The First Husband

I looked from the potatoes to him. “Did you plan that?”

“Afraid I don’t have that kind of power,” he said.

Then Aly—my new friend, apparently—reached for one of my potatoes. And looked back down at his paper, flipping to a new page.

“So you can eat in peace now,” he said. “But I wanted to say hello first . . . and get you a decent drink . . . and steal a potato . . . and talk entirely too much, apparently, without even hearing you say your name. . . .”

“Annie,” I finished for him.

“Annie.”

He handed me his business card. “You can hang on to that if you like, for whenever you want a break from work, or a break from your typical breaks from work . . .” he said. “I’ll take you potato hunting. No strings attached.”

“Potato hunting?”

He pointed at my double order of rosemary goodness. “I assume you’re a potato woman,” he said.

I wasn’t sure what kind of woman I was, but a potato one didn’t seem like a bad place to start. Another evening as nice as this one was shaping up to be didn’t seem like a bad place either.

So I looked down at his card.

It had the name of the place he worked—not a massive law firm, but rather . . . BECKETT MEDIA.

It also had his name, just sitting there: CALEB BECKETT.

I looked back up at him. “You’re Caleb Beckett?”

“My friends call me Aly, remember?”

I held the card up, like proof. “But I’m not your friend,” I said. “I’m your employee.”

He shrugged. “Not a very immediate employee, you’d have to say, wouldn’t you? Or we wouldn’t just be meeting now,” he said. “If you want to play it that way though, I’m going to have to advise you against wearing rhinestones to work.”

I pulled the coat more tightly around me. “But why don’t you have an Australian accent? Do you really have an ex-wife? And what kind of nickname is Aly? And why lie?”

He started counting down on his left hand, holding up all four fingers.

“I haven’t had an accent since I was in my second year at Yale,” he said. “And I only get to wish my ex-wife was part of a made-up tale. Aly is quite a common nickname for Caleb, where I come from. And I kind of thought that if I lied, I had a better chance of getting some potatoes.”

Then he took another, and I slapped his hand away. “This gets worse and worse,” I said.

“Not worse and worse,” he said. “Better and better.”

“How do you figure?”

“Now you get to go home happy that the guy you are finding yourself attracted to isn’t some terrible lawyer utilizing his overpriced skill set to protect brutal corporations hurting the environment,” he said. “But just someone you know from work. What’s the big deal about that?”

“First of all, I am not attracted to you.”

“No?” he said, smiling.

“No,” I said. “And, second of all, if you keep talking to me, I’m going to tell everyone at work you read the Guardian.”

He shrugged. “I’ll get my own potatoes, then,” he said. “Since you’re intent on ignoring magic.”

“Good.”

“Good.” He was smiling bigger.