Celia swung her legs up and thunked her Betsey Johnson sandals on a rare clean corner of Emma’s tidy but always covered desk, tugging open one of the buttons on the wine-red jacket of her fall suit. “That’s amazing.”
Emma leaned back in her chair until the hinges squeaked and gave her best friend a look that had sent many a student cowering back to their dorm rooms. “I hate it when the freshmen start researching the Romantics. You get sappy.”
Impervious to “the look,” Celia ignored her. “And what were you doing walking alone at night with serial killers on the loose?”
That made Emma sit up. “Serial killers?”
Celia rolled her eyes. “Hijole, don’t even tell me you haven’t heard about what’s been going on in this country? There are approximately thirty-five to fifty serial killers at work across the nation at any given moment. Do you ever watch the news? Pop your addled professorial brain out of the 18th century every so often?”
“TV rots your brain.” She paused. “Except for reality shows, which are often very deep commentaries on human relationships in the 21st century.”
Celia snorted. “Riiiiiight. Pick up a newspaper, then?”
Emma shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “Umm…”
“You know, living in the now for at least a few minutes a day can be good for your health. You can’t just completely close yourself off like this.” Celia reached forward and plucked Emma’s glasses off the stack of papers from which they were threatening to slide off. She produced a case from a nearby drawer and neatly stuffed the spectacles inside. “You see where that gets you,” she wagged the case at Emma. “Nearly assaulted in a dark alley by a psycho, that’s where. You’re going to be thirty-five tomorrow. You should know better.”
“I’m not closed—”
“You are so,” Celia interrupted, then threw her hands up in disgust. “It’s a good thing you weren’t shuffling around with your nose in a book down that alley as usual, or you’d have been toast.”
“I do not shuffle,” Emma objected.
Placing the glasses carefully on top of a short mahogany bookshelf, Celia rose from her chair and smacked her palms against the shiny wooden surface of Emma’s desk. “You, my dear, are Rut Girl to that guy’s Mystery Man,” she announced.
“Rut Girl!”
“You teach your classes and spend the rest of your time grading papers and watching out for your mom, all sprinkled in with the occasional need to risk your life running errands in the wee hours of the night. I mean, I know you’re sometimes restoring that old house of yours, which is cool, because you’ve got that Home & Garden thing going on and it’s good to have hobbies, but get a life!” Straightening up, Celia tugged on one of the tight black curls that swirled and bobbed about her head and surveyed the room. “I know things with your mom have been tough, but you need time for you, too. You know, it’s like Thoreau said: Live deliberately. Go into the woods. Suck marrow, et cetera, et cetera.”
Emma couldn’t help it. Celia had been the head librarian ever since Emma had earned her post teaching Restoration to 18th-century literature at St. Xavier’s. They’d been friends since the moment they’d met, despite marked personality differences, so Emma should have been used to her dramatic tirades by now. But the fact was, this one hurt her feelings a little. Maybe because the assessment was so dead-on and something she pondered every year when her birthday rolled around. “Mom needs me,” she said lamely.
“I know, hon, but even she’s said she wishes you’d get out more,” Celia said gently. She sat back down in the chair. “It’s been a year, Em. Maybe it’s time to let go a little.”
Emma chewed her bottom lip, trying to ignore the tightening in her stomach. It still hurt so much to think about what might have been, what still could be. “It’s been eleven months, Celia,” she said quietly, staring at the dark screen of her desktop computer monitor. “And you know as well as I do that we’re not in the clear until this year is up.”
She heard Celia swing her legs off the desk and then felt a pair of hands pulling hers out of her lap. “I know. I don’t mean to push, but your mom and I have been talking, and we’re worried. You can’t give everything to your job and then give it all over again to Jane.”
Emma’s eyes flicked to the photo of her and her mother on her bookshelves. Only someone who knew Jane Jensen Reese well could tell that she looked paler than usual, that there were new lines around her mouth and eyes, that her smart new hairstyle was a touch too shiny and perfect, in the photo and every day in real life. “I’m scared,” she whispered. She didn’t have to tell Celia of what.
Celia clutched her hands tightly. “I know. I can see what waiting for this horrible year to finish up is doing to you. I wish I could help.”
“You do, all the time.” Emma stood abruptly and grabbed her large bag, slinging the strap over her shoulder, which sank a little with the weight. “It’ll be fine. That’s what we have to believe, right?”
“Right.” Celia flashed her a smaller, less bright version of her wide grin. “Well, come on. I’ll buy you an early birthday dinner at Ca’Brea, and then you can drive me home in that snazzy new hybrid car of yours.”
AFTER DROPPING OFF Celia at her condo, Emma pulled the snub-nosed Toyota Prius into the garage behind her house. Thirty-five. She was going to be thirty-five years old, and she’d pretty much spent all of those years—with her rigid routines and carefully planned schedules—digging her own personal rut, not just the past one. Rut Girl. Celia might as well have called her Deeply Entrenched Chasm Girl, with or without her mother’s illness.
Thirty-five years old. As she tugged her overstuffed hemp satchel out of the car, the thought stopped Emma in her tracks. Tomorrow, she would officially be in her mid-thirties. Which meant that very soon, she’d be forty. Which meant it was high time she got out and broke the routines she’d been creating since she’d learned to walk and did something extraordinary.
But what?
To date, she’d achieved all of her goals. She’d earned her Ph.D. in literature ten years ago, gotten a teaching job and had risen through the ranks to become full professor of 18th-century literature at St. Xavier University, a small liberal arts college nestled in the palm-lined shadow of the University of Southern Caifornia in Los Angeles.
And now, her time was spent in a weekly routine that, as Celia had so bluntly pointed out, rarely varied, by day, hour or even minute. Could she possibly be any more boring?
Probably not. Even her name sounded like a stuffy old lady’s—Emma Jensen Reese. Hah. “Hello,” she mimicked herself aloud as she walked around her house toward the mailbox in front, “I’m Emma Jensen Reese, professor of stuffy literature at a stuffy university with a large rod stuffed firmly up my—”
Emma halted abruptly, the heels of her shoes sinking into the soft green grass.
The so-called Mystery Man was staring at her front door. And in the daylight, he was what her students would call a hottie.
He stood before the baby palms lining the small patch of grass and flowers she called a front yard, his hands shoved into the pockets of a brown mid-length suede jacket. His face was
