When the doorbell rang twenty minutes later, she almost didn’t answer it. If it was Joel, she didn’t want to talk to him. And she wasn’t in the mood to visit with anyone else. Except Aislinn maybe. And because suddenly she knew who was calling, she opened the door.
Aislinn took one look at Nic’s face and closed the door behind her. “It must have been bad.”
“He dumped me,” Nic said, forcing the words out between clenched teeth. “Joel dumped me.”
“Nic, I’m so sorry—”
Nic swallowed hard, holding up a hand to stop Aislinn’s expression of sympathy. “Can you believe he had the nerve to give me The Speech?”
Her friend grimaced. “Not—”
“Yeah, that one. The it’s-not-you-it’s-me spiel. The jerk.”
Aislinn walked into the kitchen, reached into the refrigerator and pulled out a bottle of wine. “Tell me from the beginning,” she said, opening the cabinet where Nic stored the wineglasses.
Nic was already digging in the freezer for ice cream. “He started yelling at me pretty much the minute I opened the door to him. For doing my job this morning—can you believe that?”
“The hostage situation? I heard about it. Everyone was talking about it.”
Nic shook her head impatiently. “Everyone was probably exaggerating. It wasn’t that big a deal. The guy was all talk. He never even took a shot at us.”
“Joel didn’t find any comfort in that?” Aislinn
asked, pouring generous servings of wine.
An enormous scoop of ice cream plopped into a bowl. “He wasn’t interested in hearing it. Can you believe he actually asked if I would consider quitting my job?”
Aislinn winced. “Surely not.”
“He said he didn’t think he could ever get used to my work. The way he phrased it made me think he was hoping I would volunteer to quit if it made him happy.”
“Maybe you misunderstood.”
Nic slid a bowl across the table to Aislinn and stabbed a spoon into her own mound of toffee-chip. “Trust me, I didn’t misunderstand. He called me reckless. He said he wished I were more like Heather.”
Aislinn set down her spoon with a clatter. “He didn’t say that.”
Nic flushed. “Okay, he didn’t say those words exactly. But he told me the other night that I should become a counselor for at-risk kids. I told you Heather was a family counselor. Do you really think that’s simply a coincidence?”
“It does sound bad,” Aislinn admitted.
“I can’t let Joel turn me into a pale copy of his late wife.”
“You really think that’s what he’s trying to do?”
Nic pushed aside her barely touched bowl of ice cream and reached for her wine. “It’s the only way I’d be an acceptable match for him. To his friends and family. Even to him.”
“Oh, Nic—”
The sympathy in Aislinn’s voice broke through some of the anger that had been protecting Nic from the pain. She swallowed hard against a sudden thick lump in her throat. “It was a mistake from the beginning.”
“You fell in love with him, didn’t you?”
Nic set down her wine untasted. With anyone else, she would have given an immediate vehement denial. Because it was Aislinn, she said, “I’ll get over it.”
“You don’t think there’s a chance…?”
“He dumped me,” she reminded her. “He said he couldn’t accept what—and who—I am. Does that sound like there’s a chance?”