Updated Apr 9, 2026 • ~10 min read
Chapter 2: Six Months
Kennedy
Six months out, Kennedy had developed a theory about healing, which was that it didn’t happen in a line. It happened in layers, the way a bruise healed — not fading evenly across the surface but changing colors, cycling through purple and green and yellow-brown before finally, quietly, returning to something that looked like skin. You couldn’t rush it. You couldn’t skip layers. You could only notice that this week was a different color than last week, and accept that different was progress even when it didn’t feel like it.
She was okay. That was the honest answer, when Tatum asked. Not great, but okay — genuinely okay, the kind that didn’t require air quotes or a reassuring tone, just the flat truth of a Tuesday morning when she woke up and her first thought wasn’t Tyler.
Her first thought was lesson plans. Specifically, the reading comprehension exercise she’d planned for second period, which she suspected was slightly too advanced for Emma Diaz but exactly challenging enough for Marcus Webb, who read two grade levels above his peers and was developing the focused, private quality of a child who was going to be exceptional at something specific and hadn’t found out what yet. This was the part of teaching that Kennedy loved most: not the curriculum or the benchmarks or the parent emails she answered every evening from her couch, but the individual texture of each kid, the specific way their minds moved. The way Emma asked *why* before she asked *what*. The way Marcus would read ahead in the reader and then pretend not to know the answer, out of some nascent social awareness that being visibly smart was complicated.
She got up. Made coffee. Drove to school. This was what six months looked like: the machinery of ordinary life, which had kept running even when she hadn’t, and which she was learning to trust again the way you learned to trust a car that had broken down once — with gratitude for the running and a background alertness for sounds that didn’t belong.
Room 12 at Clover Elementary was the most reliable place Kennedy knew.
Twenty-three second-graders arrived every morning in varying states of readiness — some bouncing, some half-asleep, two who were reliably tearful on Mondays and reliable the rest of the week — and they required things from her in a way that was both demanding and, paradoxically, restorative. They required her full presence. They required patience and creativity and the ability to explain the concept of a suffix to a child who was simultaneously trying to whisper to the child beside him, and they did not care that she had cried in her car in the parking lot six months ago or that she still sometimes reached for her phone in the evening with the reflexive intention of sending Tyler something funny before remembering.
“Ms. Wells,” Emma said one Thursday morning, appearing at Kennedy’s elbow with the particular purposefulness of a seven-year-old who has decided something is important. “Do you have a boyfriend?”
Kennedy finished writing the day’s date on the whiteboard. “No, Emma.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m focusing on my very excellent students.”
Emma considered this with the expression of someone who found the answer technically acceptable but substantively insufficient. “My mom says you’re too pretty to be single. She says it when she sees your picture on the school website.”
“That’s very kind of your mom.”
“She also says you look sad in the picture.”
Kennedy turned around. Twenty-three faces looked back at her with varying degrees of interest — some fully absorbed in this conversation, some coloring, two engaged in a wordless dispute over a purple crayon. “I’m not sad,” she said. “I’m focused. There’s a difference. Now. Who can tell me what a compound word is.”
The purple crayon dispute escalated. She mediated. The lesson began.
This was what six months looked like, and it was enough.
Therapy was on Thursday evenings, which meant every Thursday she drove across town to a beige building with a small fountain in the lobby that made a sound like someone trying to be unobtrusive, and she sat across from Dr. Renata Osei and they talked about Kennedy’s father, and Tyler, and the specific overlap between those two relationships that Kennedy had spent a long time refusing to examine.
“He’s not the first man who’s left you by pretending you don’t exist,” Dr. Osei had said, about three months in, with the directness that Kennedy had initially found unsettling and now considered the most valuable thing in the room.
“My father didn’t ghost me. He moved to Phoenix.”
“He stopped being your father in any meaningful way when you were twelve. The mechanism was different. The result was the same.”
Kennedy had argued with this for a month. Then she’d stopped arguing and started sleeping better, which she took as a sign that Dr. Osei was right and she’d finally been willing to stop defending herself against the truth of it. Her father’s affair, her mother’s stillness, the specific quality of being twelve and understanding for the first time that the people you depended on were capable of choosing themselves over you — this was the ground Tyler had walked into without knowing it. Without her knowing it. And when he’d chosen three women over her and then blocked her like she was the inconvenience, the wound had been both his and her father’s, and healing it required treating both, which was exhausting, and which she was doing.
She was doing the work. She wanted credit for that, even when the credit felt abstract.
Tatum’s approach to Kennedy’s healing was less nuanced than Dr. Osei’s but considerably more entertaining.
