Page 63 of What You Wish For

But that’s when Duncan said, “Who?”

“Your wife. I’m sorry. I’m sure she has many, many great qualities.”

But he was frowning. “I don’t have a wife.”

I froze. “Of course you do.” And then, as if I were trying to remind him of something he should already know, I went on, “That lady from admissions? From Andrews?”

“Chelsey?”

“That’s it,” I said. “The one who asked you out in the parking lot.”

“Wow,” Duncan said. “Okay. We dated, but…”

That didn’t compute. “Didn’t you… marry her?”

“Marry her!” he burst out with the closest thing I’d seen to a laugh from him since he’d arrived.

“Didn’t you move in together? Wasn’t it really… serious?”

He shook his head slowly, like he couldn’t imagine why I was asking that. “No.”

“There was a rumor,” I said, now all accusatory, “that you were thinking about getting engaged.”

He looked at me like that was irrelevant. “Still, no.”

“A solid rumor,” I said. “A convincing rumor.”

But Duncan just shook his head.

And despite the fact that we were fighting over the field trip, despite the fact that he had just declared the end of all fun forever, and despite the fact I didn’t even like him anymore, my heart, very slowly, just started flapping its wings.

“So… you’re not… married?” I needed to reconfirm. Again.

“No!” he said, like he’d never heard anything so crazy.

“You don’t have, like, a whole gaggle of kids?”

Embarrassing, but true: I could not disguise the bizarre feeling of joy that had just appeared inside my body—like a million tiny, carbonated bubbles. I felt positively fizzy.

Duncan peered at me, reading my face.

I smiled. I couldn’t help it. Then I put my hand over my mouth.

He shook his head at me, like he couldn’t make sense of it all. “It was always casual. Sometimes I think we were really just dating because she wanted it so badly. It was easier to say yes than no. Anyway,I left Andrews the next year—got offered a job in Baltimore—and she didn’t want to leave California, and that was that.”

I didn’t know what else to do but start laughing. “Just to confirm one more time: not married?”

“Not even close.”

I shook my head. “I thought you went home every night to the wife and kids.”

“God, no. I go home every night with Chuck Norris—who has totally become the alpha, by the way—and then he bosses me into giving him half my dinner and then sleeps on my head.”

“Okay,” I said. “So—similar.”

“I’m notopposedto being married, though,” Duncan said. Then he added, “Kind of the way you feel about cats.”

Oh, my God.

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