Not the Girl You Marry Read online

  Since then, Artie had moved on to the big leagues, a solo show at one of the country’s greatest museums. But Hannah was still waiting for her shot.

  Hannah had met Jack at the bottom of the steps to the entrance of the museum, since they’d both had to work that day. Though he’d been enthusiastic about asking her for the date, he seemed a lot more aloof that night. She hadn’t even detected a dimple through his stubble when he’d smiled at her. And the mischief in his twinkling eyes, the ones she’d been thinking about all sex-glazed since their first date, was completely banked.

  Part of her wanted to find out what the hell his deal was. She’d hated this hot-and-cold bullshit when Noah had done it. To be honest, it had turned her into an insecure mess and probably contributed to his dumping her. She was determined not to be that girl with Jack, even if she had to white-knuckle it for two weeks before letting it rip and revealing her crazy.

  The guy she was dating to get a promotion led her through the crowds with a purpose. They moved so quickly that she didn’t even get a chance to pause and check out the exhibit. Or get a glass of champagne. He’d seemed distracted when he’d met her at the entrance, kind of sweaty and twitchy. When she’d asked him what was wrong, he’d gotten all stiff—and not in the fun way.

  Other than the inherent awkwardness of being on a second date and trying to impress Jack, this was kind of her element—shaking hands, talking to rich people, and making them feel important. She was never so pushy that she slipped them a card. If she made just enough of an impression, they would find her.

  For his part, Jack stayed close. To anyone who looked, it would be clear that they were together-together. Somehow, this felt even less casual than their overly fancy first date had been. Maybe she was imagining the tight, possessive grip of his palm against her waist or the way he seemed to pull her closer whenever she introduced him to any of her friends or acquaintances. But instead of a date, she was starting to feel like a safety blanket.

  Regardless, she couldn’t think about this with the noise echoing off the white walls and the museum patrons milling around. That night, there were cater waiters circulating with champagne and hors d’oeuvres.

  Hannah grabbed a flute of bubbly off one passing waiter’s tray and some sort of crispy meat pie off of another. The moment she did it, it dawned on her that she should have probably waited for Jack to get her a champagne, or at least asked him if he wanted anything. That would have been the ladylike thing girlfriend material would do.

  She’d shoved half the canapé in her mouth when she said, “Oops,” compounding her lapse in manners. Jesus, you really couldn’t take her anywhere. Maybe this was because she was always behind the scenes, shoving leftovers in her face at the end of the night before collapsing in bed and doing it all over again the next day.

  Instead of the disapproving look she’d probably have gotten from Noah, Jack gave her the first genuine smile he’d flashed the whole night. And then he got his own drink. “No problem.”

  They tapped their glasses together.

  “You’re sure you’re okay?” She’d gotten used to his easy smiles and wanted more of them. Not because she actually cared but because she needed to convince Annalise that he was in love with her. It would help for him to look happy.

  “Not really.” She could feel the flush of embarrassment filling her face until he deflated it with “Not because of you.”

  Why was he acting so weird? “Tough day at work?”

  If it was just his job, maybe she could take his mind off things. He leaned in as though there were spies all over the room listening in. “Terrible.”

  She took a gulp of champagne. “We’re going to need more of this, then.”

  That earned her another smirk, with a wink this time. “I’ll go run some down at the bar.”

  She wanted to ask him what was wrong, but she didn’t want to pry. She was pretending to be his girlfriend, not his therapist. For all she knew, he didn’t like parties.

  She never had before. She’d started planning parties as a way to ameliorate her social anxiety in college. She’d always figured that if she was in charge of the food, the drinks, the invite list, the décor, and the music, she would always be invited to the party instead of sitting at home, eating pints of ice cream and wondering why nobody invited her out.

  She’d gotten so good at it that several of the residence halls had hired her to plan dances and social events. Although she hadn’t realized that it was her calling until a few years later, she’d been grateful for the cover of being a planner instead of a guest.

  Her social anxiety had faded away, and now everyone wanted to be at an event that she planned, and she didn’t stay in eating ice cream unless she wanted to.

  Bonus, at parties she planned, she was usually too busy for anyone to pin her in a corner to talk about the weather.

  Instead of risking eye contact with anyone and falling into a small-talk trap, she looked at the art. Artemesia had grown as an artist in the past few years and gotten a lot of publicity with all the arrests. From the looks of her new works, displayed next to the great American women painters of the twentieth century, she’d matured quite a bit in her subject matter.

  Hannah was lost in one particularly phallic representation of an herb garden when slim arms wrapped around her waist from behind. She stiffened because it definitely wasn’t Jack, not that she was looking for PDA from him anyway.

  As soon as she heard the husky Italian accent—“Bella”—she relaxed and turned, hugging her erstwhile cellmate.

  “Artie!”

  “I did not know you were coming; otherwise I would have put you on a VIP list.” When Artie talked, she did so with her whole body—she did everything with her whole being. She floated from project to project, continent to continent, lover to lover, as though she knew that everything would turn out in her favor at all times.