“You need to go on a date,” she said, appearing at Kennedy’s classroom door on a Friday afternoon in March with two coffees and the determined expression of a woman who had made up her mind. “I’m not asking. I’m informing you.”
“I’m not ready.”
“You’ve been not ready for six months.”
“Healing takes time.”
“You’re not healing anymore, you’re hiding.” Tatum handed her a coffee and settled into the small chair beside Kennedy’s desk — the one meant for parents at conferences, which Tatum fit into with her legs folded under her in a way that reminded Kennedy of a particularly opinionated cat. “You’ve been ready for two months. You’re just scared.”
“I’m not scared.”
“Your exact words when I suggested you try the dating app were, and I’m quoting, *what if I fall for someone who turns out to be a different person than I thought, which is what always happens, so what’s the point.*”
Kennedy drank her coffee. “That’s not fear. That’s pattern recognition.”
“Babe.” Tatum’s voice went gentle the way it did when she was about to say something Kennedy needed to hear. “Not every man is Tyler. Not every man is your dad. You know this intellectually. At some point you have to let yourself know it in practice.”
Kennedy knew this. She did know it. She knew it the way she knew that exercise would help her feel better — correctly, thoroughly, without yet managing to consistently act on it.
“I’ll think about it,” she said.
“That means no.”
“It means I’ll think about it.”
Tatum gave her the look. Kennedy ignored the look. They finished their coffees and talked about their coworker Iris’s latest attempt to set Kennedy up with her cousin, who was, by all accounts, perfectly nice and also had never read a book and had once described a film Kennedy loved as *too slow*, and they both agreed that some incompatibilities were simply insurmountable, and the afternoon slid into evening and Kennedy drove home through streets that were starting to show the first uncertain green of early spring.
She didn’t go on the dating app.
But in April, on a Saturday that was warm enough to be optimistic about, she decided — on her own, without Tatum’s encouragement, which felt important — that she was going to get coffee somewhere other than her kitchen. This was a small thing. It was the kind of small thing that looked ridiculous from the outside and significant from where she was standing, because going to Grounded Coffee on Maple Street meant going somewhere she and Tyler used to go, somewhere she’d avoided for six months on the logic that she wasn’t ready, and she had decided she was ready now, and she was going to walk into that coffee shop and order a vanilla latte with extra foam and sit with it for twenty minutes and prove to herself that she was capable of occupying her own life without reorganizing it around his absence.
She put on a jacket. She drove to Maple Street. She found a parking spot, which she took as a sign.
The coffee shop was warm and smelled like espresso and something baked, and the line was medium-length, and the barista had a braid down her back and moved with the efficiency of someone who had made a thousand lattes and found the rhythm of it. Kennedy stood in line and looked at the menu she already knew by heart and did not think about Tyler, which was its own kind of progress.
She ordered. She turned around to find a table.
She did not see the man directly behind her.
What happened next happened very fast: her shoulder catching something solid, the particular lurch of a full cup at the wrong angle, the sound of a lid losing the argument with gravity, and then hot coffee — her coffee, the latte she’d just paid four dollars for — cascading across the front of a navy blue uniform shirt.
The man made a sound that was not quite a word.
Kennedy looked up.
He was tall — several inches taller than she was — with dark hair and a jaw that looked like it had been designed by someone who took that kind of thing seriously, and he was wearing the uniform of the city fire department, and he was holding the ruins of her cup, and he was looking down at the spreading stain across his chest with an expression that was caught somewhere between resigned and amused.
“I’m so sorry,” Kennedy said. “I wasn’t — I didn’t see you.”
“It’s fine.” He looked up from his shirt, and his eyes were gray-blue, the color of overcast sky, and they were looking at her with a particular quality of attention that she couldn’t immediately categorize. “Are you burned?”
“Am I — no. No, it was your shirt that got it.”
“Good.” He glanced down again. “This is definitely a loss, though.”
“I’ll pay for it—”
“You don’t need to pay for it.” Something shifted in his expression. A beat of hesitation, the kind you could only catch if you were looking, and Kennedy was looking, because she’d spent two years with a man who never hesitated and she’d apparently started paying attention to the people who did. “I’m Vaughn,” he said.
“Kennedy.”
He nodded, like he was confirming something rather than learning something — but she didn’t catch that, not then. She was looking for napkins and feeling the familiar low burn of being embarrassed in a public place and wishing she had simply made coffee at home.
She would think about his expression later. The way it had landed when she said her name.
She wouldn’t understand what it meant until the fourth time she ran into him.
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