Page 1 of The Autumn We Fell in Love

Teacher’s Pet

Hollis

You know that dream people have, where they go to bed normal, mortal, ordinary, and wake up with the world at their fingertips?

That was never my dream.

I longed for family, for love I can depend on, for a beautiful everyday sort of life. I longed to write book after book, to hole up in a mountain cottage and make a living off my words.

I didn’t get my dream.

I got everyone else’s.

On a perfectly inconsequential day, I went to my mailbox and pulled out a golden ticket — a letter from the attorney of an aunt I didn’t know I had saying that she’d died and left her estate to me.

The fortune my long lost aunt had bequeathed to me, the lawyer wrote, was sizable.

Seth, my then-husband, had laughed when I’d showed the letter to him.

“Must be a scam,” he’d scoffed. “Good thing for me, too. Can’t have you getting ideas.”

It wasn’t a scam.

And I did get ideas.

I dumped his cheating ass so fast that, in his confusion, he agreed to everything I asked for in our divorce papers.

I’m forty-two years old, single for the first time in two decades, and I have more money than I could spend in four lifetimes.

And I have no fucking idea what to do with it — or the rest of my life.

I’d married young — too young, I see now — with plans to churn out as many babies as I could and become the mother I’d always wanted to be.

Except I turned out to be unable to bear children, and Seth said he sure as hell wouldn’t raise another man’s child through adoption.

So I’d become a preschool teacher — the next best thing to being a mom, I told myself — and spent my days singing and painting and mediating disputes between four-year-olds. At night, I prepped lessons, cut countless art project pieces from construction paper, and wondered what woman Seth had met at the bar after work that night, and if they’d have sex in his car or at her place.

I should have divorced him long ago. It’s not like he kept his liaisons secret, or like he treated me well in between them. But he’d told me I was too old, too ugly, too fat, too much, tooeverythingfor anybody else to love and that I was lucky to have him.

I’d believed him.

The money changed all of that.

After spending twenty years doing his dishes, washing his dirty underwear, and paying off his credit card debt, I finally had something that I knew for damn sure I didn’t want him within ten feet of.

So I ditched his ass — which would sound baller if it hadn’t taken me twenty years to do it. (Relatedly, can I sayballer?)

And now I’m free.

For the first time in two decades, my home is my own, with no one taking my belongings to pawn at that place near the Wal-Mart, no one coming home too late at night, still drunk and smelling of that night’s conquest

Only I don’t know what to do with myself. And that in itself feels like another kind of prison.

“I know it sounds ridiculous,” I tell my friend Amy as we power walk along the pedestrian trails that wind through our small mountain town. “Poor little rich girl and all that.”

She shakes her head, blonde ponytail swinging. “It does not sound ridiculous. It sounds normal.”

I aim a sweaty frown at her. “Explain.”

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