Excerpt: The Cross Under

When they reached her apartment, she got out of the car as he sat, numb. She leaned back in before she shut the door. “Hey, Dennis?”

He swallowed. His throat was dry. “Yeah?”

“Still carpooling, right?”

He couldn’t think of a good answer for that question besides, “Uh…”

“I’ll pick you up at 7:30,” she said. And then she shut the door and had disappeared into her building. He drove home, feeling like he wasn’t fully inhabiting his body.

The feeling continued throughout the next days, weeks, and months. He might have healed had he gotten any space between him and Michaela for a recovery process, but she was at the curb outside of his apartment building at 7:30 sharp the next morning. She still dropped by his cubicle at work to say hello and share tidbits from her day, and she still came and sat with him at lunch and jokingly complained about their office’s cafeteria food. They still carpooled every day. And after a few weeks, she started inviting him out to enjoy drinks with some of their other coworkers.

He started giving up on his despair and decided to trade it in for a little bit of hope. After all, if she didn’t even like him anymore, why did she still spend so much time with him? Maybe she was going through a phase, he reasoned with himself. Maybe she just needed some independence before she could fully appreciate what she had with him. Maybe it would just take time for her to find herself and come back to him, but eventually she would come back.

He consoled himself with this line of reasoning so often that he soon came to fully believe it. It didn’t help that everywhere he went, there was Michaela with her perfect porcelain face and beautiful, cheerful blue eyes, laughing at his jokes, sharing her lunch with him, saying goodbye to him at the end of each day as she had been doing since he moved to Springfield, except without the goodbye kiss.

He held onto his belief even when she began seriously dating again. About a year after the breakup (although Dennis had come to think of it as the beginning of a very temporary break), he heard her exclaiming to a coworker, Amanda, in another cubicle.

“He’s like a character from a Jane Austen novel, Mandy,” he heard her exclaim excitedly. For a split second, his heart rose, thinking that she had to be talking about him.

“Why were you at that business dinner?” Mandy had to know.

“Chelsea invited me. You know how Paul is. He just sat around with all the other suits and talked bottom lines and incomes and contracts. She was bored out of her skull. So he came over and said he had been watching me all night, and would I like to go out with him for a drink sometime?”

The two squealed like teenage girls, and Dennis sighed before reminding himself that of course Michaela would want to date a little bit before they got back together. That way, she would appreciate him even more.

“So when’s the date again?” Mandy asked.

“Tonight. I’m so excited. I bought a new blouse. I want to look my best. I have a good feeling about this one, Mandy.”

Dennis tuned that last sentence out and accepted her need to date again. Temporarily. Very temporarily.

He stayed with his logic even after she exclaimed to Mandy how well the date had gone, and the next one, and the next one, and the next one. Even after she came around with gifts he had given her, subtly showing them off around the office, he maintained in his mind that she was going through a much-needed phase. When it was over, he told himself, she’d be back.

And here he was now, staring dumbfoundedly at a wedding invitation with both of their names on it. Bronson Anthony Rothschild. As his hope shattered, he seized onto that name and hated it passionately, with more passion than he had ever hated anything besides Web server errors. In a couple of short months, the love of his life was going to be married to another man.