She angled her body to face the wall.

“No means no,” she said. “I mean it. Stay away from me.”

I gathered up the kids and brought them out to their cubbies to start getting ready for dismissal. Papers in backpacks, jackets zipped up, hats on heads, mittens on hands.

“Do you have a minute, Sarah?” Polly asked when she came out to join us.

I smiled sweetly. “Actually I don’t, but you might want to try my father.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

There’s an old quote about how holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. It’s been attributed to everyone from Buddha to Alcoholics Anonymous to Nelson Mandela.

It doesn’t really matter who said it first. It’s true. Anger filled every inch of me, like the spray insulation that expands with a whoosh to seal off all the cracks. I couldn’t breathe. And the worst thing about it was that when the negativity rushed in, it pushed all the joy right out.

Polly and I sat at separate ends of our dismissal bench. Once most of the kids had been picked up, Ethan moved over and sat down beside Polly. The two of them talked softly, their heads close together. Ethan rested one hand on Polly’s shoulder for an instant, and then it was gone.

We were down to our final pickup. Gulliver’s mom pulled up in her mammoth SUV, last but not even late, which was big progress. Polly rocked forward and pushed herself to a standing position, reached out a hand to Gulliver. The two of them walked over to the SUV, Polly opened the back door, gave Gulliver a boost as he climbed in, smiled and waved to Gulliver’s mom, shut the door.

A movement caught my eye. Or maybe I simply felt a disturbance in the force field.

Bayberry had a larger parking lot below the school, but the dismissal line snaked up the hill and around a portion of a smaller parking lot, essentially a single row of spaces edged by trees on one side. About halfway down the length of the row, a man leaned back against a pine tree, one foot resting on the bumper of a white car. The car was nondescript, generic.

The man was anything but. He was tall and lean and elegant. He was dressed in jeans, a T-shirt, a hipster black leather jacket, but he somehow managed to look like he’d just changed out of his James Bond tuxedo. He had dark hair with hints of caramel, velvety skin the color of coffee with heavy cream. Even from this distance, his eyes glittered a Caribbean blue-green that couldn’t possibly be real. Outside of Hollywood, he was the most spectacular looking man I’d ever seen. Maybe even inside of Hollywood.

I realized I was staring. Possibly even panting a bit.