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  “Sit. Over here,” Maisie commanded, taking me by the arm and leading me toward one of the ladder-back kitchen chairs. She sat down beside me and peered intently into my face. “What’s going on? Did you and Elliott break up?”

  This question startled me. Why would Maisie’s first thought be that Elliott and I had broken up? He had just moved in with me two months ago, and I thought he might finally be close to proposing. It had taken three years of on-again, off-again dating to drag him to this point, and I was starting to wonder if it was normal to feel victorious—as opposed to purely happy—that I’d managed to finally wrangle a semipermanent commitment out of him.

  “No, of course not. Why would you think that?” I asked. My voice was soggy from the tears.

  “I’ve never seen you this upset,” Maisie said. “I thought it must be Elliott-related.”

  “It’s not. I just lost my job,” I said.

  Maisie gasped and covered her mouth with her hands. “But…why? How? I mean…why?”

  I wiped my tears off my cheeks with the back of my hands. Maisie quickly handed me a paper napkin, and I blew my nose into it.

  “Apparently I sexually propositioned a student.”

  “What? That’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” Maisie exploded.

  This is why I love Maisie—with no hesitation, no second-guessing, she dismissed the idea out of hand.

  As we sat at Maisie’s kitchen table, sticky with spilled juice and festooned with soggy Cheerios, I told her about Matt Forrester and the accusation he’d made against me, and how Dr. Johnson had sided with Matt and his donation-heavy parents over me. The telling of the morning’s events didn’t make it more real for me. In fact, the more I talked about it, the more detached I felt from what had happened. Even my anger, which had been so hot and sharp-edged earlier, now seemed distant. Or maybe it was just that I’d managed to transfer it to Maisie. Because the more I told her, the more furious she became. Her pale skin bloomed red under her freckles, the way it always did when she was feeling a strong emotion, and her lips pinched into such a tight line, it looked like she was holding her breath.

  “That little shit,” she finally said when I’d finished. “That horrible little cockroach of a child.”

  “Hardly a child. He’s seventeen.”

  “He’s a bastard. Okay, here’s what you do: First, you sue him and his asshole parents. Then you sue that godforsaken school.”

  Motherhood had not softened Maisie’s lawyerly instincts. Before she had the twins, Maisie was a prosecutor with the state attorney’s office. The job had been a fertile source of anecdotes. Like the time Maisie was in court, prosecuting a burglary. After she finished her opening statement, during which she outlined the pretty much open-and-shut case, the defendant—hulking, tattooed, and nearly three times Maisie’s size—had burst out with an angry “Suck my dick, bitch.” Before the judge and bailiff could even react, Maisie eyed the defendant coolly and retorted, “Thanks for the offer, but you’re really not my type.” Everyone in the courtroom—even the judge—burst out laughing.

  “What kind of case would that be? It’s my word against Matt’s. And the school has already made it clear that they’re taking his side.” I shivered suddenly. “You want to know the really creepy thing? If I didn’t know me, and I heard about this on the news—a story about a teacher seducing one of her students—I’d believe it too. What kind of kid makes up a story like that?”

  “A really fucked-up kid,” Maisie said. She took an angry gulp of coffee. “So what is his story? Did you ever get a weird feeling about him before?”

  “That he’d do something like this? Of course not,” I said.

  “What’s he like otherwise? Did you ever get the feeling that he was disturbed? The sort to torture small animals or shoot his parents while they’re asleep?”

  “No.” I shook my head definitely. “He’s basically a cartoon of a spoiled rich kid. Strong sense of entitlement, a belief that Daddy’s money can buy him out of anything. Hell, he’s right, it usually does.” I took a sip of coffee. It was awful—bitter and watery. Maisie had always been a terrible cook. She couldn’t even make edible instant macaroni and cheese. I set my mug down and nudged it to one side. “I’ve heard rumors that he’s a bit of a partier.”

  “A drinker or a drugger?” Maisie asked.

  I shrugged. “I’d guess both.”

  “The little shit,” Maisie muttered darkly. “So, what are you going to do now?”

