The Ten-Cent Good Woman Award

Forty thousand dollars. That was the bag on my phone screen, the limited edition my rich boyfriend had just bought his best friend for her birthday.

My own birthday gift from him was sitting in my purse. A Good Woman award certificate. Ten for a dollar off some bargain app.

My phone went off in the conference room and wouldn't stop.

My boss looked up. "Take it outside."

I ducked out with my head down and hit answer, and his shout went straight through my ear.

"Are you out of your mind?"

"Ara's party is a big deal. Bring the gift and get down here, or we're done."

Five years together. He split hotel rooms with me down to the penny.

I drained my savings to keep up with him, and he turned around and spent a fortune on somebody else.

I had a deadline and a headache, and I heard myself answer him. "Fine. Let's be done."

Chapter 1

The text went through. My phone rang a second later.

"Nora, are you out of your mind?"

I was in the middle of a meeting.

Every head at the table turned. My boss gave me a flat look and pointed at the door, which meant get out and take it.

I ducked out low. He was still going.

"Or is this about me being too good to Ara? You're jealous of Ara. I've always known you don't like her."

He said it the way people do when they think they've cracked the case.

My head was pounding.

He was right about one thing. I didn't like Arabella Langford, and she had a way of holding on to Preston that never sat right.

She'd ask him who was prettier, her or me.

She'd bring up some story about him as a kid, and the two of them would laugh over it in front of me, and she'd land it with the same line every time.

"See? Nobody knows you like I do."

Once she called him while he was in bed with me, because her cat was sick and he needed to come look at it.

Most of it wasn't her, though. Most of it was him.

For her birthday this year he bought her that limited-edition bag. I got one look at the receipt. Forty thousand dollars, and change.

He was pleased with himself when he paid for it.

"That girl's high maintenance. Anything less than the best is an insult to her."

Last month was my birthday.

He gave me a "Good Woman" award certificate.

Ten for a dollar, off a bargain app.

We came from different worlds, and he'd always been afraid I was after his money, so I overpaid to prove I wasn't. His gifts cost me two months of my salary.

Even the hotel rooms, we split.

And he handed me a sheet of paper.

Two months of my pay for his. A dime for mine.

He didn't care about me.

I was at work and he knew it. He called anyway. Then he called again.

I was so tired.

On the phone, he said it again. "Ara's party is a big deal. Bring the gift and get down here, or we're done."

So this time I said it back and meant it.

"Fine. Let's be done."

The words came out, and something in my chest went hollow anyway.

Five years with Preston Ashford. He'd broken up with me more times than I could count.

Every single time I'd worked myself raw getting back in his good graces.

I didn't get around to being sad.

My boss's voice came through the office door. "Are you done? Get back in here."

The client had been brutal that month. They kept changing the scope, and every time we hit ninety percent, they moved something else.

She was one bad hour from snapping.

"I don't care about your personal life. But if you bring it into this office one more time"

Chapter 2

"It's over," I said. "Done. It won't touch my work."

She looked me up and down and laughed without any humor in it. "It better be."

To be fair to her, she'd been good to me.

I'd worked under her since graduation. She taught me how to handle a room, back when I was pulling doubles trying to keep pace with Preston.

Her advice was simple. "You two are too far apart to make it, and it'll cost you money and years. Someone like you can afford to be wrong early. Cut him loose now."

I didn't listen. After a while she stopped saying it.

It was almost midnight when I got home and pushed open my door.

The place had been picked clean.

The apartment was mine. Preston stayed over sometimes.

His stuff was all over it. You could smell him in every room.

Now my cabinets were emptied onto the floor and my clothes were tracked with black shoe prints.

He'd come by and taken his things back.

That was very him.

Other nights like this had left me wrecked until dawn, unable to talk about it. That night I lay down on the mattress.

I was asleep before I could get to it.

Maybe it was the exhaustion. I dreamed about the beginning, which I hadn't done in years.

Preston and I met in high school. We sat next to each other by accident.

I was the quiet one nobody looked at. He had a crowd around him at all times.

Some white-knight thing kicked in with him, and he made me his project.

