Stretching my neck, I peer over the heads of the people hovering near the curb waiting for their rides to pull up. The team will have sent a car, probably Vladimir, one of our regular drivers.
Holding tight to the handle of my suitcase, I spot him a few yards away, my last name written on a white card with a tiny Eagles logo at the top in the passenger window.
But before I reach it, a man and a woman with several large suitcases and a baby in a carrier approach the car, waving it down.
Vladimir makes eye contact with me, but stops the car to avoid running over the family.
They must be confused.
Maybe they’re tourists, thinking the car is a cab to flag down, or maybe they have the same last name as I do. Sullivan isn’t exactly rare . . . My mind tries to calculate the odds of that while I stride toward the car, when something else clicks in her head.
The man . . . I know him.
And, yes, we do share a name.
. . . Sullivan.
My ex-husband.
And his wife.
And their baby.
The odds of that are even worse, hundreds of thousands of times worse.
Unfortunately, my brain is too busy reeling to focus on stopping my feet. I just catch the last of Vladimir’s protests that they aren’t the Sullivans he’s supposed to be picking up as he motions toward me.
Shane turns around and, well, at least he looks as stunned as I feel.
“Frankie,” he says.
And it’s the first time I’ve heard him speak in years.
Two years.
Two years, two months, six days and, if I really, really think about it hard, probably five or so hours.
The last time I saw him was during the brief time just after the divorce was finalized but before I blocked his number and every social media account I could find. Okay, maybe my best friend had done that for me. But in person? The last time I saw him in person was the day he came to clean out the last of his stuff from our house back inLA.
I hadn’t said anything and neither had he.
Though there was plenty I would have liked to say. I’m not really the kind of person that censors myself, but that day I kept silent, because I knew once I started I’d probably never stop, and what good would that do? Probably just give him the satisfaction of knowing how much he’d hurt me.
And after the lying and cheating he put me through, he didn’t deserve to know about my pain.
“Is this your car? Babe, I think this is her car.”
His wife.
The woman he’d cheated with.
The woman he’d married almost as soon as our divorce was final.
The woman he’d had a baby with less than a year later.
A baby that, he insisted to me years before, wasn’t something he wanted.
Oh God.
