He Brought His First Love Home Again, So I Left novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Ticket
Gavin hands Callie another plane ticket so Corinna can stay; she writes Savannah, and at the office a sign on her desk calls her a homewrecker.
Gavin slid the plane ticket across the breakfast table without looking up from his phone.
It was the ninth one in three years.
"Pick wherever you want. Somewhere with a beach. Take the week and rest."
Corinna was upstairs in our guest room, unpacking the same cream suitcase she always brought.
I used to tear the tickets in half and ask him how he could do this to me.
Once I threw a coffee mug at the wall, and he stopped my mother's care payments for a month.
This time I picked up the pen beside the ticket and wrote a single word in the destination box.
Savannah.
Gavin glanced at it and smiled.
"See? You're easy when you want to be."
I smiled back and slid the ticket into my bag, next to the folder I had signed at a lawyer's office the day before.
It was a separation agreement.
He thought I had finally given up.
I had given up, but on him, not on the fight.
The next morning I rode to work in the back seat of his car.
Corinna sat up front, because she had sat up front for three years.
Gavin had once adjusted that seat for me, and said nobody else would ever sit in it.
At a red light Corinna turned around and smiled at me.
"Callie, did you put that ticket somewhere safe? I'd hate for you to lose it."
"It's safe," I said.
She patted my knee over the seat back.
"I worry about you flying alone. You'll text us when you land, won't you?"
"She will," Gavin said to the windshield.
His eyes found me in the mirror for half a second.
"We start a new project next month, and I need you on it. Don't stay away long."
He said it.
I looked out the window and said nothing.
The week I had a fever of 102, I called him from a clinic waiting room and asked him to come get me.
He told me he was in a meeting and that I was being dramatic.
I came home that night with a bandage on my hand and found him helping Corinna up the front steps because she had a stomachache.
"Why were you at a clinic?" he asked me, and carried her bag inside.
The car stopped in front of our building on Madison.
Gavin got out, walked around, and opened Corinna's door.
He unbuckled her seat belt for her, with his head turned toward the street.
I opened my own door and got out.
The lobby was full of people from the sixth floor holding paper coffee cups.
Two of them stared at me and then at Gavin's back.
"Why did she ride in with him again?"
"She does it on purpose so everyone thinks she's his girlfriend."
"Corinna is so patient. I'd have put that woman out years ago."
Gavin stopped walking.
So did I.
He heard every word, and I watched the back of his neck.
I was his wife, and one sentence would have shut the whole lobby up.
Corinna turned and looked at him with big, soft eyes.
"Gavin, it's fine. People talk."
He turned to me instead, with the face he used on late vendors.
"Don't stand in the entrance, Callie. We're at work."
I remembered a street in Savannah seven years ago, when a stranger stared at me too long.
Gavin had pulled me against his chest and said, loud enough for the block to hear, "That's my girlfriend. Look somewhere else."
I had felt tall for a week.
Now I walked past him into the elevator without a word.
Corinna stepped in beside me and pressed the sixth floor, then the seventh for herself.
"Don't let them get to you," she said gently.
Her nails were painted deep red, glossy and new.
I got out on six and walked through the open office.
Everybody stopped typing as I passed.
My desk was at the far end, under the window, where it had been for four years.
A sheet of printer paper was taped to the center of my monitor.
Someone had scrawled across it in thick black marker:
"HOMEWRECKER. GET OUT."
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