In group projects, when the others talked over me, he'd knock the desk. "Nora hasn't said anything yet."

When I fell behind tying my shoe, he'd stop the whole group. "Hang on. Nora's not with us."

He dragged me into his circle whether I wanted it or not.

I took the special treatment with both hands and kept waiting for it to be taken back.

Then I fell for him, the way anyone would have.

I never said it out loud. He figured it out anyway.

Senior year he asked me like it was nothing. "People are going to laugh at you if you show up to college single. We might as well pair off."

The rest happened on its own. We were together.

He liked to go out. Everybody liked him. Half the people who liked him were women.

Ara was his idea. He introduced us and told me she was his best friend and I needed to make it work.

I met her at his house.

She came down the stairs in slippers, yawning.

"This is the girlfriend?"

She stood there smiling at me and took her time looking me over. "Where are you from?"

"She's from the city, same as us," Preston said.

"Sure. Plenty of poor people in this city too."

Then, to him: "She's got that broke smell on her. You're not getting worked by a gold digger, are you?"

Heat crawled up my neck and sat in my face.

"Don't worry about it. We split everything," he said.

He turned to me like that closed the matter.

"Ara grew up running around with a bunch of guys. She says what she thinks. Don't take it personally."

He was easy with her the way he'd never been with me. He looked at her like being rude to me was cute.

So when he asked me later what I thought of her.

I told him the truth. "I don't like Ara."

It was the first time he ever really yelled at me.

"Because she said something you didn't want to hear? You're that fragile? Tell me which part of it was wrong."

Chapter 3

My jaw locked up. "I have never taken one thing from you. You don't respect me and neither does she."

"Don't forget who chased who. You wanted this. You asked for it."

He frowned down at me like he was explaining something to a child. "If you want to be with me, Ara comes with it."

"Otherwise we're done."

That was the first time he ended it.

He was right about the two of us. School had thrown us together for a few years and given me a door I never would have had.

Outside of it, if he didn't want to be found, I'd never get near him again.

My messages sat there dead. He'd deleted me everywhere.

I didn't sleep. Not for one hour.

My eyes burned. My skull ached. I drifted around the apartment, and all I could pull up was every kind thing he'd ever done. Then I started taking myself apart. Every problem in that relationship, I filed under my own name.

Maybe I was petty. Maybe I wasn't generous enough. Maybe I just wasn't enough to look at.

Clear-eyed and pathetic, I did the math and came out with the same answer. I couldn't leave him.

So I started working my friends for news about him.

At first they laughed at me for it. Later they called me shameless.

One of them couldn't take it anymore and called me herself. "What is so great about him? You pour everything into that man and he doesn't even register it. Take one piece of advice from me. Stop chasing him."

But I had it worked out. You can't be in a relationship and only take. Being around him made me happy, and that was enough.

So I spelled it out for her. "You play video games, right? You spend a fortune on them. This is the same thing. I spend money, he's happy, I'm good."

She made a small sound. "You have no idea what you are to him, do you. You don't know how he talks about you."

"He told people you were free."

Then two more messages came in.

[Happiness is easy to get, as long as you're willing to think that little of yourself.]

[That's it for me. Don't contact me again.]

I didn't contact her again. Preston contacted me first.

I'd written him a long message and rewritten it a dozen times. He skimmed it and swiped it away.

Then, easy as anything: "There's a brooch I've had my eye on."

I knew my line. "I've got two months saved up. Let me get it for you."

He said, "Mm." Like the money had already cleared.

The brooch came home with us.

I caught the price tag on the way out. Sixty-two hundred dollars.

Not a dollar over, not a dollar under. Two months of my salary, down to the last cent.

Something turned over in my stomach and I pushed it back down and told myself he hadn't priced it off my paycheck.

Then I saw the brooch in Ara's hand.

The gift was always for Ara.

"It's Ara's birthday," he told me. "This can be from you."

Five years, and he never once got the math wrong.

One of us was drowning in that relationship. The other one was doing sums.

I woke up and it was Saturday, so I went home for the first time in a long while.