  Icy fingers of fear gripped at my heart, and I shivered again. I liked it better when I was in shock. Shock has a nice muffling effect on your feelings.

  “I have no idea,” I said. And then the fear really took hold, and it suddenly felt like I’d been ripped open and was falling inside myself into a deep, bottomless hole. “Oh, my God. What am I going to do?”

  Maisie reached out and grabbed my hand. “It will be all right. You’ll be fine.”

  “I’ll never be able to teach again. I’m going to have to find another job. A different career. I’m thirty-two years old. I’m too old to start over again.”

  Maisie made a pfft sound. “You are not too old. People change careers all the time. And a lot of them do it much later in life than you. Think of all the people who’ve been down-sized and suddenly have to become…” Her voice trailed off as she struggled to come up with an example that would prove her point. Suddenly her face brightened. “A masseuse! Like Megan Frost’s husband. Remember? He did something over at Sunrise Bank but then started going to massage school at night. He ended up opening that day spa downtown.”

  “But I don’t want to be a masseuse!” I said. My voice was shrill. “You know I hate touching strangers! It’s why I didn’t go to medical school!”

  “I thought you didn’t go to medical school because the sight of blood makes you feel faint,” Maisie said. She had a maddening ability to remember everything anyone had ever said to her. “Don’t you remember when we were at track practice in tenth grade, and Kurt Shaw fell and got a rock lodged in his forehead? The blood was just pouring out of him—really, it was an insane amount of blood for a relatively minor injury, although I guess head wounds do bleed a lot. Anyway. You took one look at him and went all woozy. Coach Miller ended up sending you to the nurse’s office.”

  I shuddered at the memory. “Can we please not talk about this now?”

  “You brought it up.”

  “No, I didn’t. I said I didn’t go to medical school because I don’t like touching people. Although, from where I’m currently sitting, I have to say: really bad move. Because if I was a doctor right now, I wouldn’t be an out-of-work teacher with a sexual-harassment charge hanging over my head,” I said miserably.

  Maisie patted my hand consolingly.

  “I guess it’s a good thing you and Elliott are living together. He’ll be able to help you out financially, right?” Maisie said this as though it was a small point in Elliott’s favor.

  Maisie was the only person I knew who didn’t instantly like Elliott, who was an all-around nice guy and, in many ways, the perfect boyfriend. He’s kind, easygoing, faithful, hygienic, gainfully employed. The sort of man little old ladies ask to reach a can of soup off the top shelf at the grocery store and neighbors call when they need to move a piece of heavy furniture.

  But Maisie had held a grudge against Elliott for the past two years, ever since he broke up with me on my thirtieth birthday. Unfortunately, he chose to do this an hour before the party Maisie and Joe were throwing for me was due to start, which meant that when I turned up at my own birthday party, I was alone and weeping. Even though we’d later gotten back together, Maisie had never really fully forgiven him.

  I’d tried to lobby Maisie on Elliott’s behalf. Yes, the birthday-breakup trauma had been an especially low point in our relationship. I wouldn’t deny that, nor would Elliott, who had apologized profusely for it. He’d just that day missed out on scoring an exclusive listing for a waterfront mansio
n—Elliott was a realtor—and that was after learning his sales had been down twenty percent the month before. The combination of these two setbacks—along with his belief that my turning thirty would cause my biological clock to start clanging and turn me into a desperate baby-obsessed cliché—had propelled him straight into an old-fashioned panic attack. Suddenly he wasn’t just freaking out about how he was going to make next month’s payment on his condo; he was also worrying about how he’d pay for a wedding, the mortgage on a three-bedroom ranch house near a good elementary school, and the lease on a minivan with side air bags. His parents’ rocky relationship followed by an ugly divorce when he was ten had scarred him, he’d explained, and made him leery of commitment.

  “It’s fine,” I had assured Elliott the day after the doomed birthday party, as he sat on my couch, clutching my hand in his. His thin face was pale and miserable, and his shoulders were hunched forward. “I don’t even want to get engaged right now. Lots of people put off marriage and children until their mid-thirties. There’s no rush.”

