Page 75 of Pick-Up
“This feature and shoot potentially. I mean, everything is a factor, but this is the lead story, and I get the sense that they’re waiting to see what we come up with here. And if we can pull in readers.”
“Which is why you came on the shoot. To oversee. Even though you’ve been traveling less lately.”
“Well”—he swivels his head to look at the surroundings and then levels his gaze, hot and heavy, on me—“in part.”
I shift in my seat, his look like a laser shooting through me, reducing me to flickering embers. I take this in, consider how much hangs in the balance for him. And yet he still took a chance on me.
Why?What are we doing here?By design, I’m now too tipsy to truly dissect that, so I take a sip of my punch instead. Opt to remain squarely in the fuzzy zone.
“Anyway, none of this explains why my people dished all my dirt to you.” Ethan rolls his eyes.
“If it’s any consolation, they made you sound like the injured party.”
“Well, that’s kind. But, as you said in the schoolyard, it’s complicated. A million reasons why marriages don’t work out.”
Huh. I had forgotten that I said that. But he hadn’t.
“Okay,” I say, staring him down. “Name one.”
“What?”
“Name one. What was one reason your marriage failed?”
“Damn,” he says. “Failedseems like a harsh word.”
“Okay,” I say, leaning in. “Name one reason why your marriage amicably combusted.”
“Way better,” he sighs, running a hand through his hair.
I do not notice the way his bicep flexes ’cause I care about hiswords. What was he saying again?
“You really want to talk about this?” he says. “They always say not to talk about this.”
“Who is they? And when? And to whom?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t ever talk about this?”
“I try not to burden people.”
“Uh-huh.” I rest my chin in my hand. “And by ‘burden people’ you mean talk about your feelings?”
“Tomato, tomato.”
“I mean, I guess you’re not meant to talk about divorce on first dates,” I ramble. “But this isn’t a first date! It’s not a date at all.”
He looks at me, long and hard. Shakes his head. Then sighs again. “Right. Okay. One reason, then.” He shifts in his seat, taking a beat to consider. “I think she felt like I wasn’t interested in her anymore. And she was right. I don’t mean, like, physically. I mean fundamentally. We didn’t care about the same things—or like the same things. When I found out that she was cheating on me, I was pissed because it felt disrespectful—not just to me, but to our kid, our whole life together. But I didn’t reallycare. That’s when I knew.”
“That’s when you knew what?”
“That it was over.”
We sit with that for a minute. Let the immensity of it settle.
“When did you know it was over for you?” he asks.
“When he stopped coming home.”
