“What I want to do?”
He bobs his head. “Exactly. Write a revenge letter. Tell me what you would do if you had five minutes alone with this person and nobody would ever know.”
He has no idea I’ve got Kenzie’s house keys in my backpack. I imagine what would have happened if I had snuck into her bedroom and waited for her in the closet. I might have actually had five minutes alone with her. And let me tell you, those five minutes would have involved some serious payback.
A smile twitches at my lips. “Okay.”
I can already imagine what I’m going to write:
You have everything in the world. And you are in a relationship with the greatest guy I’ve ever known. But you don’t deserve any of that. What you deserve is to get your eyes scratched out. No, that’s too good for you.
“Anyway,” he says, “it looks like you’re having a nice meal with your mother.”
“Yeah.” I rub at the back of my elbow. “And, you know, I hope you’re having a nice night with Mrs. Bennett.”
For a moment, his eyes cloud over. “It’s her birthday.”
I’m not sure what that means exactly. “Oh.”
“So yeah.” He lifts his shoulders. “It’s fine. The food here is good.”
Oh boy. I was right.
Mr. Bennett isn’t having a good time with his wife. My impression of her in class is more accurate than I thought. She is not someone who goes home and then immediately becomes this super nice person who is totally different from the way she is at work. She’s a legit awful person. Mr. Bennett doesn’t like being married to her any more than I like having her as a teacher.
That’s why instead of using the empty men’s room and hurrying back to his table to be with her, he has been standing out in the hallway talking to me for the last five minutes.
At that moment, the person who was in front of me leaves the ladies’ room, and now it’s my turn. But I would much rather stand out here and talk to Mr. Bennett. Maybe I can let the person behind me skip ahead.
But before I can propose the idea, Mr. Bennett smiles at me. “I don’t want to keep you, Addie. I’ll see you in class tomorrow. And don’t forget that letter.”
I feel a twinge of regret as Mr. Bennett disappears into the men’s room. It occurs to me that as angry as I am at Kenzie, I’m even angrier at Mrs. Bennett for making him so unhappy.
OceanofPDF.com
Chapter Twenty-Six
EVE
NATE SEEMED EVEN MORE DISTRACTED than usual during the meal and then subsequently on the drive home. And as soon as we walk in through the door to the garage, he lets out an exaggerated yawn.
“Oh, man,” he says. “I’m beat, Eve.”
His attempts to get out of sex are becoming more and more uncreative. Next, he will be telling me he has a migraine. “It’s fine,” I say. “Go to bed—you’re off the hook.”
He raises his eyebrows. “Off the hook?”
“I just mean we don’t need to have sex tonight.”
Nate looks taken aback. “If you want to have sex…”
The last thing I want is to get into a big, emotional argument with my husband on my birthday. So I just shake my head. “I’m tired too. I’ll meet you upstairs.”
And that’s what I will do on my first day of being thirty years old. I will turn in for the night at a record 9:30 in the evening.
While Nate heads upstairs, I hear a buzzing sound from inside my purse. When I retrieve my phone from my purse, I see a new message on Snapflash. There’s only one man who messages me on Snapflash, and at the beginning of the night, I had vowed to end things with that man.
I left a present for you at the door.
I smile down at the message for the sixty seconds until it disappears. I look up the stairwell to make sure Nate has disappeared into the bedroom. Then I creep over to our front door and crack it open.
There’s a shoebox at our door.
I snatch the shoebox off the front porch before anyone can see it. Jay must’ve slipped over to drop it off while we were at dinner, because the box definitely wasn’t here when we left.
I pull the lid off the box, and I can’t help but let out a gasp.
It’s a pair of Sam Edelman sling pumps in a glossy red color. I had been admiring them a couple of weeks ago in the store, and I was disappointed when the last pair disappeared, because they were just barely within my price range.
And now I realize where the pumps disappeared to. Even though money is tight for him, Jay used his minimal funds to buy me a birthday present he knew I would love.