Catch up on the previous chapters here
Nell was pretty sure Pending was open seven days a week purely because of the pending food wall. True, the people who came in with money and tips at the ready liked having a place to go between 7 a.m. and 8 p.m. every day, so they could meet their blind dates or do their studying or work on their laptops, but they’d never really been Art’s focus. Those staying at the shelter had to be in before Pending closed, but he wanted to make sure they always had a place to pick up something outside of the shelter times.
She also thought that it was nice because he didn’t expect them to remember what day of the week it was, so they didn’t have to plan ahead for a Sunday. How many Sunday nights in Italy had she eaten a weird collection of leftovers because she’d forgotten that most things were closed? Sure, there was the supermarket option, but that just didn’t feel worth it for a single meal when she could get the good stuff and feel more authentic in the morning.
Here it meant she didn’t have a regular schedule and did have to keep track of the days of the week, but Nell wrote them on the calendar at the apartment and turned alarms on and off on her phone depending on the week. The wall calendar always made her think of Heidi, but of course it was worse right now.
Colton didn’t work on the weekends, so usually the place was dark when Nell used her key, but there was a light on in the office. If there wasn’t, she’d flick it on and glance around before turning it off again, repeating the process with the back room before returning to the lit front. This was all ingrained for reasons she really tried not to remember, thanks, but Heidi was everywhere today.
Art looked up and waved at her when she stopped in the doorway. “Morning. Wasn’t sure you’d want to be alone.”
“I’ve been reassured that it’s incredibly unlikely, nigh on impossible, that anyone’s actually going to show up.” Except of course she didn’t trust Adam’s blasé attitude. This wasn’t witness protection, so Adam wasn’t actually trained for it. He just passed on letters—which she was pretty sure wouldn’t happen if it were witness protection—and checked in on them casually, but mostly they were left to go about their new lives. “I’ve got this for you, though,” she added, pulling out Since You Went Away. “Brandon really, really wants to borrow it. And if you sell tickets to the event, you’d better make sure he gets one before you run out.”
“We’ll probably have to do tickets,” he agreed, taking the book back. “For the reading, at least. We can have a line out the door for signatures, but …” Art pondered the cover and looked back up at her. “What did you think of the book?”
“Well …”
He almost smiled. “I read a bunch of the reviews. Was it truly a passionate and tender exploration of a deep emotional connection?”
“Did anybody call it an obsession?” She leaned against the door frame, arms crossed.
“No. Apparently it’s sweet and I should take notes on how to woo the fairer sex.”
Nell wrinkled her nose. “But he doesn’t actually get the girl. He never comes out and tells her how he feels. He’s just … a friend in everything but his mind.”
“There’s something wrong with a man wanting to be friends with a woman?”
She shook her head, even though that wasn’t actually her answer to the question. “He doesn’t want to be friends with her. He wants a full romantic relationship. He just acts like a friend around her and assumes that she’ll notice and the music will swell and he won’t actually have to take that step of saying something, so it’s a fake friendship. He friendzones himself in the hopes that she’ll fall in love with him back and be the one to take the risk of saying something.”
“The risk.”
“Yeah, sure. If you’re the one to say something, then the other person can reject you. Put you back in your friend place, which isn’t what he ever wanted.”
Art raised an eyebrow. “And which one of you took that risk?”
The true answer was Kent, but since they were supposed to be a decade apart … “We did start out as friends. And then I kissed him. So.” That was tricky, because Art would be thinking a seventeen-year-old kissed a twenty-seven-year-old, and the twenty-seven-year-old was okay with that.
“So—and you don’t have to tell me this, because it’s personal and I’m still your boss—that’s not weird? Being, I don’t know …”
The fact that he was blushing and not quite able to meet her eyes made it easier. “Yeah, it was kind of weird. Like, all my friends were jealous. They all had crushes on him, too. And his friends … I don’t know. They kind of teased him, but they were all single, so just … him getting any attention …”
“And your parents?”
