Chapter 6
There it was.
The sentence wives like me were supposed to understand.
As though I had stolen the man he used to be.
I almost laughed.
“Which self?”
“What?”
“The one who had nothing? The one who ate noodles four nights a week? The one who slept three hours because he was terrified his company would collapse?”
“That’s not fair.”
“No. You know what isn’t fair? Making me responsible for the fact that you don’t recognize yourself anymore.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to.”
I hung up.
My hands started shaking afterward.
I set the phone down and gripped the kitchen counter until they stopped.
Then I cried.
Not beautifully.
Not quietly.
I sat on the floor in an old sweatshirt and cried until my face hurt.
That was the part Julian would never see.
And I was glad.
Pain did not mean I wanted him back.
Grief did not mean I had made the wrong decision.
You can mourn a burning house without walking back into it.
On day four, I drove into town for groceries.
A woman recognized me beside the tomatoes.
She stared, embarrassed.
Then she said, “My daughter loved you in Summer Glass.”
That had been my second film.
I smiled.
“Thank you.”
“You were good.”
Were.
One small word.
But unlike Julian’s no, this one woke something inside me.
That evening, I searched my own name online without adding Mercer.
Old interviews appeared.
Film stills.
Reviews.
Photographs of a twenty-four-year-old woman who looked fearless because she had no idea how much of herself she was about to put aside.
My career hadn’t ended dramatically.
There had been no announcement.
No retirement.
I simply began saying no.
No to a film because Julian was launching in Europe.
No to a series because we would have been apart six months.
No to Broadway because Mercer Holdings was entering a crisis and Julian needed me beside him.
Every choice had made sense individually.
Together, they had erased a decade.
The next morning, my former agent called again.
This time I answered.
“Claire Bennett,” Martin Reyes said. “I was beginning to think you’d died.”
“Only professionally.”
“You said it, not me.”
I laughed for the first time in days.
Then his voice changed.
“I’m sorry about Julian.”
“Thank you.”
“I’m not calling because of the divorce.”
“Liar.”
“Fine. I’m not calling only because of the divorce.”
He told me a director had been trying to reach me for months.