  Hannah admired that about her. She could never live like that herself—planning was too much a part of her DNA—but she could admire it in her artistic friend.

  “I’m here with a guy.”

  Artie wrapped her bony fingers around Hannah’s upper arms and shook her, taking in the very low-cut dress she wore. “You. Look. Gorgeous.” A shake for every word. “Of course you are here with a man.”

  Compliments had always made Hannah feel uncomfortable. There was a distinct difference between knowing intellectually that she was attractive and really feeling like it was the truth.

  Growing up an ugly duckling with frizzy hair and darker skin than any of her classmates in suburban Minneapolis hadn’t been the best way to feel like a great beauty. The bullying she’d endured from a few vicious classmates had been enough to make her wary of a compliment. A “Your hair is so curly!” could easily turn into “Have you ever thought about straightening it?” And that was just a hairsbreadth away from “You look like a mangy lion” and everyone roaring at said curly-haired adolescent in the hallway. For a year.

  So, yeah, Hannah deflected compliments like a damned ninja.

  Artie knew all of this because they’d gotten into superdeep childhood shit during their brief incarceration. “Just say grazie, bella.”

  Determined to steer the conversation into a lighter place, Hannah curtsied to her friend. “Grazie.”

  Her friend was gracious enough to laugh. “Who are you here with?”

  Even though the room was chock-full of people, Jack stood out like a beacon. He was just leaning on the bar but looking deeply fine in a pair of wool pants that looked they had been blessed in a previous life to be spending their time perfectly tailored to just such an ass and a white shirt that draped his broad shoulders like a blessing.

  She couldn’t keep a sigh in, and she knew Artie would notice that she was bordering on moony-eyed over this guy. And, since the artist was utterly lacking in subtlety, she pointed at him with glee. “That on
e? He is very good-looking, so good-looking he must be stupid, no?”

  Hannah sort of wished that Jack was stupid. She’d feel less bad about tricking him into liking her. “He’s not. He’s a journalist for Haberdasher’s Monthly. Funny, too.”

  “So, a very dangerous man, then?” Though it was phrased as a question, her friend meant it as a statement.

  As they watched Jack wait for their drinks, a woman approached him. She wore a black tunic over black pants and had thick, black-framed glasses. She was tall—almost as tall as Hannah. Her gray hair was brushed into a gleaming chin-length bob. She smiled at Artie as though she knew her.

  The woman intercepted Jack as he made his way back to Hannah. She put her hand on his upper arm and Hannah couldn’t help but notice that he stiffened for a moment before seeming to will himself into relaxation.

  That was when it clicked into place. She had the same face shape as Jack. And the adoring look of someone who’d changed the diapers of the grown man next to her. There was only one person she could be—Jack’s mother.

  “Does he have a taste for much older women?” Artie joked. “That’s Molly Simpson. She’s the curator of the Twentieth-Century Women’s Collection, and she is utterly terrifying. I love her.”

  “She must be Jack’s mother,” Hannah said with dawning horror. Suddenly, the low-cut dress designed to drive Jack out of his ever-loving mind didn’t seem like the best idea. She couldn’t believe that he’d sprung this on her.

  Who did that?

  She didn’t do the whole meet-the-parents thing. Not anymore. She’d met Noah’s parents by accident. They’d dropped by one morning before he’d had a chance to shuffle her out so that he could walk past the church he told his parents that he attended just to check in on social media before heading to a buddy’s house to watch the Bears game. His Sunday routine.

  Needless to say, his parents had not been impressed by her—full-on bedhead and wearing one of Noah’s shirts. Hannah was pretty sure that his mother’s pursed lips would haunt her nightmares for years to come.

  Meeting Jack’s mother was even worse because he’d knowingly sprung this on her. He’d arranged it and everything. When he’d texted, about seventy-one hours after their first date, just as she was about to go out to a bar and pick up another guy as insurance, he’d known that he was going to do this to her. And he hadn’t said a damned word.

  Hannah’s palms were sweating and she rubbed them on her thighs. She forced herself to stop biting her bottom lip so she wouldn’t wear her scarlet lipstick off.

  She thought she was going to throw up champagne and a mini beef empanada all over this nice woman’s outfit. This is why “meeting the parents” didn’t happen on the second date.

  By the time she’d had enough opportunity to freak out, Jack and his mother were almost in front of her. Thankfully, he was carrying two drinks over to them, wearing a strained smile. Hannah tried to keep her attention on her date but didn’t miss the way that Jack’s mother examined her as though she was a possible acquisition for an exhibit of women not good enough to date her son. By the time Jack made the introductions, Hannah had it clear in her head that Jack’s mother’s approval would be crucial in making this fake relationship last long enough for her to secure a promotion.

  The realization that Jack was putting her through some sort of test washed over her, and she felt as though someone was sticking pins and needles under her fingernails. She girded her loins for the kind of unpleasantness she’d suffered at the hands of Noah’s parents that first and only time they’d met.

