A Love Most Fatal (Morelli Family #1)

2. Nate

2

NATE

I’m running late. Again.

Punctuality is important to me, it really is. I’m just not always very good at it.

I have very good intentions, and I tend to leave myself more than enough time to get where I’m going, but in the ever-moving current that is a day, something always comes up. There’s a longer line at the post office when I need to return an Amazon package, or the man I play pickleball with on the weekends wants to play “just one more quick game” and I agree, even though I know it’s never quick. Inevitably, I’m rushing, and today is no different.

Freeway traffic isn’t normally so excruciating, but city planners love to make everyone miserable by closing entire lanes in the middle of the day. Lovely, really.

It’s a term week, which translates to a week off for the kids to do whatever it is middle schoolers do now that they have phones and a week for teachers to prep for the last term of the year. Also the allotted time for the final parent-teacher conferences. I schedule all of mine on Monday and Tuesday, making for two mammoth days of meetings with parents. If they miss, they miss, and they can go ahead and send me an email. But Artie Donovann’s mom begged (literally) that I reschedule for today, any time, really , and she promised she wouldn’t miss it, swore on her mother’s life she’d be there, etc., etc.

I was home for the day when she called, and I’d just realized that I’d forgotten my laptop in the classroom, so I told her I would make the allowance just this once. I’d be going to campus the next day anyway, and Artie is a good kid, although he is on my shit list this semester.

The guys I usually play pickleball with at the Y were meeting at noon, so I thought I would have just enough time to get in some games before booking it over to the school. However, I did not account for the spirit of Satan being in the entirety of the city’s driving population today, so now I’m going to be late.

My phone keeps ringing, my mom most likely checking in to see if I’ve found a date for my cousin’s wedding yet, but my phone is in my gym bag in the back seat. After it starts ringing a third time, I give in and answer on my watch.

“Ma?”

“Hi, sweetie. How are you?” she asks before launching into vivid detail about the ham she’s making for her book club tonight and just how awful the lines were at the grocery store this morning. “It sounds like you’re in the car. What are you doing? I thought you had the day off,” she says after a couple minutes.

“I have a bit of work to tie up,” I say.

With no preamble, she starts in on my cousin’s wedding and how it’s important that I don’t show up alone because of how it will look to the rest of the family (whatever that means) and I can barely hear her, so I’m fiddling with the volume control on my stupid watch, all while pulling into the school’s parking lot right behind a black Land Rover, which abruptly slams on their brakes. This, in turn, gives me no time to brake, resulting in me crashing the front of my Prius into the back of this car probably twelve times the cost of mine.

And a parent, no doubt.

“Shit, fuck,” I say, and my mother gasps through the watch’s little speaker. “Mom, I gotta go, I’ll talk to you later.” I press the screen of the watch until the call ends and pull into a spot next to the car. She gets out first, an absolute force of a woman storming to my door with her arms up.

I climb out of my car and try not to think about the fact that I’m still in my gym clothes while this woman looks like she is about to step into a meeting with high-level executives. She looks pissed, too, like I’ve ruined her day along with every other shitty driver in this godforsaken city.

“What the hell happened?” She asks when I haven’t said anything for half a minute, just staring at her. I close my mouth, which was hanging open slightly, and look at the back of her car. There’s a dent, but it’s a small one.

“I’m sorry,” I say, “but you’re the one who stopped short after a turn.”

“Because there was a kid ,” she yells, and god, why is she so pretty while she’s yelling at me?

I look in the direction she’s pointing, and sure enough a student and his father are getting into an equally nice vehicle just down the row.

“You weren’t paying attention,” she accuses, one manicured finger pointed right at me. I think it’s black nail polish, but on closer inspection, it’s blood red, which feels foreboding to her scratching through my skin for hitting her two-hundred-thousand-dollar car.

This still feels like not entirely my fault, and much more the fault of the kid and his dad for not using the crosswalk, but there is a fire in this woman’s eyes that I do not want to stay on the other side of for long. Not when I still need to change for my meeting which is oh , I glance at the cursed watch, seven minutes away.

“Look, I’m really sorry. Let me give you my insurance and we can get this squared away.”

