by Carole Devine

Created on: November 14, 2009

Nicolette got off at Ikebukuro Station and walked north towards Bill's apartment. Meiji Street was still crowded with business men and women returning from work, and even some students, walking in uniformed packs, coming home from cram school. She had stumbled through buying what she hoped was a decent bottle of wine at a liquor store near the train station and was carrying this, and a loaf of French bread, in her shoulder bag. It was Thanksgiving and Bill had invited her and some of the other teachers to dinner at his place. He had even bought a turkey for the occasion. This was the first major holiday Nicolette would spend away from home in her 35 years. She had come to Japan exactly six weeks ago, leaving two miscarriages and a failed marriage behind her.

Brian laughed when she told him of her plans. They were coming out of court, the divorce nisi having been granted, and he threw his eyes up and laughed, shaking his head at the absurdity of her plans. Their split had not been amicable.

Jesus, Nicolette. You can't even find your way around Boston. He raised his eyebrows for emphasis. And you're going to go teach in Tokyo? You know there are thirteen million people living there, and something like three hundred subway stations in the city alone.

Brian knew everything, and had spent the majority of their marriage making sure Nicolette knew this. But that wasn't the reason the marriage fell apart. Nicolette had gotten used Brian's intellectual superiority and his need to demonstrate it. In fact, his seemingly endless knowledge about almost every subject was one of the things that attracted her to him in the first place. In her eyes, their marriage seemed to have dissolved out of sheer boredom on his part, and the resulting infidelity that had her screaming at him when he came home late again one night more than five hours after she miscarried for the second time in eleven months. She had tried repeatedly to reach him at his work and on his cell on the way to the hospital. She knew when he walked in that night that her marriage was over.

Well, good luck with that, he said doubtfully as he walked down the courthouse stairs. Nicolette had a palpable sense of her resolve waning, as it so often did when he second guessed her ability to do something. She watched him turn the corner, hands in his pockets and a bounce in his step, like he was leaving a baseball game instead of a ten year marriage.

No one was more surprised than Nicolette when she actually boarded

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