The One In My Heart

My parents divorced when I was two. My mother died seven years later. Her funeral marked the only time I ever remembered seeing her in person, a beautiful woman with too much makeup on her face, her hand literally ice-cold.

From what I could piece together, Mother and her second husband, whom she married the day after her divorce became final, had begun their relationship while she was still married to Pater. The affair was documented by private detectives Pater had hired, and because of that, he was able to get the judge to grant him sole custody of me.

That, however, didn’t explain why she chose not to exercise her visitation rights. She sent letters and presents, but never herself. To make sense of things, I invented a fairy tale for her—and for me—as I pored over pictures of her with her husband, a Vermont farmer with a face as brown and craggy as a Sherpa’s.

I imagined that this beautiful new marriage of hers so angered Pater that he exiled her forever from my life—and I accepted her banishment in the cause of true love. Her rugged, hirsute husband came to stand for all that was wildly manly and romantic in the world, the guarantor of happiness, the knight on a shining John Deere tractor.

Eventually I learned that when she’d died unexpectedly from bacterial meningitis, she had already separated from the Vermont farmer. But the damage was done. When I was sixteen I fell desperately in love with a boy named Jonathan—who had very little going for him except that at eighteen he’d managed to grow a full, luxuriant beard like the one my mother’s husband had sported.

Every man I’d dated since had some trait that could be linked back to this fairy-tale man I’d never met. There was David in college, who fascinated me because he was an actual Vermont farm boy. There was Nick, also in college, whose collection of plaid shirts rivaled Mother’s husband’s. And there was Alex, who gave me palpitations because he knew carpentry—Mother had sent many photographs of rocking chairs, bookshelves, and once even a loom that her husband had made for her with his own hands.

But the Vermont-farmer fixation also had a flip side: Once I understood that my attraction to these men was but my psyche still acting up from the misplaced yearnings of my childhood, my crushes would peter out as quickly as they’d come to be, before a man had time to figure out I never told him anything about myself.

The older I got, the easier it became for me to see the Vermont-farmer connection. Sometimes I could spot it within a few minutes of that first stirring of interest. As a result, that interest would quietly die down, with a sigh and a shrug from me.

Bennett was a complete outlier: I kept dissecting his appearance and lifestyle, and there was nothing of the Vermont farmer to him. He might, in fact, be the anti-Vermont farmer.

And it scared me that I had no idea how to get over him.

“I like being single,” I said.

“I know people who genuinely enjoy being unattached. They are not the ones who get melancholy at weddings.”

My gut tightened. I wasn’t used to anyone seeing me in my less guarded moments. “I wasn’t melancholy, just contemplative.”

The car rounded another sharp curve. “You, Professor, lie like a rug.”

I could only be thankful that our road, hemmed in by cliffs on one side and overhanging a deep plunge into the fog-shrouded sea on the other, required all Bennett’s attention. Or he might have seen me flinch.

I also wasn’t used to being called out on my lies.

But I did have a few tactics for moving away from subjects that I didn’t want to discuss. “My romantic history doesn’t matter. What I want to know is why, with the threat of naked pictures hanging over your head, you took so long to get things moving? I mean, you were going out with Damaris Vandermeer’s friend back in summer—that’s a crowd of women who would have been perfect for your purpose. If one didn’t work out, why didn’t you try another?”

“First, there was no threat of naked pictures last summer. Even after my ex passed away, in the beginning it seemed like it’d take a while for the retrospective to get off the ground. It was only after the New Year that I heard differently.

“Second, I didn’t go out with Damaris Vandermeer’s friend. We met a few times for coffee. And I did check out the other women in that circle. But like I told you, they wouldn’t have worked.”

I studied him. His profile was as dramatic and chiseled as the cliffs to which the road clung—and about as revealing. “Am I really your only score since you moved to the East Coast?”

I couldn’t have asked such a question back in December. But that was before he shoved a shit-ton of money my way.

The corners of his lips curved. “Are you feeling sorry for me? Please say you are.”