Page 35 of The Best Worst Thing
Tea Leaves
When Nicole landed later that night, she picked Nero up from his boarding kennel, took a long, hot shower, then sat down at her dining room table with a massive cup of chamomile tea and FaceTimed her sister.
Paige was fumbling around her tiny, cluttered kitchen, gathering ingredients for a plant-based charcuterie board as Nicole caught her up on what had happened in Virginia.
“You actually think he’ll stay in Colorado all month?” Paige said. “With everything that’s going on?”
“Yeah,” Nicole said. “He’s not doing so great.”
“Good. Fuck him.”
Nicole shook her head. “I know this probably sounds weird, but when I saw the baby, and after our fight … It’s just different now, I guess. I feel like I can finally start to focus on what’s next.”
Paige paused from butchering a salami-inspired cylinder of tempeh to look at her sister. Nicole, twirling her mug around in silence, looked back.
Only eighteen months separated them, and since before Nicole could remember, they’d shared everything from a bedroom full of princess costumes to a candy-themed bat mitzvah to whichever of their mother’s steamy romance novels they could get their teenage hands on.
Nicole’s freshman year of college, Paige would sometimes fly all the way to New York for a long weekend just so they could bundle up in Nicole’s bed, watch movies on her laptop, and eat raspberry sorbet straight from the pint.
A few years later, when Nicole first started bringing Gabe home to Missouri for holidays, Nicole and Gabe struck up a deal.
She’d let him do anything he wanted to her—within reason, of course—and in exchange, Gabe would sleep in Nicole’s little brother’s room so she and Paige could have their sister time.
Ethan was finishing up high school back then.
Kind of a big man on campus as far as backup quarterbacks go, and certifiably obsessed with the fancy-pants, ten-years-his-senior investment banker sleeping on the deflated blowup mattress smushed between his cluttered desk and a rusting rack of dumbbells.
Gabe—quite satisfied, and rather amused by the childish high jinks of his new girlfriend and her quirky sister—would go right along with it.
The two guys would watch hockey and talk about money and take turns shooting a tiny foam basketball through the sagging hoop drilled above Ethan’s doorframe.
Once, when Nicole wandered downstairs for a glass of water in the middle of the night, she found them in the garage, getting drunk underneath the Ping-Pong table.
They were just sitting there in their boxers and sweatshirts, sharing a bottle of Nicole’s dad’s gin while Ethan cried over some girl he’d played it so cool with she decided he was an asshole and went to third base with his best friend instead.
But that was in the beginning. That first year, when everyone was still on their best behavior. When Nicole was still peeling back the layers of New York Gabe.
“Nicole,” Paige said. “You gotta tell Mom.”
Nicole nodded. It was strange, really, talking to Paige like an adult. These past few days, she’d started to feel it—her age. She wasn’t a kid anymore, was she? She wasn’t even close.
“I know. I already texted her to call me in the morning. Dad too.”
“What are you going to say?”
“The shortest, least up-for-discussion version of the truth possible. I’ve been working on it all day.”
On her flight home, Nicole had written maybe two dozen drafts of what she might tell her parents, tailoring each word to the life they’d lived.
Now, with Paige’s help, Nicole finessed the messaging until they’d settled on this: Gabe cheated on me.
I don’t think we can fix our relationship.
I understand you guys are going to be concerned about the baby.
About me. I will figure it out. I need you to trust me.
“They’re going to give you a million reasons to stay,” Paige said.
“I know,” Nicole said. “I’ll deal with it.”
Paige sighed, ripping the seal off a jar of fig jam as her intercom buzzed. Nicole was already saying goodbye when Paige interrupted her.
“Nic, wait,” she said. “I know this isn’t how you wanted it, but I’m really happy for you.
I think you were made to do this. I think it’s going to be good.
And now you’ll be one of those hot moms who makes sandwiches that look like panda bears and says whatever’s on her mind and wears tiny little dresses and answers to no one. ”
Nicole rolled her eyes. “That’s just Mari, but with a kid. That doesn’t sound like me at all.”
Paige—whose friends’ voices were beginning to fill her very crowded, very-fourth-floor walk-up—shook her head. “Maybe you don’t remember it, but that’s kind of who you became right when you were finishing college. You were really fucking cool.”
Nicole wrinkled her nose, said goodbye for a second time, then walked across her kitchen in a daze trying to remember that version of herself. Trying to remember whether what Paige had said was true. Whether she really was on her way to becoming that kind of girl. That kind of woman.
By the time Nicole had snapped out of it, she was standing at her island, poking the tip of her finger against the spiky paddle of that cactus she’d placed on her counter nearly two weeks ago.
The one she’d been so careful not to water, ever, at all.
And then—because she was suddenly in the business of cleaning up her messes—Nicole unlocked her phone, pressed her index finger to the glass, and let it ring.
Logan Milgram picked right up.