My Best Friend Set Me Up On A Blind Date — The Woman Waiting For Me Was My Ex-Wife’s Mother

Part 1

I gave myself exactly forty-five minutes to get ready, which was thirty more than I had spent getting dressed on any given morning for the past three years.

I stood in front of the bathroom mirror in my apartment holding a tie I had not worn since my last performance review.

I genuinely felt ridiculous.

“You look weird,” a small voice said from the doorway.

I glanced over my shoulder and saw Emma standing there.

She was six years old and holding her stuffed rabbit by one ear.

She wore her favorite blue pajamas covered in cartoon planets.

She was staring at me with the specific expression she reserved for things she did not understand but was trying very hard to evaluate.

I thanked her and set the tie down on the counter.

She asked me why I was wearing that outfit.

I told her I was going out to dinner.

Emma considered this information carefully and asked if she could come with me.

I told her not this time.

She asked if it was a work dinner.

I picked up a regular button-down shirt instead and admitted it was dinner with someone I had not met yet.

Her face scrunched up as she declared that to be very weird.

I agreed with her that it was indeed a little weird.

She padded across the bathroom tile and looked at my reflection alongside hers in the mirror.

She was small enough that only her eyes and the top of her head appeared at the bottom of the frame.

She asked what would happen if I did not like them.

I told her I would simply eat my dinner and come home.

She asked what would happen if they did not like me.

I looked down at her and promised I would eat my dinner much faster and come home.

That made her smile the quick, private smile that still occasionally stopped me cold because it looked so much like a photograph of someone else I no longer let myself think about.

I ruffled her hair, and she ducked away with a small noise of protest.

My babysitter Rachel arrived fifteen minutes later.

Emma had already moved on from interrogating my wardrobe and was absorbed in a picture book on the couch.

She barely looked up when I kissed the top of her head.

I told her to be good while I was out.

She said she was always good without lifting her eyes from the page.

Rachel suppressed a knowing grin as she unpacked her homework on the table.

I grabbed my keys and walked out the door, already regretting this entire evening.

I had agreed to this blind date solely because of Craig.

He had been my best friend since we were nineteen years old.

He had waged a slow, patient campaign to get me back into the world.

He used soft approaches, practical logic, and eventually pure guilt.

None of those tactics had worked.

Then, three weeks ago, he tried something completely different.

He did not argue at all.

He simply said he knew someone he thought I should meet.

He described her as smart and real, someone who did not play games.

He asked for just one dinner.

I told him no immediately.

He waited four days and asked again.

I told him I would think about it.

He waited three more days and sent a reservation confirmation to my email.

His message said it was already done and I could show up or not.

I told myself I was doing this to get Craig off my back.

That was not entirely a lie, even if it also was not the whole truth.

The whole truth was smaller and much harder to say out loud.

I was thirty-two years old, and I was tired of feeling like my life had been put on pause at twenty-nine.

Some small part of me still remembered what it was like to look forward to things.

I parked two blocks from the restaurant because the lot was full.

I walked through the January cold with my hands shoved deeply into my jacket pockets.

The restaurant was the kind of place that understood good lighting was more important than anything else.

Low copper fixtures hung over dark wood tables.

The murmur of other people’s conversations created a sound like a river moving slowly in the background.

I had actually been here once before for a colleague’s birthday dinner years ago.

I gave my name at the host stand.

The young woman checked her tablet and nodded.

She told me my party was already here and led the way.

I followed her between the tables, nervously adjusting the collar of my shirt.

I was mentally running through the small inventory of conversation topics I had prepared for the occasion.

I was so focused on managing my own nerves that it took me a full three seconds to process what I was seeing.

The woman sitting at my table looked up from the menu she had been studying.

She was dressed in a dark green blouse with her hair pulled back elegantly.

She immediately took her reading glasses off when she saw me.

She went completely still in the way a person goes still when their brain encounters something that simply does not fit any available category.

I felt the floor physically shift under me.

My body lost its equilibrium for a half-second.

I put one hand on the back of the empty chair across from her just to have something solid to hold.

She stared back at me in absolute stunned silence.

The woman waiting for me at the table was the mother of the woman who had walked out on me and our daughter three years ago.