Tear You Apart by Megan Hart Page B

conversation without much preamble, but I can hear the smile in her voice. “Happy Birthday, Mama! Sorry I won’t be home for it.”
    “It’s fine. When you get to be my age, birthdays aren’t such a big deal.” Ross is the one who believes that, not me. I’d make my birthday a month-long holiday if I could, but it’s kind of hard to celebrate it alone. “Thanks, though. Who’s going camping?”
    “Just me and Jeff. State park. Roughing it.” Jac’s laugh is almost identical to the trilling tone she programmed into my phone, all burbling bubbles, the warble of a bird. “Tents and everything.”
    “Sounds fun. Be careful,” I add, because I have to and she expects it, not because I fear my daughter will be reckless. She always knows where she’s going and how long it will take to get there.
    I envy her that.
    “Gotta go. Happy Birthday!”
    “Thanks.”
    “Make Daddy take you to dinner or something.”
    “I will,” I tell her, though at that very moment I’m not sure I’ll be hungry for a long, long time. “Bye.”
    Call disconnected, I give Will a small smile. “My daughter.”
    “It’s your birthday?”
    “Sunday,” I tell him with a small shrug.
    “Got any big plans?”
    “No. It’s kind of a milestone birthday,” I say suddenly, revealing something I wasn’t expecting to tell him. “Not a big one. Halfway to the big one, I guess.”
    Will’s smile crinkles lines at the corners of his eyes. “Forty?”
    I’m so convinced he’s pulling my chain, I burst into laughter I hide immediately behind my hand. He looks confused, still smiling, his head tilting a little to look me over. “No?”
    “Um, no. Thanks, though. Not quite. I’ll be forty-five.” It doesn’t sound so bad out loud, though in my head I’ve been testing it out for the past few weeks. “Seems like a lot bigger step from forty-four than it did from forty-three.”
    The number five to me is the color Crayola used to call burnt sienna and we always called “baby poop brown.” It could be why it’s my least favorite number. Why this birthday, perhaps, has hit me so much harder than the last few, because when I think of being forty-five, the four—which has always been a nondescript and inoffensive cloud-gray—is overshadowed by that ugly color. I learned not to tell people that numbers had color and flavors had shape, about the prickly sensation in my fingertips when I drank wine. I’d never even told Ross, not really, although I was sure Katherine had a least a little bit of the same thing. We never discussed it, but once when she was a child she’d told me very seriously that the colors on her building blocks were wrong. They didn’t “match.”
    “Wait for forty-eight,” he says. “That’s when you really look fifty in the face.”
    It’s my turn to be surprised. I’d been sure I was older than him, and by more than a few years. “You’re kidding me.”
    “I could show you my driver’s license,” he offers, but I wave my hand.
    We stare at each other as if this new knowledge has changed things, and maybe it has. We’re both too old to behave like kids, maybe that’s what we just learned. Or maybe it’s that we’re both adults who know what they want and how to get it.
    “So,” Will says after a few more seconds. “About what happened.”
    The memory of feeling his skin unfurls in my mind like a flower, and I can’t stop the hitch of my breath or thump of my heart. Will has no more smile. There’s definitely no flirting in the gaze he cuts so carefully from mine. The table between us is so small his knees bump mine every time he shifts, and yet I feel so very, very faraway. When he looks at the plain gold band on my left hand, I know what he’s going to say.
    “We shouldn’t have,” Will says.
    “Of course we shouldn’t have. But we did.”
    The veneer tabletop is patterned with interlocking circles, orange on cream. It would be retro if it wasn’t probably legitimately from the