I shook my head. “She signs autographs now and then. I don’t really see that side of her. We do normal things. She’s just like everyone else,” I said, slipping a paper clip over my stack of corrections.
Becky gawked at me from across the table. “Okay, but she’s totally not. People love her. They pay money at cons just to be able to take, like, one picture with her, and you just get to hang out with her all willy-nilly and you’re not even freaking out about it?!”
“I very much appreciate that I get to hang out with her. Willy-nilly.” I circled a typo.
She gave me crazy eyes.
I loved messing with Becky.
She blinked at me. “You don’t get this, do you? Your neighbor is America’s sweetheart and I feel like you’re not fully appreciating this. She was a judge on a panel with Tom Hanks once and they called her ‘the nice one.’ She had a cameo on that one Gordon Ramsay cooking show and he refused to yell at her—Post Malone has her name tattooed on the inside of his lip!”
I looked up at her. “She’s met Tom Hanks?”
She stared back at me, horrified. “Why don’t you know any of the things?!”
I stifled a grin. I didn’t know about Tom Hanks—or the Gordon Ramsay show, come to think of it. And I didn’t know what the hell a Post Malone was either.
I was fully aware that Vanessa was a celebrity. But to me she was just…Vanessa. She was grounded and normal. Most of the time I forgot what she did for a living entirely—something I think she preferred. She didn’t like to talk about her channel.
Admittedly, there were times when we were out that I noticed she was being recognized. Even if people didn’t approach her, I could tell they knew who she was.
I could never be on camera like that, my life so exposed, no anonymity. I don’t think she particularly enjoyed that aspect of it, but for her, raising money for ALS trumped privacy. I guess if you found something important to you like that, it would be worth it.
“I don’t need you to tell me how lucky I am or how incredible Vanessa is,” I said. “I am well aware.”
Becky was shaking her head at me, rendered mute by how totally uncool and uninformed I was. She let out a disappointed sigh at my unwillingness to gossip about this and went back to her subpoenas.
The occasional celebrity surprises aside, it occurred to me that I officially knew more about Vanessa and her family in two short weeks than I had known about Rachel and hers after eight months.
I’d had a lot of time to think about that relationship since it ended, and I was coming to conclusions that I wasn’t thrilled about.
Part of me knew that Rachel had probably been purposely cagey about her real life, and that’s why I didn’t know her better or catch on to what she was doing. But the other part of me was starting to wonder how much of a role I had played in that. Because the reality was I didn’t care enough to dig.
I made no effort to meet her friends and family or to visit her in Seattle. If she didn’t text me for a few days or answer my calls, I barely noticed because I didn’t have time to talk to her anyway.
I wasn’t blaming myself for what Rachel did. But Vanessa was right about what she said all those weeks ago. I didn’t have balance. My life only allowed for a once-a-month girlfriend who was a stranger to me after almost a year of dating because that’s all I’d made room for. And that I did have to take ownership over.
And there was something else. A small but niggling voice that told me that maybe I liked it this way. That maybe Rachel was another manifestation of the control I seemed to need, a symptom of a bigger problem. That making work my number one focus was a way to protect myself from getting too close to someone who might end up hurting me. Leaving me, like Dad had. And the funny thing was Rachel did end up leaving me. But the more I really thought about it, the more I realized that I didn’t care.
I was indignant and angry about it, but on principle, not because I’d been in love with her, or even close to it. Did I choose her by design? Because I knew somewhere buried in my subconscious that she couldn’t get near enough to my heart to damage it?
I couldn’t shake the thought. I didn’t like this. At all.
Vanessa said that childhood trauma always messes with your relationships. And I was starting to think she was right.
She was right about a lot of things.
Vanessa made me different. Better. She made me see the world through a new lens—or a lens that I’d forgotten existed.
It was like I was a kid again. We played like children. Had squirt gun fights in her living room, played the floor is lava. When it was negative five outside, we boiled water and threw it off the balcony to make fog. We blew bubbles to watch them freeze, made snow angels on the roof, had snowball fights that made me want to fall into a snow drift in our coats and kiss her.
I laughed until my stomach hurt, noticed the beauty around me, and marveled at the fact that I’d stopped seeing it in the first place. I felt like I’d been half-dead and I didn’t even know it, walking through my life in a sleepy fog until she’d woken me up.
Vanessa had said once that money can’t make you happy unless you know what you want. And it was becoming clearer and clearer to me by the moment what that was. With every day that I spent with Vanessa and Grace, I became more sure of it. But the thing that I wanted couldn’t be bought. I had to earn it.
I just didn’t know if I could.
I was still in the conference room scanning the Bueller police report when Becky made a shrieking noise from across the table. Becky being dramatic wasn’t usually cause for me to look up from what I was doing, so I didn’t see Vanessa come in with Grace in her stroller until she cleared her throat in the doorway.
“You must be Becky?” she said, smiling at my hypnotized paralegal over my shoulder.
My heart skipped at the unexpected sight of her.
She was beautiful. She was always beautiful, but I hadn’t been braced to see her.
She had on a purple sweater I’d never seen her wear before, and her hair was down and curled. It gave me a twinge of pride that this woman had just walked through my office to see me.
I got up, grinning. “Hey, I didn’t know you were coming.”
“Since I’m not hanging out with you tonight, I thought I’d come down to surprise you and bring you lunch.” She held up a paper bag.
I stood there, just smiling at her like an idiot until Becky made a whimpering noise from behind me. “I’m gonna go have lunch at my desk,” she squeaked.
She clutched a jumbled pile of paperwork to her chest and grinned at Vanessa like a lunatic as she edged past her and closed the door.
Vanessa beamed at me. “You know, you’re even hotter in your office.”
I laughed.
Grace smiled at me from her stroller. She’d been doing that now for the last few days. Every time she had her pacifier in and I made her smile, it popped out and she’d beam up at me, all gums and twinkling eyes. And if I tickled her, she giggled. I couldn’t get enough of it. I loved playing with her.
I reached down to scoop her into my arms and nuzzled her with my nose. She had on a tiny blue fleece onesie with snowflakes on it and she smelled like baby powder and Vanessa’s perfume.
She smelled like home.
She put a fat little hand up, and I bit her fingers with my lips and she made happy giggling noises. I couldn’t stop smiling.