The Wife Between Us(29)

The apartment was completely masculine. It was as if his ex had never spent time in it at all.

“I was thinking. . . . We haven’t talked much about your ex. . . . Why did it end?”

“It wasn’t any one thing.” Richard had shrugged and turned a page of the business section. “We grew apart. . . .”

That’s when he’d spoken the line that Nellie couldn’t get out of her head now: She wasn’t who I thought she was.

“Well, how did you guys meet?” Nellie playfully batted down the newspaper he was reading.

“Come on, sweetheart. I’m with you. The last thing I want to talk about is her.” His words were gentle, but his tone wasn’t.

“Sorry . . . I was just wondering.”

She’d never brought her up again. After all, Nellie had topics from her past she didn’t want to talk about with him, either.

Richard would have landed in Atlanta by now, Nellie thought as she unlatched the gate encircling the playground and walked toward the preschool. He might be in a meeting or alone in his hotel room. Was he consumed by images of Nellie’s ex, just as she was fixating on his?

She couldn’t imagine how wrenching it would feel to see Richard kiss another woman. She wondered if Richard thought Nellie might turn out to be a different person from what he thought she was, too.

She reached for her cell phone to call him, then stopped. She’d already left a message. And she wasn’t going to question him about his ex’s visit. He’d earned her trust, but she’d shaken his.

“Hey there!”

Nellie looked up to see the church’s youth leader holding open the door for her. “Thanks,” she said, hurrying toward him. She gave him a big smile to compensate for not remembering his name.

“I was about to lock up. Didn’t think anyone from the school would be here on a Sunday.”

“I was going to start cleaning out my classroom.”

He nodded, then glanced up at the sky. Thick, shifting clouds blotted out the sun. “Looks like you just beat the rain,” he said cheerfully.

Nellie headed into the basement, flicking on the overhead light as she descended the stairs. She wished she’d come here straight from Richard’s, when the church would’ve been full of parishioners. She hadn’t expected it to be empty.

As she entered her classroom, she nearly stepped on a lone paper crown. She bent over and picked it up, smoothing out the creases. Brianna’s name was on the inside, written in the shaky letters Nellie had taught her to form. “Remember, the B has two big bellies that stick out,” Nellie had told her when the little girl kept reversing the direction. Brianna had been so proud when she’d mastered it.

The Cubs had made the crowns to wear during the graduation ceremony. They’d stand in a wiggling line behind a curtain until Nellie put her hand on their little shoulders one by one and whispered, “Go!” Then they’d march down a makeshift aisle while their parents stood up and cheered and snapped photos.

Brianna would be upset she’d lost hers; she’d spent a long time affixing stickers to it and had used a half bottle of glue to attach a different-colored pom-pom to each point. Nellie would call Brianna’s parents to let them know she’d found it.

She tucked the crown in one of her shopping bags, then stood in the atypical quiet.

Her classroom was modest, and the toys were basic compared to the ones most of the children had at home, but her students still bounded in every morning, tucking their lunches into cubbies and hanging their little jackets and sweaters on hooks. Nellie’s favorite part of the day was show-and-tell, which was predictably unpredictable. Once Annie had brought in a miniature Frisbee she’d found in the medicine cabinet. Nellie had returned the diaphragm to Annie’s mother at pickup. “At least it wasn’t my vibrator,” the mother had joked, instantly endearing her to Nellie. Another time Lucas had opened his lunchbox, revealing a live hamster, which had immediately seized its chance at freedom and leaped out. Nellie hadn’t been able to find it for two days.

She hadn’t thought it would hurt this much to leave.

She began to pull off the walls the construction-paper butterflies the children had made and tuck them into folders that she would send home with each child. She winced as the edge of one cut into the soft tip of her index finger.

“Fudge.” She hadn’t sworn properly in years, ever since she’d shocked little David Connelly and had to scramble to convince him she’d merely been pointing out a toy truck. She put her finger in her mouth and reached into her supply closet, taking out an Elmo Band-Aid.

She was wrapping it around her finger when she heard a noise in the hallway.

“Hello?” she called.

No answer.

She walked to the doorway and peeked out. The narrow corridor was empty, the linoleum floors reflecting the gleam of the overhead lights. The other classrooms were dark, and their doors were pulled shut. The church’s old bones creaked sometimes; it must have been a floorboard settling.

In the absence of the laughter and chaos, the school felt off-kilter.

Nellie reached into her purse and pulled out her cell. Richard hadn’t phoned yet. She hesitated, then texted him: I’m at the Learning Ladder. . . . Call if you can. I’m here alone.

Sam knew where she was, but Sam was napping. Nellie would just feel better if Richard knew, too.