The Teacher(57)

I assign far too many problems to do, knowing that they’ll be working on them until the bell rings. There are other math teachers who do this with alarming frequency, but I’ve never resorted to this tactic before—I’m desperate. I drop down behind my desk, and the first thing I do is dig out my phone. After a brief hesitation, I send a message to Jay:



I need to see you tonight.

I sit behind my desk, holding my breath, waiting for his response, not sure if he’ll be able to message me in the middle of the day. Thankfully, it comes a few minutes later:



I’m not closing the store tonight so we can’t meet there.



I don’t care. We can drive somewhere.



Are you sure, Eve?



Please.

We arrange an out-of-the-way place to meet. Jay is absolutely the only person I can talk to about this. If I tell anyone else, the secret will be out. But I trust Jay to be discreet. I know too many of his own secrets.

Jay will help me figure out what to do. He may not know anything about school politics, but he has common sense, and he’s a good person. But one way or another, I am not going to allow Nate to get away with this.



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Chapter Forty-Nine

EVE

AFTER SCHOOL IS OVER, Jay and I meet in the parking lot of a McDonald’s not too far from the shoe store.

We park at opposite ends of the lot, and I walk over to his car and slip inside the passenger seat, and he drives off. Under other circumstances, I might find the secrecy thrilling, but right now, all I can see is my husband’s mouth on that little girl’s lips.

“Thank you for coming,” I tell him as I dig the heels of my boots into the carpet. I’m not entirely sure what he blew off for me, but I appreciate it.

“So what’s going on?” Jay asks me.

I open my mouth to tell him the entire story, but before I can get a word out, I burst into tears. Jay glances over at me, a slightly panicked look on his face. He keeps driving until he finds a quiet street without any houses overlooking us. He pulls over and parks the car.

“Eve.” He reaches over to envelope me in a hug. “What happened? Talk to me.”

I sob into his big, strong arms as he strokes my hair to calm me down. It takes several minutes to get myself under control enough to tell him the entire story. He knows the first part, about the problems I’ve had with Nate and how distant he has been, but then when I get to the part about finding Nate and Addie kissing in the classroom today, his body stiffens. He pulls away, his eyes wide.

“You’re kidding,” he says. “You really saw that?”

I nod slowly.

“That piece of shit.” He cracks his right knuckles. Jay looks furious, and part of me is scared that he might walk up to Nate and punch him right in the face. And part of me wants him to do it. “That is unbelievable.”

“I know.” I shut my eyes, but when I do, the image of the two of them kissing doesn’t go away. I doubt it ever will. “I don’t know what to do.”

“Maybe you should kill him.”

I look up at Jay’s face, and he’s not smiling. But he doesn’t mean that. Although right now, the idea is tempting. “Really. What do you think I should do? Should I go to the principal?”

He shakes his head. “If you go to the principal, everybody in the world is going to know about this. Is that what you want?”

Speaking with the principal is the proper protocol here, but he’s right. There’s no way this will be dealt with discreetly, as much as they might try. The situation with Art Tuttle is testimony to that, even though he never did anything wrong. “That’s not what I want.”

“So then,” he says, “you have to lay out an ultimatum for him. You have to do whatever you can to make sure this stops immediately and never happens again. And also…” He reaches for my hand. “You have to get out of this marriage.”

He’s right about that part. I’ve got to leave Nate. That is not negotiable. I lift my head, looking into Jay’s eyes, wondering for the first time if there’s any chance at all of a future with the two of us. I know there isn’t, but there are moments when I like to fantasize that it’s possible.

But it doesn’t matter. Whether I can be with Jay or not, I can’t be with Nate anymore.

“You can do this.” He squeezes my hand. “Don’t be afraid of him. You’ve got this.”

He has confidence in me, but the problem is, he doesn’t know my husband the way I do.



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Chapter Fifty

EVE

BY THE TIME Nate gets home, I am more than a bit drunk.

He doesn’t arrive until nearly three hours after school ended, which begs the question of what he has been doing all that time. I don’t know if he has been with her or doing actual school-related duties. If he’s not an idiot, he knows he should be staying away from Addie Severson in the wake of her being found outside our house. Although he must not be thinking entirely clearly if he kissed her right inside his own classroom.

As for me, after Jay brought me back to the McDonald’s to retrieve my car, I drove around for a while but eventually ended up back home.

I tried to grade some papers, but that was an exercise in futility. Soon after that, I went for my bottle of wine. Unfortunately, all we had was about a quarter of a bottle left of cabernet. But I did find half a bottle of vodka.