After He Loved Her, I Learned I Was Second Choice

Seattle smelled like rain and pine and something faintly salt-edged that I couldn't name. I liked that. I liked that it had nothing to do with anything I already knew.

I built the days carefully, the way you build something you intend to last. Up before seven. Biscuit's leash off the hook by the door. We walked the same path along Puget Sound every morning — past the fishing boats, past the coffee cart that opened at six-thirty, past the stretch of waterfront where the light came in low and gray and honest. Biscuit trotted ahead of me with the focused authority of a dog who had decided this city was his. I let him lead. It seemed fair.

Back by eight. Earl Grey in the proper pot, never a bag in a mug. My desk faced the window. I wrote under a new pen name — Margot Ellis — and I did not think about why I had chosen a name that sounded nothing like me. I wrote through the afternoon. I made soup for dinner. I went to bed early and slept without dreaming, which felt like a gift.

I did not call anyone from New York. I did not check Damian's social media, because I had deleted the apps the same morning I left, standing in the elevator of his building with the settlement paperwork in my bag and the sapphire pendant sitting on his kitchen counter where I had left it without a note. There was nothing to say that the number on the paper hadn't already said.

The only person who knew where I was was Nora.

She called every few days. Not to check on me — Nora didn't check on people, she showed up for them, which was different. She called because she wanted to talk, and talking to Nora had always felt like being handed something useful.

"You eating?" she asked, the third week.

"I made a frittata yesterday."

"That's not an answer."

"I'm eating, Nora."

"Good." A pause. "Biscuit?"

"He stole a sock this morning and looked very pleased about it."

"Smart dog." Another pause, shorter. "You writing?"

"Every day."

"Good," she said again, and I could hear her meaning it.

She came for a long weekend in October, when the leaves along Capitol Hill had gone amber and the air had that particular Seattle chill that felt clean rather than cold. She brought a bottle of Côtes du Rhône and a tote bag full of snacks she claimed were for Biscuit but were mostly for herself. We sat on my living room floor because I still hadn't bought a proper couch, just a secondhand armchair and a lot of floor cushions, and Nora said it looked like a very chic graduate student situation, which I took as a compliment.

We were two glasses in when she set hers down and looked at me directly. Not the way people look at you when they're waiting for you to say you're fine so they can relax. The real way.

"How are you?" she said. "Actually."

I looked at Biscuit, who was asleep against my knee. I thought about the question.

"I don't miss him," I said. "That's the thing I keep coming back to. I thought I would, and I don't. What I miss is —" I stopped. Tried again. "I gave five years to someone who was looking at me and seeing someone else the entire time. And I didn't know. I thought I was — I thought I was the person he chose. Not the person he settled for because the person he actually wanted wasn't available."

Nora didn't say anything. She just listened, which was one of the things she was best at.

"So it's not grief," I said. "It's more like — I'm going through everything I thought was real and figuring out what actually was. Every memory. Every compliment. Every time he looked at me like I was something specific to him." I shook my head. "I'm trying to figure out if any of it was actually about me."

Nora was quiet for a moment. Then she said: "That's not grief. That's inventory. You're already past him."

I looked at her.

"You're not asking how to get over him," she said. "You're asking what was real. That's a different question. That's a you question, not a him question. You're already past him."

I wasn't sure I believed it. But I reached for my notebook on the coffee table and wrote it down anyway. That's not grief. That's inventory.

I looked at the words for a moment. Then I closed the notebook.

"Okay," I said.

"Okay," Nora agreed, and refilled my glass.

---

The bookstore was three blocks from my apartment, the kind of place with handwritten staff recommendation cards tucked into the shelves and a cat that slept on the poetry section. They hosted a local author reading on the second Thursday of every month. I had been meaning to go since I moved in. I finally went in November, mostly because Biscuit needed a shorter walk that evening and I needed to be somewhere that wasn't my desk.

The author was reading from a debut novel — something quiet and Pacific Northwest, about a fishing family and a missing boat. The room was small and warm and smelled like old paper. I stood near the back with a cup of bad coffee and listened.

I felt him before I saw him. Not in a dramatic way. Just the particular awareness of someone nearby who is also paying attention.

I turned slightly. He was standing a few feet away, hands in the pockets of a dark jacket, watching the author at the front of the room. Then he turned too, and we looked at each other, and he said, "Esme Andrews," in a tone that was not surprised, just — certain. Like he had simply confirmed something he already knew.

"Caiden," I said.

Caiden Shaw. We had overlapped for two years in college, in the way that people overlap when they share a social orbit without ever quite landing in the same conversation for long. I remembered him as someone who listened more than he talked and always seemed to have a book in his hand that wasn't assigned reading.

He looked the same, mostly. A little steadier, maybe. The way people look when they've grown into themselves.

We stood near the back through the Q&A, talking quietly in the margins of the event. He told me about his PhD program at UW — comparative literature, a dissertation on unreliable narrators in postcolonial romance fiction. I looked at him.

"Unreliable narrators in romance," I said.

"It's a rich field," he said, and the corner of his mouth moved.

"I write romance novels," I said.

"I know," he said. "I've read two of them."

I didn't know what to do with that, so I drank my bad coffee.

Afterward, on the sidewalk outside, he asked if I wanted to get coffee. Real coffee, he said, not whatever that was in there. I almost said no out of habit. Then I thought about Nora's word. Inventory.

"Sure," I said.

Biscuit, who I had left at home, would have approved.