Second Choice Wife novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Three Words
The class group chat plays a three-word game, the old campus belle says "And Heath," and Naomi lies beside the husband who never touches her; in the morning she reads the first love's text on his phone and tells him she is going to the reunion with him.
It was past midnight when someone in the class group chat started a game.
"Sum up high school in three words," someone typed, and a hundred phones lit up.
"Cheap pizza, football, regret."
"Locker, locker, locker."
"Pop quizzes, pop quizzes, pop quizzes."
I was lying on my side in the dark, reading with the brightness turned all the way down.
Then Bridget Depew wrote in the chat for the first time in four years.
"Vibrant. Passionate."
The chat went quiet.
Three dots appeared and disappeared and appeared again.
"And Heath."
Forty replies landed in a minute.
"OMG BRIDGET."
"Where have you BEEN?"
"The two of you were everything."
"Remember when he climbed the water tower for her?"
"Does anyone know what happened to Heath?"
"He left the chat the day after the breakup and cut off all of us."
"We only see him in the news now."
I remembered.
Everybody in that chat had watched Larkfield High's most famous couple, the rebel with the motorcycle and the gentle blonde girl who read poetry on the bleachers.
They had loved each other loudly and in public, and everyone still talked about it ten years later.
I had been in the third row of that bleachers. I had seen it too.
Then the summer after graduation it ended, and nobody could say exactly how.
I put the phone face down on the blanket.
Heath Garrison lay beside me with his back to the window and his face half in the pillow.
He slept perfectly still.
His dark hair had been cut that week. His jaw was shaved even at midnight.
The boy on the motorcycle had turned into a man in pressed grey suits who said "good morning" and "thank you" and "I'll be late tonight."
He was my husband.
He had been my husband for fourteen months.
In fourteen months he had never once touched me on purpose.
I looked at the space between his shoulder and mine, about the width of a hand.
The ache I had carried for nine years rolled over inside my chest.
I had loved him since I was nineteen and he walked out of the county jail with a paper bag of his things.
He had never asked me why I sat across from him at the diner that morning.
He had never asked me anything.
I turned off the screen and lay there until the clock said three.
***
At seven, his phone buzzed on the nightstand.
Heath was in the shower. I wasn't looking for it.
The screen said "B. Depew" and then the message, in full, because he kept his notifications open.
"I land Friday. I know about the reunion. Tell your wife I said hello."
Under it, a second one arrived while I was still reading.
"I'm single now, Heath. I wanted you to hear it from me."
I stood very still in my robe.
Water ran behind the bathroom door.
Heath's mother, Eleanor, had put the reunion invitation on the kitchen island three weeks ago, with a sticky note in her own handwriting.
"Heath will want to go."
He had thrown it away the same night.
I knew, because I took it out of the trash and put it in my cardigan pocket.
The shower stopped.
Heath came out in a towel with another over his shoulder, and saw me holding his phone.
I put it back on the nightstand, face up.
"She's coming home Friday," I said.
"I saw."
"You're not going to the reunion."
"No."
"I am."
He stopped drying his hair.
For the first time in months, he looked straight at me.
His eyes were dark brown and gave nothing away.
"Naomi, you don't have to," he said.
"She said hello to your wife. I'd like to say it back."
"It isn't a game with her."
"It never was a game with me either."
I walked to the closet and took out the green dress I had been saving for no reason.
I felt him watching me do it.
Behind me, his voice came out lower than I'd ever heard it.
"Then you don't leave my side."
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