So, for the next several months I spent a lot of time at the bar working while Dickerson spent a lot of time at home working. It didn’t bother me much—I actually found I got more work done without him there to distract me with jokes and gossip and recaps of televisions—but it did bother me on a subatomic level. An irksome wondering had entered my brain—what was he doing at home? If Ellie was still working nights, then what was the point of him being at home by himself? He would text me updates, or sometimes email them to me, or if it was something that needed my attention he’d call and say, “I’m coming by in a bit so we can talk about this.” It felt normal enough, but try as I might, it also felt off, and I couldn’t put my finger on exactly why.

               “It’s not like he’s ignoring me or work,” I told Jay. We’d moved into a steady pace in our relationship, and I was pretty sure I was the only woman on his horizon, but we hadn’t had that conversation about labels yet. “So, I don’t get why I can’t shake this feeling like something is wrong.”

               Jay gave me a knowing, sympathetic look over the top of his glass before he knocked back a swig of the beer. “Because you feel like you’re the problem,” he said.

               The veil lifted. “Yes,” I said, wondering why I hadn’t been able to articulate it like that before. “Yes! I feel like I’m the problem here, but I didn’t do anything.”

               “Except exist as a confident woman in the world,” Jay said, a smirk parting his lips for a moment. He reached across the bar and squeezed my hand. “But it’s not, true. You’re not the problem. Whatever is going on between them doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

               Jay was right, but it was still impacting me, especially when Dickerson started ignoring my texts, ducking my calls and forgoing long in-person conversations. A few times here and there and I would have assumed he was having a bad day. But it continued for weeks until I just couldn’t take it anymore. The pot had boiled over.

               Dickerson came by unannounced around 1:30 in the morning on a Thursday evening in November. He nodded at me as he came through the doors and went straight into the office in the back of the bar without a word. I gave him a few minutes to get settled into whatever he had come in to do—and to compose myself so I didn’t immediately explode—before I deliberately walked with light feet (to avoid marching) to the office myself.

               I pushed open the door. He was sitting at his desk scrolling through a spreadsheet on his laptop. I came in without a greeting, and pulled up a chair next to him. Only then did he acknowledge me.

               “Hey, Nattie,” he said, but it sounded forced, off, thick, wrong.

               “What’s going on with you?” I asked tenderly.

               “What do you mean?” Either his bluff was really good or he truly had no idea what I was talking about it.

               “You’re ignoring me,” I said.

               He glanced away, just for a second, but it was long enough for me to know that his impulse was to keep it repressed, to tuck away whatever he didn’t want to say to me and pretend it didn’t exist. “I’m…not doing it on purpose,” he said.

               “How do you accidently ignore somebody?” I asked, feeling my ire rise. My face felt hot.

               “Look, I’m…well, it’s complicated. I’m trying to figure some things out.”

               “About me?” I asked.

               He looked at me like I had five eyeballs in my head. “About you?” he asked, a frown of confusion crinkled his features.

               “Because Ellie doesn’t like me,” I said. “And you’re choosing not to deal with that by choosing not to deal with me.”

               “What?!” he said.

               I should have taken note of how his body had stiffened, how his surprise has turned to anger and his eyes held a wounded look instead of a panicked one. But I didn’t do that. I plowed ahead of full speed, releasing years of confusion, hurt and anger over the poor treatment I’d received from Ellie, a woman whom I had wanted as a friend, but had rejected me because of her own insecurities. “I didn’t do anything to deserve this from either of you,” I said, even as he tried to interrupt me, tried to explain something that I didn’t want to listen to. “I have tried really hard to let the two of you figure it out on your own, and I feel like I’ve been more than gracious enough to both of you. But if you’re going to throw away a friendship because your wife doesn’t want you talking to other women, I guess we were never friends in the first place.” His frown deepened, and there was anger in his eyes, in his posture. I had hit a nerve that was unraveling him but I didn’t care. “I asked you to do this with me despite knowing that she would be a problem. People tried to warn me and I didn’t listen because I wanted you with me on this.”

               He closed his eyes, his face flat, his breathing slow, like he was releasing the steam. “You don’t know everything, Nattie,” he said through his teeth.

               “I don’t know anything!” I said. “Because you never tell me anything. You never talk about this one part of your life with me. What am I supposed to think?”

               “I’m really trying to do the right thing here, Nattie,” he said, and he was about to say more, but I cut him off.

               “The right thing would be to deal with whatever issue is between you and your wife without dragging me into it.”

               “Dragging you into it?” he asked. “What the hell? I haven’t drug you into anything!”

               “No, you just cut me off instead.”

               And there it was, the seed that had grown the thorns of pain I felt over his behavior. He softened, and I did too. He looked away from me, closed his laptop, and tucked it back into his bag. Then he turned towards me and took me by the hands, leaned really close to my face and said, “It has nothing to do with you.”

               I wanted to believe him, but I couldn’t if I had no other explanation. “Then, what is going on?” I asked. “Why are you ignoring me?”

               He wet his lips, tucked his bottom one in for a minute, as if buttoning it up.

               I dropped his hands. “I’m going home,” I said. “I’ll see you when I see you, I guess.”

               That was it. He didn’t try to stop me, didn’t try to explain. He let me walk away from him without putting up a fight.