Time of My Life Read Online Free PDF

stranger attempting to unlock it. Alarmed, frightened, armed with her racket and a mean forehand.
    I take a step back. “I’m . . . I’m sorry,” I stutter. “I must be confused. I thought this was my house.”
    Her grip on her racket noticeably loosens, as she realizes that I’m not here to attack or rob her dry. Just, perhaps, a delirious neighbor who seems to have lost her way.
    “Er, no,” she says, still somewhat on guard, but softer. “Are you sick? Lost? Should I call someone?”
    I peer over her shoulder into the foyer with lavender wallpaper that Henry and I would immediately strip and replace with a coat of cool beige paint, and run my eyes into the kitchen, where Katie would first learn how to crawl. But there are no signs of life here, not signs of
my
life here, anyway. This is Lydia’s home, not mine. And not Katie’s. Certainly not Katie’s.
    “I’m sorry to disturb,” I say quietly, turning back down the walkway to the cab that lingered by the curb because I’d asked the driver to keep the meter running. “It won’t happen again.”
    “Are you sure?” she shouts to my back. “I’m happy to make a call.”
    But I don’t answer. I only slam the door of the taxi and direct the cabbie back home, back to my
former
home, that is. Because what I can’t tell Lydia is that there is no one to call. There is only me, my past, and the holes that I now have to fill in between.

Chapter Four
    I arrive early at Café Largo, a characteristic from my old life that I could never shake. Henry, though so fastidious and meticulous in nearly every aspect of his life, ran perpetually late—an anomaly that only pure human quirk can explain. I’d learned to adjust to it—waiting in restaurants, waiting at home for him to come to relieve me so I could finally, desperately, have a girls’ night out, waiting for him to get out of the house while Katie and I were already parked in the car—but my personal clock never matched up with his. Most couples do. Most couples acclimate so that a year into the relationship, the early one is almost always constantly running a good twenty minutes behind or vice versa, but Henry and I, well, we just never clicked.
    I’m ensconced in a back booth, my fingers keeping time on the citrus-colored tiled table to the saxophone that soared in the background, when I look up and see Jack coming straight toward me.
    “Hey,” he says, leaning down to brush my lips against his, his lavender tie skimming the tabletop. He surveys me, his brow furrowing. “How do you feel? You look . . .” He tilts his head to the right and pauses. “You look different. Did you do something with your hair?”
    I scoot over, and he slides into the sparkly red leather booth beside me. I peer over at him rather than answer.
Jack!
I want to clamp onto his shoulders and shake him to make sure that he is real.
    Instead, I press my palm over his sweaty hand.
    “No,” I say. “I haven’t done anything with my hair.” I smile. “But it’s nice to see you.”
    He scrunches his face as if I’d just told him that the world was flat.
    “But I’m feeling better, much better, so don’t worry. Maybe I just needed a good day of rest.”
    “Maybe,” he mumbles, unconvinced, and reaches for a menu, pulling his hand from under mine.
    If I looked lighter, different, it might have been because of how I spent my day, because I felt lighter, different, too. After the cab had deposited me back at our apartment and after it became permanently clear that there were no take-backs, that this wasn’t some sort of fluke or sick joke or eccentric dream gone bad, and after I plopped on my couch and tried to breathe and breathe and breathe, I made a decision. A shaky one at first, but then I carved it into my soul and swore to abide by it:
This was my second chance, this was what I’d been fervently hoping for.
So I opted to embrace it rather than run. It was, after all, all I could do, anyway. And with my decision