Better Than My Ex novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Closure

Mara walks up to the table on the sand, asks for her documents, and watches the widow drop the mask; the widow posts a photo of Mara walking away.

I stood in the palms and listened, because I wanted to hear all of it.

"You've gone quiet," Bryson said.

Lydia touched the pendant. "I was thinking how unreal this feels. The water. The dinner."

She waited a beat.

"You."

Bryson picked a strawberry out of the bowl and held it across the table. "Come here."

"Seriously?"

"Open."

She leaned in and took it from his fingers. They stayed on her mouth a second too long.

"I missed this," he said.

"This?"

"Us."

Nobody in four years had made that word sound so easy.

I stepped out of the palms and said his name.

His whole body stopped.

Lydia turned first, then Bryson.

The warmth went out of his face so fast I almost admired it.

"Mara."

He didn't sound surprised. He sounded annoyed.

"What are you doing here?"

"I came for my passport and my birth certificate."

A waiter at the edge of the canopy found something to do with a napkin.

"You flew to Santa Barbara for paperwork?" Bryson said.

"You've had it since April. I stopped believing in next week."

"Keep your voice down."

"I'm not shouting."

He stood and straightened his shirt. "Don't make a scene in front of Lydia."

I looked at Lydia.

She had pulled her feet under her and folded her hands in her lap, wide-eyed and soft.

But her mouth had moved.

It was a smile, small, and gone again.

"Oh, Mara," she said. "This must be so uncomfortable."

"The documents are at my condo," Bryson said. "In the safe. The code is 1104."

He didn't look at me.

"Take them, take whatever else is yours, and leave your key on the counter."

"Fine."

"Good. I'll handle this. Lydia, stay here."

He walked up the beach toward the hotel, and I understood that handling this meant not being near me.

That left the two of us and a bowl of strawberries.

Lydia poured herself more wine. She did it slowly.

"I'll admit it," she said. "I didn't think you'd actually come."

"I'm good at following through."

"That's what Bryson says. That you always follow through." Her fingers went back to the pendant. "Isn't it pretty?"

"It's mine."

"Is it?" She glanced down at it with feigned surprise. "Bryson said it suited me."

"He told me it was lost."

"Well." She turned the heart in the torchlight. "I suppose it was."

I had spent four years being careful around her.

I had never seen her face with nothing arranged on it.

It was calm and a little bored.

It was not the face of a woman in mourning.

"How long did you plan this?" I asked.

"Plan what? A weekend?" She laughed softly. "I post every day, Mara. I don't block people. I wanted you to see."

"Why?"

"Because someone had to tell you it was over, and he's too kind to do it."

She said it gently, and she was smiling.

"Christopher would be so ashamed of how you're acting," she added. "He always said you were the sweet one."

I had met her husband twice, once at his bedside and once at his funeral.

I did not trust myself to say anything about him in front of her.

A year ago I would have cried here.

Instead I took one last look at the diamond on her throat and turned around.

"Thank you for dinner," Lydia called after me. "Drive safe."

I walked up through the lit gardens with my hands shaking, and I didn't let them shake where she could see.

At the top of the path I stopped under a lamp and took out my phone.

I wasn't going to look. I looked.

Lydia had posted a new story three minutes ago.

It was a picture of my back, small against the torches, walking away across the sand.

She had written across it: "Some people don't know when it's over."

It already had two hundred views.

The first comment came while I watched, from a captain whose name I had never heard.

"Wait, is that the baker??"

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