25

The play was postponed for a week. This was just long enough for Candice to learn Jessica’s blocking—she already knew her lines—and to have the costume altered to fit her. Candice couldn’t really act, but with Jessica Potts away receiving much-needed treatment, Candice was better than nothing.

On opening night, Rachel abandoned directing and sat in the front row, her bandaged leg propped on a stool. Ian sat on one side, Lee and Sharon on the other.

Lee, who carried a new sense of relief now that he knew his mother was checked in safely to a minimum-security rehab facility, where she wouldn’t be able to harm herself or others.

Ian, who—unbeknownst to Rachel at the time—had patiently explained to Lee his options and helped him through the difficulty of making the toughest of all choices: knowing when to show tough love to someone who had failed him. Ian, who had turned up tonight uninvited, eyes crinkling when he’d read the shock on her face.

“Garcia told me to bring my A-Game,” he said, sitting down beside her and brushing imaginary lint off his tailored button-down.

“Tell her it worked,” she hissed as the lights dimmed.

“Does that mean you’re going to call me?” In the dark, his voice seemed almost a tangible thing, low and warm.

Rachel heard the audience shifting behind her, rustling in anticipation.

“Probably.”

He turned toward her in the dimness. “When?”

The lights came up.

“Why ruin the sense of mystery?” She watched closely, not wanting to miss his eyes crinkling at the corners.

~*~

“So it has a happy ending,” Chris said the next day in class, flipping his copy of Much Ado About Nothing from hand to hand.

“Yes, of course,” Rachel said. “You’ve known that from the start.”

“It’s a comedy,” Shayla reminded him. “Comedies end happily, remember?”

Chris frowned. “It’s still a bit of a let-down. I wanted someone to get stabbed.”

“Why can’t you just let them have their happy ending?” Shayla prodded him with a pencil.

“Are you sure it’s going to be happy?” he asked, turning sideways. “Because people who get what they want aren’t always happy.”

Rachel’s gaze turned toward Jessica’s empty chair. She glanced around the room and noted Alice staring in the same direction.

“And besides,” Chris continued, “eventually Benedick and Beatrice are going to start fighting again. You know they are. And then what?”

“Fighting doesn’t always mean that people don’t get along,” Rachel said, thinking of herself and Lynn. Of herself and Ann. Of herself and Lee. Of herself and almost everybody. “It doesn’t mean that people don’t love each other.”

“I find it hard to believe that any of these people get a happy ending,” Chris maintained. “Especially Claudio. I mean, who would trust him after that?”

“No self-respecting woman I know.” Alice surprised everyone with her authoritative tone.

Chris turned all the way around to face Alice, legs stuck completely out in the aisle.

“You need to let it go.”

Alice said nothing, but she colored slightly, and her eyebrows twitched upward.

“What’s this?” asked Rachel.

“Nothing,” Chris swiveled forward, looking like a thundercloud.

It wasn’t until days later that Shayla dropped a hint in Rachel’s ear that Chris and Alice had attended middle school together. The two had, in point of fact, been “going out” for two years when Chris suddenly broke up with Alice—via a friend, of course—because of some rumors he’d heard about her and some boy from another school.

Rachel thought of all she’d noted between the two of them and wondered how she could have been blind to all the clues. Would she ever get it right?

Or would she just be one of those people who would always be bad at reading others?

Maybe.

But as she always told the students, the only way to improve was through practice.

Perhaps the time had come for Rachel to practice real relationships.

To stop making assumptions, start taking advice, and ask people what they were really thinking.

She might be bad at it. She might fail. She might go down in glorious flames.

Then again, she might not.