Above All

Chapter Three-2

ONLY SHE DIDN’T. SHE tried the crossword but couldn’t focus. She tried to read but the words swam on the page. Finally she sighed, refilled her tea, added a touch of honey, and turned on her laptop. She would give in, but just this once.

Aubrey Peterson. It took Google half a second to inform Casey that she was a partner at Sullivan and Cromwell, a billion-dollar law firm in New York, and utterly perfect in every way. The photo on her company page was of a tiny blonde with pale, unblemished skin and full lips glossed with baby pink. Casey was willing to bet money that she drank skinny lattes with a shot of nonfat sugar-free vanilla, extra foam, and told Nick he was wonderful every day.

When she and Nick first met, introduced by friends at a housewarming party in Brooklyn, he had published a few short stories and was supposedly on the cusp of revealing some really great novel that needed only to get out of his head and onto the page. By the time they’d moved in together, he even had a few words down, whereas Casey had yet to land a single art show and her café job was cutting back hours. It was the logical choice for her to go to graduate school while Nick stayed home to write.

And complain, and make a mess, and go for long tortured walks, and smoke cigarettes out the window as if he didn’t think Casey would notice the smell, and blame her for being too noisy, too in the way, too difficult to deal with so that it was impossible for him ever to think.

The problem, Casey realized in retrospect, was that she had been too there. Nick didn’t want a girlfriend, he wanted a mom. Someone to pick up after him and reassure him it would all be okay.

They’d lived together for six years, together for seven, when in a fit of frustration about the dissertation she never had time for and the Columbia students she hated to teach, she asked why he couldn’t be the one to cover rent for next month.

There were other things, of course. She’d started to decline reading pages when she was exhausted and let chapter three languish untouched on her desk. Then she asked for one night a week—just one—where they didn’t talk about the book. Two months later, he sat her down.

The next day, she spent the rest of her grad school stipend on a used car and was gone, leaving him the furniture, the apartment, most of her clothes, and all the unfinished drafts of her dissertation that she never wanted to look at again.

She never did know how he managed the rent.

It wasn’t that he’d dumped her, and done so cruelly, abruptly, with no hint that it was coming or desire to salvage the seven years they’d spent together. It wasn’t even that he was now the name on the tip of everyone’s tongue, although of course that burned.

No, what stung the most were the acknowledgments. Above all.

Casey closed the computer on Aubrey’s pert little smile, taking deep breaths to calm her racing heart. She’d always figured Nick would find somebody else soon. At least she didn’t have to wonder anymore.

She didn’t want to be Nick’s “above all,” she reminded herself. But that wasn’t the point. The point was that no matter how much she told herself that she was happy being alone, another cold, hard truth was whittling a persistent hole in her gut, making her wince every time she moved. She wasn’t Nick’s above all, but she wanted to be somebody’s. Their most important. Their everything and then some. The one who mattered most.

It was a good thing she was already sitting on her bed because the realization that she was truly alone hit her so deep and so fast it nearly knocked her down.

She wrapped herself in the comforter. It was too late to call Lee and there was no way she’d call her friends Hannah and Jen in New York on a Friday night. That would prove what she knew they already thought—that she had no life.

Her parents were out of the question. Any time she talked to her mom, it always came back to the same thing. When was she going to screw her head back on and leave Bonnet? Leaving Bonnet was the only way she would get a man, get a real job, and get her life back on track. It was implicit in every conversation with them. That nagging question, What are you doing with yourself?

“I don’t know,” Casey groaned, surprising herself by speaking out loud. She pulled the comforter back so it was no longer smothering her face. Now she was hot, restless, and annoyed. She pulled on her jacket and hiking boots. She needed a walk.

She stepped out into the cold, clear night and followed a path that meandered along the water. The lake was smooth and shiny, Mt. Bonnet rising in a long, dark hump against the blue-black sky. It always amazed her that at every time of day or night, in every possible light, the view was different. She had hundreds of sketches to prove it, piles of canvas showing the mountain new each time she saw it. Her fingers longed to start painting whenever she gazed up.

Along the lake, she heard the sounds of Ben’s group at their campsite. Guitar strings—that must be Kristi—and a lot of laughter. That must be the beer. Somewhere in that chorus, Ben was having a good time with whichever one of those girls was sharing his tent.

She kept walking. The night air was clearing her mind, reminding her why she was up here. Reminding her of everything she’d gained—not lost—since moving on.

She wound up a side path away from the lake, connecting with another path that branched out to the other sites. She was turning left to take the longer loop back to her cabin when she saw a flashlight bobbing up and down with a tall man’s stride.

You’ve got to be kidding me. Why couldn’t she get away?

“Hey,” a voice came from the darkness as the flashlight streamed over her.

She squinted and turned from the light. The flashlight clicked off and she lowered her arm from her eyes, letting the darkness flood her again.

“It’s Ben,” he said. “Sorry.”

“I know it’s you, I could tell by your walk,” Casey said, and then was glad the night hid her so he couldn’t tell how mortified she was to admit that she’d already noticed him enough to be able to tell his distinctive gait, confident strides bouncing on the balls of his feet.

“You coming over?” he asked. Spots of white still swam in front of her eyes from the light. She had no idea if he genuinely wanted her to come or was being polite.

But why was she even wondering? Obviously the answer was no.

“I was just checking up on the campsites,” she lied.

“Hope everything looks good. I was on my way back from the bathrooms.” He gestured up the path.

“Oh. Well, goodnight.” Casey moved to go past him, this time opting for the short route home—the one that wouldn’t lead her anywhere near his campsite.

“Stay for a beer?” He pulled out a bottle from his pocket, where it was too dark for Casey to have noticed.

A laugh escaped. “You walk around in the dark carrying beers?”

The sounds of shifting told her he’d shrugged. “I thought I’d take it down to the water. Use the bathroom as an excuse to get away.”

“Then you should keep your beer. But you know the lake is back the other way, if you want to go down to the beach.”

“Well, then on my way over there I figured it’s only the first night here, I should probably be with my friends. Reunion, reliving old times—”

“Giving you a break from culinary school,” Casey added, wondering why he seemed so reluctant to talk about his program. She hoped he could hear the warmth in her voice. She knew how hard it was to balance college friendships with the demands of the real world, and how overwhelming the next stage in his education and career must be. She understood the competing desires to savor the time he had with friends and the need to be alone to make sense of it all.

“Come for a little bit.” He passed her the beer, already leading her back toward his campsite.

“A minute,” Casey said, not sure why she was even agreeing. “I’m not here to intrude.”

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