The Spare Phone Held Years Of Spare Love Chapter 04
During the three days Ethan spent in San Diego, I did two things.
First, I found Laurel Hayes’s address.
I asked a realtor friend to look into property purchases in that building over the past three years.
The payment date was one month after the car purchase. The condo had cost about four hundred seventy thousand dollars.
Second, I met someone.
She was a former colleague of Laurel’s who had left the symphony six months earlier and now ran a small violin studio.
I signed up for three thousand dollars’ worth of adult lessons.
She taught me for twenty minutes, took the money, and seemed to be in a good mood.
So I invited her out for coffee.
We talked about the orchestra, about the principal seats, and finally, about the cellist.
“Laurel?” She stirred her latte. “Pretty face. Decent player. Mostly, she got lucky.”
“How so?”
“She had a sponsor.” Her voice dropped. “Supposedly her boyfriend. Some research guy. Every year during the symphony’s fundraising season, he anonymously donated one hundred twenty thousand dollars. Three years in a row. And guess what? The money was earmarked for the cello section, with Laurel named as principal cellist.”
She set her cup down.
“That chair was supposed to go to our associate principal. She worked for it for ten years, but apparently ten years of work couldn’t compete with a rich boyfriend.”
I said nothing.
The coffee went cold.
That afternoon, I drove past Pacific Vista Residences and stopped outside the entrance for ten minutes.
Security was tight. Everyone had to swipe a key card to get in and out.
But I saw her.
She was thinner than she looked in the photos, wearing a loose knit dress and flats. A corgi trotted beside her as she walked slowly out of the building and crossed the street to buy water at a convenience store.
When she came back out, she opened the bottle and crouched down to give the dog a drink first.
The corgi was clearly attached to her, rubbing against her palm again and again.
She smiled, then lowered her head and kissed its forehead.
I started the car and left.
That night, Ethan came home with a bakery box from San Diego.
I opened it and found salted caramel shortbread inside.
“You said once that you wanted to try this place,” he said from the couch, scrolling through his phone. “I happened to pass by, so I picked some up.”
Once.
Back in sophomore year, one of his roommates had interned in San Diego and posted about that bakery, saying their salted caramel shortbread was amazing.
I had only said it looked good, and somehow Ethan still remembered.
I picked up a piece and took a bite.
The caramel was too sweet, and the sea salt hit too sharply.
“Is it good?” he asked.
“It’s good.”
He put his phone down and looked at me.
“Claire, I actually took care of something else while I was in San Diego.”
I didn’t look up.
“What?”
“I looked at a condo,” he said. “In La Jolla, close to the ocean. We have enough for the down payment. I wanted to buy it in your name.”
I set the shortbread down.
“Why buy a condo all of a sudden?”
He paused.
“I wanted to surprise you.” He smiled faintly. “You always said you wanted to live near the ocean.”
I wanted the ocean.
He had given another woman sunsets on a seaside boardwalk.
I wanted a home.
He had paid cash for another woman’s two-bedroom condo.
I closed the bakery box.
“It’s too expensive,” I said. “We don’t have that kind of money.”
“We can pull the down payment together.” He paused again. “We can borrow against my 401(k) too.”
“We can’t pull it together.”
He was silent for a few seconds.
“Are you… worried about money?”
I turned to look at him.
His eyes were so sincere that for one moment, I almost believed the transfer records, the property records, and the symphony donation receipts were things I had made up in my own head.
“Ethan,” I said, “are you hiding anything from me?”
He went still.
“Why would you suddenly ask that?”
“No reason.”
I put the shortbread into the fridge.
“Let’s not buy the condo yet. The remodel has already cost too much.”
He didn’t push the subject.
That night, I went to bed early.
He thought I was tired, so he dimmed the bedroom lights and quietly closed the door.
I lay there with my eyes open until his breathing finally evened out.
At two in the morning, I got up.
His phone was charging on the nightstand. The passcode was still those same six digits.
I unlocked it.
He had wiped L’s chat clean again, but in his notes app, there was an unsent draft with only one word as the title.
Nellie.
I opened it.
It was a letter to his unborn child.
