The walk from her house to Starbucks seemed to take hours, but when Shelly looked at her watch, she saw that only fifteen minutes had gone by since leaving home and, now, passing the building that housed the Chamber Music Society. She willed herself not to look up at the window to her office, but she could feel the window looking down at her. She could feel her former self watching this present self walking by.
What might she have thought, say, six months before, if she’d been told of a woman who had a secure well-paying job at the university and had thrown it all away to have a sleazy affair with an undergraduate work-study student?
What would she have thought if she’d been told the way the woman had been caught red-handed in this affair—that she’d allowed a series of cell phone photographs to be taken of herself in bed with a nineteen-year-old sorority girl?
What would she have thought if she’d looked down now and seen this woman walking by, moving inexorably, but also as if there were heavy weights tied around her ankles and wrists, toward the place she thought she might be able to find this girl—this girl that university officials had warned her not to harass?
She’d have thought, perhaps, no fool like an old fool?
Or would it have been something harsher? Much harsher.
Now, she thought, imagining looking down at herself from the lofty heights she’d once occupied, she was one of them. The fallen.
She was so lost to these thoughts that, as she approached Starbucks and glimpsed herself in the plate glass window, she was surprised to see her own reflection. She’d expected, she realized, to see herself as a warted hag, a specter, a creature—lecherous and leering, and that much more repulsive because, although she looked sexless, she wasn’t.
But that’s not how she looked.
In the window, she looked frantic, even to herself. And pitiable. Harmless. Maybe sad. Her hair was messed but shining in the dim November sunlight. A man in a black suit and red tie looked her over appreciatively as he held the door for her. She did not, it seemed, appear to be a monster to him. To him, she looked like the reflection in the plate glass window.
But there was no mistaking the horror on Josie Reilly’s face as she turned at the counter, holding her white cup, and saw Shelly walking through the door.