Chapter 17
Margaret visited twice a month and complained that I had named all of them.
“You’ll never eat an egg without feeling guilty,” she said.
“I’m not eating the chickens.”
“I know that. I’m saying you’ll start thinking the eggs are their children.”
“That is ridiculous.”
“You named one Eleanor.”
“Eleanor has personality.”
Margaret stared at me.
“You used to attend dinners with presidents.”
“And Eleanor appreciates me more.”
She laughed until she had to sit down.
Julian and I rarely spoke.
There had been no dramatic reunion.
No secret affair after divorce.
No late-night promises that someday we would try again.
He sent flowers on the first day of filming.
The card contained only four words.
I always knew you could.
I sent them back.
Not because I was angry.
Because I no longer needed Julian to confirm what I could do.
Three months later, he sent a different gift.
A coffee maker.
Cheap.
Probably forty dollars.
The exact model we would have bought when we were twenty-one if we could have afforded it.
The note said:
No saucepan required.
I kept that one.
Sometimes healing is not forgetting someone.
Sometimes it is remembering them without needing the memory to become your future.
I heard Sophie had moved closer to her sister and started managing a restaurant.
I never contacted her again.
She never contacted me.
For a while, strangers wanted one of us to be the villain.
Some blamed the young woman.
Some blamed the billionaire husband.
Some even blamed me for “giving up too easily.”
Those comments used to bother me.
Eventually, I understood why.
People like stories where love is proved by suffering.
They wanted me to fight.
They wanted me to storm into Hawthorne Manor and drag Sophie’s suitcases onto the lawn.
They wanted screaming in restaurants.
Broken champagne glasses.
Public revenge.
They wanted me to destroy Julian because that would prove how deeply I had loved him.
But I had nothing to prove.
I had loved him when there was nothing to gain.
I had stood beside him before anybody knew his name.
I had believed in him before investors did.
I had sold my grandmother’s earrings so his employees could get paid.
I had slept beside him through failure, ambition, success and fear.
I had loved him.
And when he told me he no longer loved me, I believed him.
That wasn’t weakness.
It wasn’t indifference.