The Photo On My Coworker’s Desk

The morning I started my new job at Heartland Mutual, I told myself I was finally doing something for me. Eleven years of marriage, most of them spent following Ryan’s career from one Ohio town to the next, packing boxes for his promotions, smiling at his company parties, and telling myself my own ambitions could wait one more year. I was thirty four years old, and I had just been offered a senior account manager position at an insurance company two towns over from the one where I’d spent a decade being somebody’s supportive wife. I bought a new blazer for the occasion. I curled my hair. I told Ryan over coffee that I was nervous, and he kissed my forehead and said I would be great, the same way he always did, in the same voice he had used for nine years of anniversaries.

I believed him completely.

Heartland Mutual sits on the second floor of a converted feed mill building on Main Street in Bowling Green, Ohio, the kind of small city where everyone still says hello to strangers on the sidewalk and the biggest employer in town is either the university or the hospital. I liked the building the second I saw it, brick and tall windows, the old grain elevator still visible from the parking lot like a monument to what the town used to be before it became what it is now. My new manager, a steady, no-nonsense woman named Linda who had been with the company for eighteen years, walked me through the office herself, introducing me to people whose names I promptly forgot in my nervousness, until we reached a cubicle near the window where a young woman with dark hair and an easy smile stood up to shake my hand.

“Natalie, this is Chelsea,” Linda said. “You’ll be working closely together. She handles our small commercial accounts, you’ll be handling personal lines, but you’ll share a lot of the same clients.”

“So nice to meet you,” Chelsea said, and she meant it, I could tell, because she had the kind of open face that does not know how to hide anything. “Sit wherever you want, we’re not fussy about desks around here.”

I sat in the empty cubicle across from hers, and that was when I saw it. A small silver frame, angled just slightly so that anyone sitting where I now sat would see it clearly. A photo of a man standing on a dock somewhere, sunglasses pushed up into his hair, one hand shading his eyes, laughing at whoever was holding the camera.

My husband.

I did not gasp. I did not drop anything. I have thought about that morning many times since, and I am proud, in a strange and sad way, of how still I managed to keep myself. I sat down at my new desk, opened my new laptop, and looked at a photograph of Ryan that I had never seen before, taken somewhere I had never been, on a day I clearly had not shared with him.