of whatever job you can get.” He shook his head as he reached for another tortilla chip. “Even if you knew you were coming back here, a year is a long time.”
“If you accept Einsteinian relativity, the passage of time is an illusion,” she said. “Past, present, and future exist simultaneously with the three dimensions of space.”
Paul rolled his eyes. “Don’t go all weird on me now. This isn’t a theoretical problem. I’m talking about real life.”
The laws of physics were real life, but Mia didn’t argue the point.
“You can’t expect me to live like a monk for a year while you’re half a continent away,” Paul said.
It didn’t seem like that much to ask.
Unfortunately, he didn’t seem to agree. “A lot can happen in a year. We could grow apart, we could both become completely different people, I could meet someone…” His mouth twisted into a mocking smile. “Hey, maybe you’ll fall in love with a cowboy and decide you never want to leave.”
Mia would have laughed at the suggestion if she hadn’t felt like crying.
Paul reached across the table and took her hand. She squeezed his fingers gratefully, comforted by his touch. But his next words offered only cold comfort. “I know this move isn’t what you want, but you can’t ask me to put my life on hold for you. We’ve had a good run. I think it’s best if we call time of death now and move on.”
Mia took the breakup hard.
She couldn’t believe they were done, just like that. Everything had seemed to be perfect between them—right up until the moment it was over. The part that hurt most was how easily Paul had let her go. He hadn’t even seemed upset. She’d seen him display more emotion over a Lakers game than he had over the end of their year-long relationship.
If he’d been torn up about it—acted even the least bit regretful—it might have been easier for Mia to accept. Instead, she felt like he’d pulled the rug out from under her. Everything she’d believed to be true—that he loved her, that they were a team, that he’d be there to support her through good times and bad—had turned out to be false.
Had she been deluding herself all this time? Overestimating the depth of his commitment? Or had he actively misrepresented his feelings? She couldn’t stop rewinding her memories of every moment they’d spent together, searching for signs she should have picked up on before now.
A month after Paul had unceremoniously dumped her, Mia was still struggling to regain her footing. It didn’t help that she was in the midst of uprooting her whole life, preparing for a move she didn’t want to make in order to start a job she hadn’t wanted to take. But at least it gave her something to focus on besides her broken heart.
She’d thrown herself into lesson planning for the three courses she’d be teaching, all of which were part of the university’s core curriculum offerings: Calculus I, Foundations of Mathematics, and something called Math in Society, a math class tailored for humanities majors. Mia was expected to create her own lesson plans around the department’s vague framework for the courses. In her previous teaching experience as a graduate student, she had been provided with a lesson plan by the professor she was assisting. This was the first time she’d ever had to come up with one on her own. To prepare for it, she’d been delving into educational resources online and brushing up on pedagogical techniques.
She was deep into a paper on active-learning approaches to post-secondary mathematics education when her phone rang on the table beside her. Seeing her sister’s photo on the screen, she smiled.
Holly was basically a younger, cuter version of Mia. The same medium brown hair and eyes that looked so plain on Mia were somehow much prettier on Holly, who was a full four inches shorter than Mia’s six feet.
She and Holly had always been close, despite their three-year age difference, but Holly still lived with their mother in New York, and Mia missed her like crazy.
“Heya. How’s it going?” Holly said cheerfully when she answered.
Mia leaned back and rubbed her tired eyes, forcing cheer into her voice. “Fine.”
“You’re not still pining over what’s-his-name?”
“No way,” Mia lied. “I’m so over it.”
It was much easier to pretend she was taking it in stride than admit she was struggling. And maybe, if she kept up the act long enough, it wouldn’t be an act anymore.