“Uh, hello?”
Dani shook her head. She was talking to Sinéad. Theoretically. She hadn’t been listening, and Sinéad was holding her beer aloft in what looked like a paused toast. Dani lifted her glass and clinked it against Sinéad’s, but after setting it down and realizing she’d forgotten to take a sip, she had to reverse course.
“That is the most pathetic toast I’ve ever seen.”
“Yeah, yeah.” She took a sip. It had been just over two weeks since she’d gotten home from Eldovia, and she was trying to do the things that a person did when she was not heartbroken.
One of those things was go to the holiday party, even though going to a work party without Max felt wrong. Another one of those things was reconnect with local friends. She’d been emotionally absent all summer and fall. So she’d invited Sinéad out for an early dinner before the party and now they were standing at the bar in the faculty club waiting for the shindig to begin.
“What’s the matter with you?” Sinéad asked.
Dani lowered her voice. “What if I don’t want to be a professor anymore?” She couldn’t believe she was saying this out loud. “What if I want to do something else?”
Sinéad, ever-unflappable, didn’t freak out. “And what would that be?”
“Write books.”
“You’ve done that.”
“But what if I wanted to write a novel?” She hadn’t touched the Gertrude Stein book since Riems. It hurt too much. It was so tied up with Max. Max, who, when she’d said, “I think I want to try to write a novel,” had said, simply, “Yes.”
“Then you write a novel?” Sinéad said. “Which, for the record, is an entirely unremarkable thing for an English professor to do.” When Dani only nodded, Sinéad said, “Any more questions?”
“What do you call it when you go on vacation and have a lot of sex and then you come home and you don’t know how to feel?”
Aww, crap. That had just come out.
“I think you call that a fling,” Sinéad said.
Right. “And what do you call it when you have a fling with a friend?”
“I think you call that a mistake.”
Yep.
“Unless . . .” Sinéad raised her eyebrows.
“What?” Dani asked, sorry she’d started this conversation.
“Unless you’re mischaracterizing your relationship with that person.”
“No, we’re definitely friends. Or we were.”
“But is that all you are?”
And there it was.
“We’re talking about the duke, aren’t we?” Sinéad pressed.
“Baron, actually.” Sinéad raised her eyebrows even higher, and Dani sighed and said, “Yes.”
“Do you love him?”
“Does it matter?” It didn’t matter if she loved Max. He didn’t love her. Max didn’t lie. And Dani would die before she would repeat her past mistakes for another man who didn’t love her. She was never going to quit her job and move to Eldovia. Well, she was never going to move to Eldovia. She was, however, thinking about quitting her job. But not really. Just idly. Because quitting a tenure-track job was insane.
Sinéad shrugged. “I personally can’t think of anything that matters more, but okay. You do you.”
Maybe this “hang out more with local friends” plan had been a bad idea. Dani needed Leo. Her friendship with Leo had always been refreshingly free of analysis. They were the same that way. They didn’t have to—or want to—talk about everything.
She missed him. He had been trying to reach her since he got home from his honeymoon yesterday, but she’d been dodging his calls. It had been shitty of her, and she resolved to call him when she got home.
“Well, hello,” Leo said when he picked up the phone. “How great of you to finally make time in your busy schedule to call me back, no matter that it is in fact one a.m. here. Allow me to get straight to the point: Max is devastated.”
She winced at the one a.m. part. She’d gotten so used to calling Max whenever. “I’m sorry. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
“No. No. Hang on a sec.” Some rustling followed, and some low whispering that was probably him talking to Marie. “Okay, hi, Max is devastated.”
“I don’t want to talk about Max.”
“I’m sure you don’t. I just wanted to state for the record that Max is devastated.”
“How is that my problem?” She winced hearing those words coming out of her mouth. They were a defense mechanism. Because she was so confused. How could Max—Max—be devastated? How had he have gone from glibly asking her to move to Eldovia to “devastated”? Something was getting lost in translation.
“So it’s one in the morning, and you’ve called me to talk about something other than Max,” Leo said, with a hardness in his tone that was unusual. “Go ahead.”
“How was your honeymoon?” she asked weakly.
“I’m going back to bed. Call me later if you want to chat.”
“No! Wait.”
He waited, but she didn’t know what to say. She didn’t know if she could say anything without crying.
He sighed, too, and when he spoke, he sounded softer, more like the Leo she knew. “If I had asked you, say, a year ago, when you were pretty much over Vince but he was dragging out the divorce, if you would ever consider another relationship, what would you have said?”
“A relationship that didn’t violate any of my list items?”
“Yes. A relationship that didn’t violate any of your list items.”
“I would have said maybe under very specific circumstances.”
“And what would those be?” he said with exaggerated patience, like he was talking to Gabby when she was getting hyper.
“They would be the circumstances dictated by the list, Leo.” She, by contrast, was sounding decidedly snippy. But honestly, Leo knew about the list. Why did he need this explained to him? “He would have to integrate into my life. Do things on my terms. I finally have everything arranged the way I want it. Career is good. I’m on track to get tenure. I can legit afford my apartment now that I’m renting it out every once in a while. Why would I give up any of that?”
“I know I’m supposed to issue a vaguely ‘You go, girl’ cheer, but maybe the answer is you would give that stuff up for something bigger.”
“Like what?”
“Love? Love that is not quantifiable in list format? Love for someone who doesn’t have the same flexibility in life that you do?”
“But I’m post-love. And Max is . . .” Devastated?
“Right.” Leo’s voice had lost its edge but had taken on a totally blank tone, which was somehow more upsetting than the exaggerated patience of a moment ago. “I gotta go. It’s one a.m. I’ll talk to you later.”
He hung up on her.
Chapter Twenty-Four
“I’m going to get a place in New York,” Max said. “A pied-á-terre.” He glanced at his father, who was sipping a digestif of kirsch. He didn’t react at all to the news, surprisingly.