Page 1 of Anywhere with You

I watched on my phone as Bridget enjoyed a sloppy, open-mouthed kiss with her childhood best friend, then kept watching as the reel started over again. I didn’t gag, like I had the first time. No, by my twentieth viewing, I only sat and stared.

“Honey,” Florence said.

It wasn’t an endearment. That’s my name, unfortunately.

“Oh, Honey,” she said again, and this time I wasn’t sure. “She’s not worth your tears.”

I’d like to state for the record that I was not crying. I was, in fact, watching with perfectly dry eyes as my wife kissed a man who had spoken, no, not just spoken, orated on his love for his own wife in my own backyard six months ago.

One kiss, two marriages, and three hundred thousand dollars sunk into a business that I would now have to get a lawyer and fight to keep. And would still probably lose.

But for now, I slid my phone into my pocket and put on a grin that made Florence cringe. “Is there anything you need, Florence?” My voice was too high normally. At the moment, I sounded like a songbird being plucked.

She gave a sympathetic head tilt. Florence couldn’t be older than fifty, but she’d been raised by—and possibly possessed by the spirit of—an elderly aunt from the Deep South. “I was going to ask if you’re ready for me to go to lunch, but if you’re feeling poorly—”

“No!” I almost shouted. “I mean…no, not at all. Go ahead.”

I rushed Florence out of the store and took her spot at the front of the shop.

Strings & Things had been my dream, not my wife’s.

Sure, Bridget knew enough to help beginners find a violin, but those sales were rare.

It was the electric guitars in the front window that brought in customers.

It was the row of acoustics, from cheap to elite, that brought in the sales.

It was my passion, in short, that made this a business and not a very expensive display case.

And now…well, now there was a very thin pile of receipts and a very thick manila envelope on my desk. The thin pile of receipts represented our week’s sales. The thick, unopened manila envelope was from a law firm. It was addressed to me, and only me.

It had arrived this morning, when I was half awake and wondering who was rude enough to ring a doorbell at seven a.m. A man in a suit had confirmed my name and placed it in my hands.

If he said anything after that, I didn’t hear, and I may not have answered him. I closed the door and went back to bed.

I hadn’t wanted to leave it there, haunting my house while I was at work, so I brought it with me.

Now, I shoved it under the receipts and opened Bridget’s Mesmio page instead, watching her French kiss Lorenzo until the entire thing seemed absurd, like when you say the same word again and again until it loses meaning.

Who invented kissing? Why do we push our faces into each other’s like that? Why does a declaration of love have to be followed by trading all our mouth bacteria?

I took my phone back out of my pocket and searched mouth germs under a microscope .

But just as I hit enter, the bell over the front door tinkled.

There was a long list of people I wasn’t eager to see, and Cara Espinoza was number three.

Her short black curls were windblown. She wasn’t currently crying, but her eyes were red and swollen, which was particularly obvious because Cara had these massive, beautiful eyes.

I supposed they were brown, technically, but that was like saying the ocean was blue.

It didn’t come close to expressing all the hues and depth.

As if that wasn’t enough, she had lips like Selena. Bridget and I had actually had conversations about her lips. We thought we could probably get her some red lipstick and eyeliner and teach her to sing “Bidi Bidi Bom Bom.” She’d be internet-famous overnight.

For comparison, Bridget and I agreed that I looked like the musician Norah Jones, who coincidentally is also the daughter of an Indian father and white Texan mother, but a version of Norah that is washed out, short, just shy of forty years old, and thirty pounds heavier.

Only my long, thick brown hair and side-swept purple bangs improved the situation.

But Cara Espinoza was not the type to dress up and dance on Mesmio.

I doubted she’d ever been to a concert at all.

She probably spent Friday nights sipping tea and writing down the license plates of people who drove too fast through her apartment complex.

She probably thought cleaning the baseboards and reorganizing her shoes made for exciting weekend plans.

Now, she glanced around at the guitars, the drum sets, the violins and cellos, and the absence of even a single customer, before her eyes landed on me.

“Did you know, Honey?” she rasped.

I recognized that rasp. I’d been the embodiment of that rasp for weeks, but somehow, that didn’t make me sympathize with her.

Instead, rage blazed up in me in an instant like a fire that hadn’t quite been smothered.

My words felt mean before I even spoke them, but I had been teetering for weeks between being okay and losing my shit completely.

Cara was just the last straw, the one that tipped the balance, the butterfly that landed on the wrong damn seesaw.

“Did I know ?” I seethed. “Did I know that my wife was fucking your husband, Cara? Is that what you’re asking me?”

Cara’s tears were as close to the surface as my anger. She sobbed once.

She waited, giving me the chance to yell at her more if I wanted, or maybe to apologize.

I did neither. I stared at her until she turned around, the bell over the door tinkling softly again as she fled.

I put my head on the cool countertop next to the cash register and tried to breathe calmly. Honestly, I tried to breathe at all .

I was an ass. Obviously.

Cara, sweet Cara, did not deserve to be screamed at, not by me, not when her worst mistake was the same as mine: She’d loved the wrong person.