Three bedrooms. My sister was older and needed her own space, and my brother was a boy and needed his own space, so the pullout couch in the living room was mine.

I moved out before I even finished school.

They still live there. I've never been asked back.

Chapter 4

Mom opened the door and her face went blank, and then she found her footing. "You could have called. There's no food made for you."

I lifted the roast chicken in my hand and smiled. "Then that's one more dish."

The whole chicken went on the table and she started dividing it up the way she always did.

The drumsticks and the wings went to my sister and my brother, one each.

When she got to me, she pulled off the neck and the back and dropped them on my plate.

"These are the good part. Nor's loved these since she was little."

The skin had gone cold and shiny on them. I sat there and looked at it.

My teeth have been bad since I was a kid. I can't chew anything hard.

But I was the middle one, and the middle one is nobody's favorite.

My brother was born the year I started high school, and money got tight in a way it never had before.

The tightness landed on me.

Lunch money always came up short. The twenty bucks for field trips never got paid. When I needed school clothes, they had an answer ready. "Your sister's stuff still fits. We didn't throw it out."

I wore my sister's hand-me-downs with the grease stains still in them and walked around like a person with nothing to protect.

Then Preston took me in and suddenly I had friends.

I learned every one of their birthdays. I never missed one.

None of them knew mine. That didn't bother me.

Preston was the only one who ever asked.

"What about you, Nora? What do you want for your birthday?"

He was serious about it.

"Me? I don't need anything. My own parents don't remember it, so you guys really don't have to"

Something about the way he was looking at me shut me up. My voice got smaller and smaller.

"So other people treat you like that, fine. You're going to do it too?"

"You have to learn to be good to yourself."

One sentence. Years of my life.

I still remember what it did to me, standing there in that hallway.

Being good to myself turned out to be the one subject I couldn't pass.

At the table, everybody was catching up. Mom told my sister to buy herself more clothes, because girls should look nice. She told my brother not to work so hard, because they were doing okay now.

Then she got to me. "It's getting dark out. Don't stay too long after you eat."

It hit me right there. Most of it comes down to whether you can make yourself say no.

So I smiled and dropped the neck and the back onto the platter.

"Mom, I like drumsticks too."

"Also, I bought the chicken. A leg isn't asking much."

The table went dead quiet.

"Since when do you keep score? Your mother and I didn't get any either. I don't hear you counting that."

My father's hand came down flat on the table.

"Take it. Take all of it. Are you happy now?"

Funny how that works. As long as I ate what I was given, everyone had a lovely time.

The second I asked for something, I was the difficult one. I was the one in the wrong.

So I learned early. Eat what I'm given, and everyone stays happy.

I'm twenty-nine. Thirty is a few months out.

Thirty is when you're supposed to have your life together, and sitting there, I decided it was time I got moving.

"If you don't like your second kid, you can just say so." I looked around the table, at all of them, and I didn't drop it. "You didn't get any. Somebody did. You know exactly who's been going without in this house."

Chapter 5

"And you can stop pretending you treated us all the same. That's for your conscience, not for me."

"Honestly? I'm sick of both of you."

People chase what they never got. They spend their whole lives paying for it.

What I said at that table was close enough to cutting them off for good. Walking out, I was lighter than I'd been in years.

Fall in New York comes in cold and gray, and the wind gets through everything you own.

I hated that season as a kid. It meant the kind of cold that splits your knuckles open.

That night the wind poured down my collar.

I had never been so free.

Under a streetlight, my phone lit up.

One of the guys we both ran with.

"It's been days. Why haven't you fixed things with Pres yet? Look at the man. There's a line ten miles long for him. You're average, so putting in a little extra is just how it works."

"You've loved him for years. You're telling me you can drop it?"

I let a beat go by. My voice came out clear enough for the whole room over there to hear.

"Yeah. This time I dropped it."

"Preston was right about one thing. There's nothing left in this for me."

A glass hit a wall on the other end.

He'd been sitting right there the whole call.

Then I said it. "Preston, I'm tired too. Let's be done for real this time."

I hung up before he could answer