“I beg your pardon. I drove myself.”

“But he’s the one from your old school? That you were obsessed with?”

“Not obsessed.”

Alice squinted at me. “Pretty obsessed.”

“It was not an obsession. It was a healthy, red-blooded American crush.”

Now Alice was trying to remember. It had been a while—a lifetime, really—since we’d talked about it. “Didn’t you snoop in his diary?”

“I wasn’t snooping, I was feeding his cat while he was out of town.”

“But you read his diary.”

“Well, he left it lying open on the kitchen table. You could argue that on some unconscious level, he wanted me to read it.”

Alice gave me a second to decide if I could stand by that statement.

“Plus,” I went on, “it wasn’t a diary. It was just a notebook.”

“A notebook full of private thoughts.”

“We all have private thoughts, Alice,” I said, as if that was somehow a good point.

“You shouldn’t have taken that cat-sitting job in the first place,” she said.

“What was I supposed to do? Let his cat starve? It was declawed and missing a tail.”

“It wasn’t even his cat. It was the girlfriend’s cat.”

“I didn’t know that at the time.”

Alice gave me a look then that was part affection, part scolding, and part Give me a break.

Anyway, there was no point in continuing the denials. She knew the whole story. I had read his notebook that day all those years ago while he was on vacation in wine country about to get engaged—or that was the rumor anyway. And I hadn’t just read the one page that was facing up on the table, either. I had grabbed a pair of kitchen tongs from the drawer—as if not touching the pages with my fingers somehow made it less awful—and used them to turn every single page, searching for clues to his soul like some kind of love-struck Sherlock Holmes, and careful, like a crazy person, not to leave any fingerprints.

What can I say? It was a low point.

A very low point.

And, actually, it became a turning point.

Before that moment back then, I’d been infatuated with Duncan Carpenter for two solid years. Big-time infatuated. Hard-core infatuated. Infatuated the way teenage girls get infatuated with pop stars. If he’d had song lyrics, I’d have memorized them; if he’d had merch, I’d have bought it; and if he’d had a fan club, I’d have been the president.

Of course, he wasn’t a pop star.

But he was, you know … a celebrity of sorts. In the world of private, secondary-school education. In our tiny little sliver of humanity, he was a big deal. He was the pop icon of our teaching colleagues, for sure.

And for good reason.

He had a big, friendly smile filled with big, friendly teeth. He was handsome without trying. He had a magnetic quality that was almost physical. If he was in a room with other humans in it for any amount of time, there’d be a group of them gathered around him by the end. He emitted some kind of sunshine that we all wanted to soak up.

Me included.

Me especially.

But I was terrible around him. I was the worst possible version of myself. All the longing and desire and electricity and joy I felt whenever he was anywhere near me seemed to scramble my system. I’d freeze, and get quiet and still and self-conscious, and stare at him, unblinking, like a weirdo.

It was uncomfortable, to say the least.

When I’d first met him, he was single—and he stayed that way for one long, beautiful, possibility-infused year as I tried to work up the nerve to sit at his table at lunch. A year that slipped by fast, and then suddenly, before I’d made any progress—boom!—a perky new girl from the admissions office just brazenly asked him out.

Their assigned parking spots were next to each other, apparently.

It was front-page teacher news, and the grade-school faculty were by and large offended. Wasn’t it a little uppity to just swoop in and start dating whoever she wanted?

Apparently not.

Soon, they were exclusive, and then they were serious, and then, barely a year to the day after she’d first asked him out, they were moving in together. Rumor had it she’d been the one to ask him. A move I would’ve admired for feminist reasons if it had been any other couple at all.

The consensus among the female teachers was that she was too conventional, too small-minded, and too ordinary to be a good match for him—mostly because he was the opposite of all those things.

Frankly, I agreed—but I also knew my opinion was based largely on one short interaction, when, awkwardly trying to make chitchat at a school function, I’d said to her, “Admissions! That must be tough! How do you make all those agonizing decisions?”

And she just blinked at me and said, “It’s just whoever has the most money.”

Then, reading my shocked expression, she shifted to a laugh and said, “I’m kidding.”

But was she, though?

Nobody was sure she deserved him.

Of course … it didn’t follow that I did.

I couldn’t even say hi to him in the elevator.

Anyway, it was not five minutes after I’d heard the moving-in-together news—from a librarian who’d heard it from a math teacher who’d heard it from the school nurse—that, as I was making my way outside to gulp some fresh air … he asked me to cat-sit.

I’d just rounded the corner of the hallway, and there he was. Wearing a tie with dachshunds all over it.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” I said, panicking at the way he’d … just materialized.

Then, of all things, he said, “I’ve heard you’re a cat person.”

A cat person? Nope. But, not wanting to kill the conversation, I shrugged and said, “I’m more of a dog person, actually.”

He blinked at me.

“I mean,” I went on, feeling like I’d said the wrong thing. “I’m not opposed to cats…”

“Don’t you have a bunch of them?”

“Um. Nope.”

He frowned.

“I don’t have any cats,” I added, just to be clear. “At all.”

“Huh. Somebody told me you had like three cats.”

Wow. The only thing he knew about me … and it was wrong. Or maybe he thought I was somebody else entirely.

He looked as disappointed as I felt.

I reminded myself to breathe.

“I don’t dislike cats,” I said then, to cheer him up. “I don’t wish them harm or anything. I’m just … neutral.”

He nodded. “Got it.” Then he started to turn away.

“Wait!” I said. “Why?”

He paused. “I’m looking for a cat sitter. For the weekend. Just one night, actually.”

And then, truly, without even considering how pathetic it would be for me to be cleaning the litter boxes of my true love while he was off on a romantic weekend with his new live-in girlfriend, I said, “I’ll do it.”

“Really?”

“Sure. No problem at all.”

Next thing I knew, there I was in his apartment, snooping—and doing unspeakable things with his kitchen tongs.

So what was I looking for, exactly, as I tong-flipped those pages in that notebook? What could I possibly have been hoping to find? Some note-to-self that he didn’t really want to be with the woman he’d just decided to live with? Some daydream doodle of a face that looked remarkably like mine? Some secret code only I could break that spelled out H-E-L-P M-E?

Ridiculous.

Anyway, there was nothing like that.

There were grocery lists. Reminders. A half-written letter to his mom. A circled note to get his baby niece a one-year birthday present, with the words “baby biker jacket” scratched out and replaced with: “Something cool.” Doodles (mostly 3-D boxes), and to-do lists, and a whole bunch of tally marks on the cardboard of the back cover. Nothing special, or memorable, or even private. The normal detritus of a perfectly not unhappy life that had nothing at all to do with me.

And that’s when, flipping the pages back into position, a very important word came into my head: “Enough.”

I heard it almost as clearly as if I’d said it out loud. And then I did say it out loud.

“Enough.”

Then I shook my head. I couldn’t keep living like this—stealing glances, brushing past him in the hallways, sitting near—but not too near—his table at lunch, pausing to watch him leading kindergarten dance parties on the playground. Yearning.

Enough.

I had to shut it down. He’d chosen somebody else. It was time to move on.

And even though I did not always, or even often, follow the life advice I gave myself—on that day I did. I put the tongs back in the drawer, walked out, locked the door, drove straight home, and got on the Web to start looking for a new job.