My perfect neighbor fixed my car, won over my son, and made me believe in men again. But our first date ended with my ex at the gate and a secret I wish I’d never heard.
After the divorce, I was left with three things: a small house on the outskirts of town, my three-year-old son Kevin, and silence.
My husband had stripped me of everything else: our car, our accounts, even the coffee machine I had bought for myself.
“You’re lucky, really,” the lawyer said. “You got the house because of the child.”
Lucky.
What a joke. He just didn’t want to pay child support.
For the first month after the divorce, I breathed.
I sat in the kitchen and waited for the day I’d want to do something again. Sometimes, turned on the stove just to hear a sound.
Eventually, I started coming back to life. I found comfort in takeaway coffee cups, a blush palette I dug out from the bottom of a forgotten makeup bag, and weekly conversations with my friend Sofie.
“You alive in there?” Sofie asked one day when I finally agreed to grab coffee with her.
She held out two cups without lids, so the steam rises, for dramatic effect.
“I’m trying,” I said, sinking into the cheap plastic café chair. “Maybe I’ll become a person again.”
“Or maybe a woman,” she winked.
We laughed that day, though we both knew it wasn’t a victory. But it was something.
A start.
The very next morning, I stood next to my car in a robe thrown over my jeans, hair a tangled mess.
“Come on. Come on, sweetheart… We had a deal just two days ago. Don’t do this.
Not today…”
The car wheezed, teased me twice with a false start, and then went dead. Kevin, sitting in the backseat in his hoodie, crushed his toy dinosaur between tiny fists. I just wanted to get to work.
Just once without chaos.
“Car trouble?” came a voice from behind.
I turned quickly. A stranger was standing behind the fence. He was tall, fit, and fresh-faced.
He was too clean for someone standing near my busted Toyota at 7 a.m.
“I’m late and she’s rebelling.”
“I’m Alex. New neighbor, I can give you a lift, if you don’t mind. My van’s parked just over there.”
I looked around.
No other options. Just that man, or tears over my hood.
“If your van runs,” I said with a shaky laugh, “you’re mine forever.”
The story doesn’t end here –
it continues on the next page.
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