How it began

What Michael has come to think of as "The Miracle" had begun on a drab Monday in March. The large insurance company he worked for had hired several casual staff, and as part of their orientation, they were to job shadow other employees.

Michael's supervisor, a silly officious young man, had come to his cubicle, a petite dark haired young woman beside him.

"Michael, this is Erica, she'll be job shadowing you this week. Michael is one of our claims assessors." Michael stood and offered his hand. The woman, not much more than a girl, was about five feet high, dark haired and very pretty. She took his hand, smiling. A firm strong grip, not a girl's handshake at all.

"I'll leave you two to get on with it then. If you have any questions, you know where my office is," the supervisor said to Erica, already striding away.

"Welcome, I'll try not to bore you too much," Michael smiled.

"You don't look boring," she smiled back, an impish quirk to her lips.

"Stick around, you haven't seen me work yet." Erica laughed then, an honest, almost masculine laugh, and Michael felt a tremor inside him. He could smell the faint citrus aroma of her perfume and it reminded him of high-school girls long ago.

"What?" Erica asked him suddenly.

"Sorry?"

"For a moment you had a very odd look on your face."

"Oh nothing, my mind just wandered. A function of this highly exciting job." She nodded, smiling again.

They spent the morning together in his cubicle as he showed her the intricate but ultimately routine process of assessing claims. He found himself smiling more than he had in several months as he talked to her, wanting to see her smile, happy to be near her. Mid-morning he offered to buy her coffee.

"It's a date," she smiled at him, touching the back of his hand for a moment. In the coffee shop she found a table and he carried the cups over. She nodded her thanks and took a sip.

"How long have you been separated?" she asked, startling him.

"What?"

"Your hand. There's still the difference in skin where your ring used to be."

"Oh, of course," he looked down at his hand. "About a year. We've been in separate places for only about six months though. It took a while to sell the house."

"How long were you married?"

"Seventeen years. My second marriage. The first one lasted seven years."

"That's too bad," she said and then looked at him thoughtfully. "Or is it?"

"It wasn't my idea but I'm starting to come to terms with it." He sipped his coffee and looked at his hand, flexing it gently.

"Kids?"

"Three. My daughter is from my first marriage, two boys from the last one. They're dealing with it in different ways. My daughter is an adult, probably not much younger than you. She's ok. The boys are teenagers, the younger one is pretty upset but I think he's getting through it."

"How old is your daughter?"

"Twenty."

"I'm twenty-four."

"Ancient," he grinned

"Old enough," she grinned back. "How old are you?"

"Fifty-four."

She nodded, a slight smile touching her mouth and eyes. "And married for twenty-four of them. What happened?"

Michael looked down at his hand again, and then at his cup. "She got bored I guess. She wasn't happy, and I was probably not paying enough attention."

She reached out and touched the back of his hand. "Sorry, I wasn't trying to bring up bad memories."

"It's ok. I'm a big boy, mostly. Its not the leaving as the manner of her going. She told me in March that she wanted to separate. I found out later that she'd met a guy on a dating site back in December and had been seeing him for several months."

"That's pretty cold. What did you do when you found out?"

"Confronted her with the evidence, cell phone bills, hotel receipts. She denied at first, but then admitted it. Not much more than that. There didn't seem much point. She'd made her choice and anything I did wasn't going to bring her back and would likely do more damage, to me or the boys."

"I don't know that I could be that calm."

"I was pretty fucking far from calm," he said ruefully. "I just didn't see the percentage in going crazy."

"So she was bored, that's it? Seems like a pretty shallow reason to dump a marriage of twenty years."

"Seventeen. There was more to it than bored. We had some financial troubles for a while and that caused a lot of stress. Some of that was my fault. I've got a fair temper, so does she, and when we fought it could get pretty dramatic. No , but lots of yelling."

"I'm Sicilian, you should hear my parents go at it sometimes. You'd think a war broke out," she chuckles.

"She said it was no one thing, just a lot of little things."

"You still miss her?"

"Sure. Sometimes quite a bit. I don't like her much, because of how she did things, but part of me still loves her."

"That's understandable. What happened in your first marriage?"

"You're the curious one aren't you?" Michael smiled. "We should never have got together in the first place, and we both knew it two years in. Ended by mutual agreement, more or less."

"I'm just nosy," she grinned at him and touched his hand again. "Don't tell me anything your don't want to."