The Ex Read Online Free PDF Page A

after we parted.”
    “What about now?”
    “Now? Oh, I’m reasonably content these days. Good job, enough money even if I’m not rich. And right now contentment’s enough for me. I’ve learned it’s more than most people have.” She stood up from the booth, then leaned forward unexpectedly and pecked him on the cheek. It was a kiss like fire. “Bye, David. Take care, hey.”
    She edged through the crowd at the serving bar, moving toward the counter.
    Biting his lower lip, he watched her stride from the deli. Out of his life again.
    He suddenly felt much too warm, and the pungent scent of the food was making him nauseated.
    He got up and made his way outside, dropping his suit coat from where it was folded over his arm. It landed to form a puddle of cloth on the sidewalk.
    “Here, David.”
    Deirdre picked up the coat and brushed it off, folded it neatly as if she were going to lay it on a bed or chair, then handed it to him.
    “I thought—”
    “I was about to hail a cab,” she said.
    “They aren’t easy to get this time of day.”
    “So I’ve been told, but nothing ventured, nothing obtained.”
    She smiled and strode to the curb, raising her arm. As if to prove her point, a cab immediately swerved across Third Avenue and coasted to a stop next to her.
    She opened the cab’s rear door and turned toward him. “Make the rest of your life happy, David!” Then she lowered herself quickly inside and pulled the door closed.
    As the cab drove away, David stood staring at the back of her head framed in the arc of the rear window, this woman who was like a stranger but wasn’t a stranger. She faced straight ahead as rigidly as if her neck were in a brace. She might have been crying, but he couldn’t be sure.
    Maybe he was simply imagining her tears because he felt like crying.

5
    Deirdre pushed aside the roiling emotions she’d experienced after seeing David. Their meeting had been less and so much more than she’d imagined in the instant their eyes met.
    On Broadway, she gazed through the cab windows at the crowded sidewalks and asked the driver to pull to the curb beyond the next intersection. She paid through the little rounded scoop set in the plastic dividing panel, leaving a suitable tip, and climbed out of the cab.
    It felt wonderful to be lost in the middle of all the people, all the energy that swirled noisily around her. It was as if she were protected by movement and blaring horns and masses of humanity. And it was true, she told herself, she was safe here in New York.
    A man with a raincoat slung over his arm almost ran into her, swerving at the last second and smiling at her. She smiled back, and he hesitated, then walked on. Deirdre held her head high, her shoulders back, and joined the flow of pedestrians. Workers hurrying back from lunch, shoppers, sightseers…she was one of them, and it felt glorious with the afternoon sun warming her shoulders and glancing brightly off the buildings and the contoured steel of the yellow cabs stuck in the impatient, laboring traffic. There was a strong exhaust smell, but she didn’t mind that. It was better than a lot of smells.
    A woman carrying a shopping bag emerged from a revolving door and bumped into her. “Oh, hey! Deirdre!”
    Deirdre looked at her and smiled. She’d literally bumped into the one other woman she knew in New York. “Darlene! You’ve been shopping.”
    “Charging up a storm. I’m happily addicted to plastic.” Darlene spoke in a clipped, cultured voice that sounded natural to her but probably wasn’t, like a long-ago affectation that had taken root. She was about Deirdre’s height but much slimmer, with a long, elegant neck, slender calves like a teenager’s, and practically no breasts. She wore her hair combed back severely and neatly braided above the nape of her neck. She had the kind of dark-eyed, delicate features that enabled her to get away with that kind of hair style, Deirdre thought with envy. Darlene looked