  And Elliott had thanked me for being so understanding, had told me he didn’t deserve me, and then had asked me if there was any way I’d take him back. Without hesitating, I said yes. Although now, two years later, I was starting to think that It Was Time. Time to move forward—to get engaged, to get married, and, yes, to have children, before my ovaries crapped out. I’d been arrogant enough to think that I was in control of my biological clock. But lately, whenever I saw a baby strapped into a carrier at the grocery store or spent time with Maisie’s boys, I felt a pang that was getting harder and harder to ignore. When I’d brought this up to Elliott, he seemed open to the idea.

  “It’s definitely something we should talk about,” he’d said, folding me into his arms. Despite being thin, Elliott was a world-class cuddler. He was the human equivalent of a cozy sweater. “Not right now, of course, not while I’m still getting my business up and running.” Elliott had recently left the large realty group he’d worked at for the past seven years to start up his own office. “But soon. Very, very soon.” And then he’d leaned back and smiled playfully at me. “Who knows? Maybe it’ll be a holly jolly Christmas this year.”

  “Do you think Santa will bring me something sparkly?” I’d asked, playing along.

  “Maybe…” Elliott said, raising his eyebrows knowingly. Then he kissed me in a way that I thought sealed the deal.

  I hadn’t told Maisie about any of this. Any mention of Elliott and the cautious approach he took toward marriage always caused her to roll her eyes and mutter under her breath about commitment-phobic bastards and how I should get the hell out of it before it was too late.

  I privately thought that in order to maintain her grudge against him, Maisie was deliberately ignoring all of the wonderful things Elliott had done over the years. Like when I had my tonsils out and he’d filled the freezer with ice cream and brought over his blender to make milk shakes for me. And then there was the time he surprised me by waiting in line at the bookstore on the night the last Harry Potter book came out, so when I woke up it was waiting for me on my nightstand. He had some issues, sure, but who didn’t, especially by the time they reached their thirties? And I knew Elliott. At his core, he was a really good guy in all the ways that mattered.

  And yet…I wasn’t at all sure how he would react to the news that I was, in all likelihood, about to be insolvent and unemployable. Of course we were in a committed relationship, especially now that he had finally rented out his condo and moved in with me. But the new living arrangement was taking some getting used to, and I’d thought Elliott had been a bit distant lately. It was probably just nerves, I knew, but I also wasn’t thrilled at the idea of adding more stress to our relationship.

  I hadn’t shared any of this with Maisie, not wanting her already low opinion of him to sink even further. So now I just said, “Hmmm, yeah, good thing.”

  Maisie gave me a sharp look, but I was saved from prosecutorial interrogation by the sudden and uproarious entrance of Gus and Leo. They came hurtling into the kitchen like twin rockets. Gus was wearing a red superhero cape, and Leo had on a quiver of foam arrows and a toy bow slung over one shoulder.

  “You two look like you’re expecting trouble,” I said.

  They giggled in response, and then Leo whispered something in Gus’s ear. Gus, always the more vocal of the two, said, “Mama, can we have juice boxes? And crackers?”

  “Already? You just finished breakfast ten minutes ago,” Maisie said. She shook her head at me. “These two are like bottomless pits. Do you know our grocery bill has tripled since they started on solids? Not doubled. Tripled. I can’t imagine what our food budget is going to look like when they’re teenagers.”

  “Goldfish crackers, please!” Leo piped up. He waved his bow around. I privately questioned the decision-making that had gone into arming the boys, even with something as seemingly benign as a plastic bow and foam arrows.

  “And juice boxes!” Gus chimed in, quickly adding, “Please!”

  “Okay, okay,” Maisie said. She stood up, grabbed a giant carton of Goldfish out of the cupboard, and began dispensing the crackers into two green plastic bowls.

  I got up too and fetched the promised juice boxes out of the fridge. “Apple or fruit punch?” I asked the boys.

  “Punch!” Leo yelled.

  “Apple!” shouted Gus.

