She sipped her faux wine and wrinkled her nose.
“Not good?” I asked.
“You know when you leave an open bottle of wine around for a few months, and then you want to have a glass of wine and that’s the only shit you have left?”
I chuckled. “Sadly, I do.”
“It tastes like that.”
“It’s going to be a long nine months,” I said.
“You ain’t kidding.” She sipped anyway. “But talk to me. What are you overthinking?”
I sighed. “Well, today Merrick and I went shopping for my new apartment. When we were in line at HomeGoods, there was a little girl in the cart ahead of us. Merrick kept staring at her. It seemed like he recognized her or something, and then he abruptly said he was going to wait in the car.”
“Okay…”
“The little girl was with her dad, and he looked a little freaked out too, so after Merrick left, I asked him if they knew each other. Turns out, the little girl is his ex’s daughter. Merrick told me Amelia had cheated on him, and he found out when she had her accident. But the little girl wasn’t even three, and I could’ve sworn Merrick said Amelia died around three years ago.”
“Hmmmm… Could you have gotten the timeline wrong?”
“Maybe. But what’s bugging me is how Merrick acted afterward.”
“How did he act?”
“He barely spoke and then just dropped me off here. I didn’t even have my bag with me.”
“So seeing the little girl upset him?”
“That’s what it seems like. Maybe I’m overreacting, but it felt like the thirty-second exchange they had rewound the clock on our relationship.”
“I do think you’re reading into it. It was probably just an emotional reminder of a hard time. Things like that can pack a punch if they’re thrown at you when you least expect it.”
“Yeah, I guess…”
“Do you know Amelia’s last name?”
I nodded. “Evans. Why?”
Greer picked up her phone. “You said she died in a plane crash, right?”
“Yeah.”
“There must’ve been some press coverage.” She shrugged. “Let’s Google.”
Before I could reconcile why googling a dead ex felt wrong, my sister turned the phone to show me a headline.
“Woman survives crash during flight training. She didn’t die on impact?”
“I don’t know all the details, but no.”
My sister scanned the article. “This was written in July a few years back, so it would’ve been thirty-one months ago. How old was the little girl you saw today?”
“Her dad said she was going to be three in two months. So thirty-four months?”
“Welp, then that little girl was in her mom’s belly when the plane crashed, and Amelia survived for at least a few months after.”
Oh, God. There was a lot more to the story than I knew. I sighed. “Well, I guess there’s a reason for a lot of emotions to bubble up then.”
“That’s probably all it was.”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
Yet deep down, I wasn’t so sure.
? ? ?
Monday morning, I walked into the office with an anxious feeling in the pit of my stomach. I hadn’t heard from Merrick since he’d dropped me off on Saturday afternoon. Whatever uneasiness I had was magnified tenfold when I unlocked the door to my office and opened it.