Nell nodded without knowing what she was nodding about. “They’re not the ones trying to find me. They wanted to … you know. But I was seventeen, so there wasn’t anything legal they could do”—shoot, that still meant she could’ve come from a lot of states, right?—“and I was eighteen when I left.”
“Can’t they still report an adult missing?”
Yeah, probably. “Nobody did.” That was the truth. Gran knew why she was gone, if not where, and she didn’t think it occurred to anyone else that they could’ve actually pursued that.
Including O’Connell. Whoever he was.
Art nodded. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t bring up the painful stuff. It’s obvious Kent’s really good for you.”
Nell realized she was chewing on her lip. “Being here’s been good for us. Away from … ugh, I don’t know.”
“The zone of familial expectations?”
“Yeah. Those, and … I don’t know. Your past weighs you down sometimes. The person you were before, or thought you were before, even outside of …”
“Parents and school?” he suggested.
She nodded.
“I always thought that was the best part of college. Meeting new people, being a blank slate …” Art tilted his head as his eyes drifted. “Going home for breaks was a problem, though. Mom still wanted me to be her little Arty, but I was out there changing, without her … growing up and away …” He refocused and smiled at Nell. “There’s a reason we’re still a few hours apart. It’s just better that way.”
Right, except his distance from his mom was a choice that either of them could change at any time, and they could still communicate with each other along all of the usual channels without an Adam to mediate and delay and who knew what else.
“Sorry,” Art added. “You’ve got stuff to do.”
She nodded, but at least she wasn’t feeling as thrown off as last week. Scanning the walls was enough, since the information actually stuck in her head, and she started the coffee going before getting the chairs down for maximum efficiency, and even if the urns weren’t all full when she flipped the sign, they opened on time.
This wasn’t the sort of job you were supposed to really want as a career, much less as a career after you got a college degree. Nell hadn’t gone back to class after Heidi’s murder, so she hadn’t completed her final exams. She figured she didn’t have the degree, even if they added up all the credits leading up to that last quarter.
She hadn’t asked about whether students in real life got an automatic 4.0 during a semester if their roommate died, the way they did in television shows, because having a diploma in her old name wasn’t going to help her in this new life, especially when everyone thought she was eighteen when she showed up. Eighteen, newly wed to a twenty-eight-year-old, and no, Kent had never protested the whole idea that made him look like a pedophile, because it protected her. It protected them. Even if O’Connell realized she’d had a boyfriend, he wouldn’t be looking for a couple with their backstory.
Even if he’d actually recognize her. It couldn’t have been someone she saw on a regular basis, much less every day, because you recognized faces both on campus and in the apartment building. Maybe you didn’t know names, but you nodded. If you ran into someone in Meijer or something you blinked a couple times because the face wasn’t in the right location, but then you laughed and nodded because yeah, that was another K student, or someone from the second floor, or just the whole Midwest nice thing.
It didn’t bother Adam that the O’Connell author headshot was a stranger, but it bothered her. Was she supposed to just be overly suspicious of any man with brown hair, just in case? And what if he bleached it or shaved his head? He was such a nobody, such a nondescript face, that if he changed his hair or his beard at all …
Nell put her customer service smile on when the door opened and the bell jingled, but the woman coming in wasn’t paying any attention to how friendly the barista was this morning. “Hi, I can’t figure out how to get to the lake?”
Right. Okay. “You’re in the town of Colchester. Lake Colchester’s almost three hours from here.”
“Three …? Well, fuck.” Without looking up from her phone, she turned, opened the door, and snapped, “It’s three fucking hours away!” There was a pause, and then “I asked you before booking the hotel!” There was a longer pause, and then the woman sighed and let go of the door, finally looking up and frowning. “Huh?”
Nell held up a large to-go cup. “Seems like you need it. On the house.” Because that was easier than explaining she’d just take the proper tag off the wall once the woman left.
She hesitated, maybe running through everything she’d said and the tone in which she’d said it, then shrugged. “Thanks. This is not how today was supposed to go.
Nell just smiled so she didn’t say something like Join the club.
Rebecca Frost 