  I distributed the juice boxes, only to have the boys thrust them back at me with orders to unwrap the attached straws for them. It was only when they’d run back out of the kitchen, snacks in hand and making more noise than seemed possible, that I noticed the lottery ticket stuck to the refrigerator door with a plastic banana-shaped magnet.

  “A lottery ticket?” I turned around to look at Maisie, my eyebrows arched.

  “What?” she asked, trying to sound blasé, although the effect was ruined when she flushed a dark red.

  “You’ve always said the lottery is a tax on stupid people.”

  “Well, the jackpot is really high this week. Eighty-seven million dollars,” Maisie said defensively. “I told you our grocery bill is out of control.”

  “Eighty-seven million would certainly buy a lot of juice boxes,” I said.

  “Tell me about it. I don’t normally play, and I know you have a better chance of getting struck by lightning than winning the lottery.”

  “Especially in this state,” I said. Late-afternoon thunderstorms were commonplace in south Florida.

  “But when the jackpot gets this high…Well, I figured why not.” Maisie shrugged and refilled her coffee mug from the glass carafe. “I picked the twins’ birthday and Joe’s and my wedding anniversary as my numbers. I thought they might carry some good juju.”

  “You’re not supposed to play dates,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because everyone plays meaningful dates, which means that there are a disproportionate number of tickets sold where all the numbers are thirty-one or lower.”

  Bruce Greene, the algebra teacher at Andrews Prep, had once told me this over lunch in the teachers’ lounge. Bruce was full of fun facts. He’d also told me that, over a lifetime, the average person swallows eight spiders in their sleep.

  “So?”

  “So it means there’s a higher probability that someone else will pick the same numbers. And then you’ll have to share the money with them,” I explained.

  Maisie snorted. “Half of eighty-seven million dollars? I think I can live with that.”

  “No kidding. Can you imagine having that kind of money?”

  “Yes, I can. We could pay off the house, the credit cards, my student loans, and put aside money for the twins’ school tuition. And after all of that, we might just have enough left over to splurge on a few cheeseburgers,” Maisie joked.

  “Surely things aren’t that bad.”

  “Well, maybe we could afford a couple of steaks instead of the cheeseburgers.”

  She said this lightly, but I knew Ma
isie and Joe had been having financial trouble for a while. It started when they hadn’t been able to conceive. Maisie’s health insurance didn’t cover consultations with the fertility specialist, and then it took three rounds of in vitro fertilization before she got pregnant. They’d spent upward of fifty thousand dollars by the time the twins were born, and she and Joe had taken out a second mortgage on their house to pay for it. And then Maisie had opted to stay home with the boys, reasoning that by the time she paid the double childcare costs, her state attorney’s salary wouldn’t go very far. So now she was a fulltime stay-at-home mom, and they were managing on Joe’s earnings from the landscape nursery he owned. At least, I’d thought they were managing.

  “Maisie,” I began, but before I could ask her if their financial troubles were more serious than I’d thought, the twins had stormed the kitchen yet again, roaring for more Goldfish crackers.

  “More?” Maisie asked, her face screwed up in comical disbelief. “You ate all of those crackers already? I don’t believe it!”

  “We did! We ate the crackers!” Leo said, delighted with himself.

  Max grinned and nodded. “We did, Mama, we did!”

  “Are there holes in your tummies?” Maisie asked teasingly. She picked Leo up and nimbly turned him over, so that his T-shirt fell open, exposing a pale, rounded belly. He laughed uproariously and kicked his legs, while Maisie tickled his stomach and asked, “Is there a hole in there, Mr. Belly Button?”

  “Pick me up, Mama, pick me up!” Gus begged, and Maisie set Leo down and swooped Gus up and repeated the gag with him.

  And now that the kitchen was full of light and laughter and the screeches of childish pleasure, I didn’t have the heart to drag Maisie back to the depressing reality of her financial troubles. Besides, I had my own, more pressing problems to deal with. And remembering this—my sudden unemployment, the accusations that had been made against me, the uncertainty of where I’d go from here—it all hit me anew. There was no escaping the truth: I was in major trouble.

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