I stuck notes on his flashcards:
You know this.
Eat something.
I remembered the night he passed.
We drank cheap champagne from coffee mugs on the fire escape.
He said:
“Someday I’m going to give you everything you’ve given me.”
That was the hardest part of the whole ordeal.
The betrayal wasn’t only what he had done.
It was the slow collapse of a story I had believed in, one that was still partly true.
On Monday, I met my friend Dana for lunch at a soup place near my office.
Dana had been my closest friend since our twenties.
She worked nights as an ER nurse, which gave her the bedside manner of someone who had delivered every kind of bad news and didn’t believe in decorating it.
I told her everything.
The mall.
The Everett Hotel.
The necklace.
She listened silently, stirring her chicken soup until it went cold.
“Okay,” she said finally. “Can I ask you something, and you don’t have to answer it right now?”
Chapter 6
“Go ahead.”
“What do you want? Do you want the marriage back, or do you want the man you thought you married?”
I opened my mouth.
Nothing came out.
“Because those might not be the same thing, honey.”
“I don’t even know if the man I thought I married ever existed,” I said.
Dana shook her head.
