a gently sloping hill, and quaint brick buildings lined the street, with stores on the ground level and apartments above.
Nina still couldn’t wrap her mind around the deceit. She and Glen had shared everything—a bed, a home, the children. How could she love someone heart and soul and not know him at the same time? He had a history of his own before they became a couple. Naturally, he shared stories from his past, but there were lots of years to cover and surely plenty of details omitted. And how would Nina know what was left out? They didn’t grow up together, weren’t high school sweethearts. In fact, they had met long after college. They were fully realized people when they started dating. People with pasts.
Before Glen, Nina had done what many twentysomethings did: worked her job, gone to the gym, and hung out with friends on weekends. The bar scene was fun until it wasn’t, and that shift happened almost overnight.
What had become of Jerry Collins, the college boyfriend whose heart she’d broken, or Keith Middleton, the man who had broken hers? The only thing Nina knew for certain was that her jealousy had grown as her friends paired off, got engaged, married, and became young mothers while she stayed stuck on the scene. One by one her social circle had grown smaller, like a herd being culled by some super-predator. Nina went out on dates, fix-ups with friends of friends, hoping to find that connection, believing in her heart she’d know when it was right. But it was never right.
She had worried about being too selective. Maybe something was wrong with her, not with all of her dates. When Nina suffered these thoughts, she reminded herself of the real issue: she gravitated toward a particular type. She dated broken guys, much like the people she saw each day in her social work practice. Men with issues she could unravel with the same delight she took in working with clients. They were mysteries, enigmas for her to figure out. Secrets to unlock.
The older Nina got, the more dismal her prospects seemed to become. She’d tried her best to break the wounded bird habit, but the younger men she dated were too immature, and the older ones too set in their ways. She had too many bad coffee dates that felt like job interviews. Some of the men were overly desperate; others too detached. Throughout it all, she avoided online dating. She wanted her romance to have a fairy-tale element—a story she could tell her kids, with glee in her voice and delight in her eyes.
I was at the grocery store, and I dropped a jar of pasta sauce on the floor. It shattered on the ground with a massive crash. I swear it looked like a murder scene, blood spilled everywhere. I was so embarrassed, but then your father—well, before he was your dad—stepped in front of me and acted like he was the one who dropped the pasta sauce. He even called for the manager and helped him clean up the mess, apologizing over and over for being such a klutz. Then we went out for coffee and—
But no, that wasn’t Nina’s story. It wasn’t her story at all.
It was a friend from social work school in Boston, where Nina had moved after venturing away from Nebraska, who had made her see things differently.
“Face it, your grocery store scenario isn’t going to happen,” she had said one evening years back, when wine was all about the buzz and calorie counting didn’t matter.
Not only did this friend know about Nina’s fantasy, but more embarrassing, she knew about the time Nina had held a jar of pasta sauce in her hand and contemplated dropping it because a cute guy was standing in the same aisle. Nina’s best chance of meeting somebody was through a setup, which was, her friend opined, the same thing as online dating.
“Just cast a wider net. What can it hurt?”
Nina created her online dating profile that very night. When she was done, she made a single click to see her first set of matches. There he was, the fourth profile on the page, handsome as a movie cowboy. She read his profile carefully. Thank goodness he didn’t list “long walks on the beach” and “cuddling by the fire” as personal interests. He sounded confident and sincere and was genuinely funny. He wrote something about being an aspiring surfer and having a good relationship with his mother,