  To her surprise, there was none of it. After keeping her in suspense, Molly offered her a smile that seemed genuine. Even more so when Artie began regaling Jack’s mother with the tale of their night in the slammer. Although her heart had lodged somewhere in the vicinity of her throat when her friend had started telling the story and she might have punctured the skin in Artie’s forearm once she got to the part about living-nude sushi trays, Hannah’s dread vanished the second or third time Molly laughed.

  By contrast, Jack’s tension ratcheted up every time his mother laughed. Hannah reacted by instinct and took his hand in hers, offering it a squeeze. The heat from his palm radiated through her body, never letting her forget the connection they shared. Their gazes met, and a spark of electricity arced between the two of them.

  This was going to be fine. It was a jerk move, but maybe he hadn’t meant anything by it. Or maybe he was already so into her that he was ready to introduce her to his mother.

  It was just her luck that the only guy she’d met in years whom she could actually see herself falling in love with was the one guy whose heart she was going to have to break.

  Because after this was all over, and he found out that she’d been lying to him, there was no way he’d still want to be with her.

  * * *

  —

  IF HIS BROTHER, MICHAEL, were here, he would have been making lots of derisive snorts. He’d never played along with their mother’s shift from their neighborhood, which boasted a dive bar and a church on every block, to what Chicago thought of as “high society.”

  The change had made Jack twitchy at first, but he’d gotten used to it. Maybe too used to it. Not as twitchy as it was making him that his mother seemed to adore Hannah.

  “Did you always want to be an event planner, Hannah?” Jack’s mother’s question bit into his gut and twisted things up. He hated that, even though she was clearly impressed, she was still interrogating Hannah. As though she would know what kind of woman would be best for him. She didn’t even know him.

  This was all a huge mistake. Hannah didn’t even look pissed off. She answered his mother’s question and then complimented her on the event. His mother actually preened.

  Sometimes, he had no clue how his parents had actually stayed together long enough to have three kids. They couldn’t be more dissimilar.

  Sean Nolan was a man of few words and a single routine that he followed without fail. Even though it had thrown all of their lives into chaos when she’d left, Jack could understand how his mother must have felt as though she was dying a slow death eating the same meals on the same day of the week. Every week for years on end. Going to the same church service with the same priest; playing cards over beers with the same friends.

  Jack remembered the first time his mother had brought him to a museum. She’d passed baby Bridget off to one of their church friends and Michael was off riding his bike with some of his buddies. So it had been just the two of them walking up the stairs of the Art Institute, past the lions and into the echoing halls. Halls filled with art from across the known world.

  Before that day, he hadn’t known that his mother could truly be excited about anything. She certainly never spoke with hushed tones of wonder about any of the new meat loaf recipes she’d tried and his father had rejected. That day, Jack realized that his mother had an inner life of her very own, separate from what he and his siblings and her husband had access to. Although he could never have predicted that his mother would leave them a few years later, first to move to New York for school and then to return to Chicago with a new husband and stepkids who seemed to fit her a whole lot better than her own kids, he had kind of understood it.

  But watching his mother chat with Hannah, liking her more and more and getting her to reveal things that Jack didn’t know about her, made him realize that he always chose women who were a little unknowable to him. He always tried to figure out what would make them stay, but he was never very successful at it.

  “I sort of fell into it, actually.” Hannah’s voice didn’t have the high, nervous quality it had had when they’d walked in that night. He wasn’t sure if it was his mother’s warmth toward her or the champagne that had loosened her up, but this ploy—the one to get Hannah to think he was doing too much too soon—wasn’t having the intended effect. “I just realized I had a nat
ural talent for being at the center of mayhem, I guess.”

  One of the many things Jack hadn’t realized about Hannah was that—like his mother—she was friends with famous artists. The only artist being featured in this exhibit who wasn’t too infirm or too dead to show up to the show was hanging off of Hannah’s shoulder.

  Something about the similarities between his mother and Hannah crawled inside him and pulled out some things that he didn’t want to feel. Hannah laughed at something his mother said, and he was transformed into a teen boy again—and not just because her laugh gave him an inappropriate hard-on. Just seeing them together made him acutely aware that Hannah was not someone he should depend on to stay in his life. She would leave, and she wasn’t going to be his person.

  In a way, it made what he had to do next—sabotage this date—much easier. He’d hoped that introducing Hannah to his mother would do the trick, and that, while he was dropping her off, she would grab on to his upper arm and tell him that “things are moving too fast” and she “hoped that we can stay friends.”

  He’d much rather have to convince her that he could take things slower and that she should give him another chance than have her and his mother become besties.

  She might still think this was too much, but it seemed less likely now that Hannah had formed some sort of witchy triumvirate with his mother and Artemesia Valencia. Every time one of them made a joke and the other two cackled, Jack felt as though his balls were in a vise. His mother had never liked any of his real girlfriends, but she liked the one girl he was actually trying to get rid of? The irony made his stomach hurt.