, invigorated, and alive.
Caitlin read my silence as a yes. “Lear, no... that’s horrible advice. Nice is good and all, but just nice is... flavorless. We need sparks in our lives.”
I pictured RJ’s cutting glare, the way she turned on a dime when I rejected her offer and how she looked like she wanted to slap me. “Sparks I have, but I need to pee, so unless you want to stay on the phone with me, I need to go.”
“What would you do if I said I can stay on the phone?”
“Hang up. Never take me in the bathroom with you.”
She laughed. “Okay. You know I’m here if you need me, right?”
“I know.”
“And you’ll think about talking to someone?” I agreed and we hung up. I set my phone aside and let my eyes fall closed again before climbing out of bed. RJ had been a mistake from beginning to end, and I needed to figure out a way to remind myself of that. I stepped out of the bathroom a few minutes later, determined to fall back onto the mattress and start this day over again. I scrolled through trending news on my phone, eager for the distraction, and stopped short on something a local paper had picked up. I stopped scrolling at the photo of RJ standing next to me. I didn’t understand the connection to the headline, “Mayfield Uncoupling Complicated by Longtime Affair,” but the photograph had captured the moment when she’d asked if I thought it was difficult to love her and I hadn’t said a word.
I didn’t need to see her face in the photo to remember how she’d looked, how I knew the silence would hurt her like she’d hurt me. It had been crystal clear to me in that moment that we were wrong for each other. We weren’t the focus of the article, though. We were only in the background of a middle-aged couple smiling at each other, their fingers linked.
Chapter 45
RJ
I’D SPENT ALLday on Sunday in the office with my phone turned off. Work was predictable, familiar, and something I could manage. It was cold comfort after everything had fallen apart with Lear, but cold comfort in a place where I shined and where I knew the rules. After talking with the team, I’d explored the best potential loopholes, strategies, and angles to get Dina Mayfield what she wanted. I ignored my reaction to seeing her at the wedding, to seeing the intimate gesture between her and the board’s chairman. I’d already known the Mayfields’ attempt to reconnect hadn’t worked. It didn’t matter. Monday came early, and I was in the middle of reviewing the final settlement for a client when Eric poked his head in the door.
His normally easy smile was gone, replaced by a tense line.
“What’s up?”
He took a seat across from me, studying my desk. “I just left a meeting. Gretchen pulled me in with Dina Mayfield and the team.”
A chill slid up my spine. “I didn’t know we had a meeting scheduled.”
He scratched the back of his neck. “It was scheduled without you.”
“What the hell?”
“I’m sure Gretchen will be down in a bit. Did you see the thing in the paper this morning?”