She stares at me for a long moment, like she’s trying to see if I’m actually sorry, and I try to look as penitent as I can while wearing gym shorts and the “I 3 BJ” T-shirt my cousin Rex got for me in Beijing last year.

She lets out a breath before nodding, releasing me from the staring contest spell so I can retrieve my insurance information from my cluttered glove box. She takes photos of her bumper and mine—which is in much worse shape than hers, to be clear—then of my ID and insurance card. I learn from her ID that her name is Vanessa Morelli, and the whole thing is done in less than four minutes. She’s already on the phone with someone and waves me away once she has everything she needs.

“Sorry again,” I mouth, and she gives an absolutely lethal eye roll that I will be thinking about for the next three weeks while I shower and every time I close my eyes to sleep.

My mom has sent me a dozen texts since hanging up on her, and I quickly tell her that I’m fine while I tug my loafers on in the staff bathroom by my office. When all is said and done (I do have to re-button my shirt because I missed one in my haste), I walk into my classroom with one minute to spare and am stowing my gym bag beneath my desk just as Mrs. Donovann knocks on my door.

“Come on in,” I say and look up to find, not Mrs. Donovann, but the woman whose car I just hit in the lot, Vanessa. I know it’s not Mrs. Donovann, because I’ve met her before, and Mrs. Donovann’s hair is honey blonde and she has gentle eyes; this woman’s hair is a shiny dark brown with matching eyes that cut through me like knives.

She stops at the door, both of us staring at each other trying to sort out what the other is doing in this classroom. She stares at my body, and I glance down at my clothes, worried. The button is fixed, everything is tucked in, and my zipper is up, I look great. It’s the best button-up shirt that I own, it’s got tiny little stripes on it.

“You changed,” she says.

“I did,” I reply.

“That was absurdly fast.” She looks almost impressed, and I have to wipe a surprised smile from my face.

“Yeah, I’ve, uh, got a meeting.” I peer behind her to what I can see of the hall, which is otherwise empty. Not a Donovann in sight.

Her eyebrows shoot up on her forehead. “Willa didn’t tell you,” she says.

It’s time for my eyebrows to move because I know the name Willa, Willa being. . . Willa Donovann. Donovann- Morelli , I now recall. Willa, who has obviously sent this woman, Vanessa, in her stead. Because of course I would need to have a meeting with her after just making an ass of myself in the parking lot.

“She didn’t tell me. But please, come in.” I gesture to the desk set up in the front of the room, two chairs on one side, one on the other. I suddenly wish I had a better set up for her to sit in, something classier than a table that I had to use three Clorox wipes on to get all the pencil-drawn penises off its surface.

She takes a seat and crosses her legs, and I catch sight of the red bottoms of her shoes as I sit across from her. Her phone buzzes in her bag and she glances at it before closing her eyes briefly, as if recentering herself after whatever bullshit she just read. I am desperately nosy and wish I knew what it was, but I am in no position to ask.

“I’m Artie’s aunt, Vanessa Morelli. Willa is sorry she couldn’t make it, but something came up.”

“Sure, no worries,” I say, though Mrs. Donovann’s ardent assurances that she’d be here today ring through my mind.

I open Artie’s file and flip to the page of his list of approved adults who have access to his school information. Sure enough, Vanessa Morelli is on the list.

We sit quietly for a moment that is thick with the fact that I just hit her car. The ridiculousness of it dawns on me so thoroughly that I have to close my eyes and laugh just a little or I’ll combust.

To my surprise, Vanessa gives a laugh, too.

“Look, I am very embarrassed and would love to go hide in that closet there,” I choke out as I point at the little door in the back of my classroom, which makes her smile wider. “Can we start over? Like pretend some jackass in the parking lot didn’t just hit your very shiny, very nice car with his very old, environmentally conscious, baby blue Toyota?”

Her smile is everything to me, like it might make my brain melt the way her cheeks push up her eyelids and she tries to keep her lips closed.

“Okay,” she agrees, and holds a hand across the desk for me to shake. I do. “I’m Vanessa.”

“Nathaniel,” I say. Then, “Nate Gilbert. Good to meet you, Vanessa.”

“You too.”