Noah breathed a relieved sigh, avoiding Linda’s eye. He was looking for Maggie.
Chapter Twenty-six
Maggie, Before
“So this will be fun!” Maggie cruised down the street with Anna, seeing her neighbors inside their houses, the kids hunkering down to homework in the family room and the parents getting ready for the work week, fighting off the Sunday night gloom. She knew that feeling, but she didn’t have it tonight. Everything felt like a new experience, with Anna.
“Agree!” Anna smiled.
“And King of Prussia is a great mall. It has every store imaginable. J. Crew, Abercrombie, Free People, Nordstrom.” Maggie left out Neiman Marcus, since that may have been in Anna’s price bracket, but not her and Noah’s.
“There’s a pop-up store there, too. I saw it online. It’s called Circa. It sells really cool stuff, like vintage. Boho.”
“Okay, sounds great.” Maggie felt suddenly cool and hip. Pop-up stores. Mall trips. Girly fun. She wasn’t an odd duck anymore, with a secret daughter. She was a full-blown mom.
“And I want to pay for this, okay?” Anna looked over, her ponytail swinging. “These are my expenses. James approves them. I never even spend that much.”
“I know, but let me treat you tonight.” Maggie turned onto Montgomery Avenue, taking the back roads.
“Then let’s split it, okay?”
“Okay.” Maggie wondered if Noah would agree. “You know, Noah and I were talking about house rules, and how to make rules for you.”
“Rules?” Anna looked over, blinking.
“Nothing too onerous. We’re not really strict with Caleb. But we should probably have some rules for both of you.”
“Okay,” Anna said, slowly enough to make Maggie wonder if she was pushing the point.
“I don’t want to make a big thing of it. I’m just thinking that with respect to purchases, whether it’s the clothes or the car, we might discuss those things as a family.”
“If you want to, I will.” Anna shrugged. “You’re right, you guys should make the rules and I’ll follow them. I followed the rules at Congreve.”
“What rules did they have? Curfews?”
“Yes, but I never went out. I don’t think following a curfew is going to be a problem here, either.” Anna shot her a sideways glance. “It’s not like my social calendar is going to be crazy busy.”
“I know you’ll make friends, and like my mother used to tell me, ‘it only takes one.’” Maggie hadn’t remembered it until this very moment.
“Did you have a lot of friends, growing up?”
“Yes, I did, but it wasn’t easy. I was insecure.” Maggie realized she had stumbled onto something. Maybe a way to get Anna to talk about herself was to be open about her past. “I used to be fat. My dad always said ‘pleasingly plump,’ and in an Italian family, plump is always pleasing. I never thought it was a bad thing until I got to school. I got bullied and called names.”
“Fat-shaming.”
“Right.” Maggie stopped at a traffic light, the red burning into the increasing darkness. “So I felt shy, but there was one girl in my Latin class and we became best friends.”
“So it only took one.”
“Yes, but it’s not like I had a lot of dates.” Maggie felt a twinge,surprised she carried the dumb high-school hurts, even now. She was fifty-two pounds lighter, but a fat kid inside. “I got asked to the senior prom by a guy I liked, and his friends called him a chubby chaser.”
“That’s so mean!”
“I know, and he was a great guy.”
“It’ll be strange to go to school with boys,” Anna said, after a moment.
“You didn’t have a boyfriend at Congreve, did you?” Maggie asked, trying to keep her tone casual. She was asking for Noah.
