“Your image fills my whole soul.…How that moment shines for me still when I was close to you, with your hand in mine.”
—Prince Albert
in a letter to Queen Victoria, 1839
Chapter One
The night we split was the last I saw of Nick for months—at least, in the flesh—and the pain from the hole he left consumed me. Our fight had been inevitable, and I’d gone cruising for it. I knew that. But I hadn’t thought ahead to after I picked it, when, like a scab, it would fall away and expose whatever hid beneath. I hadn’t even stopped to wonder what that would be. I certainly hadn’t imagined a mutual surrender. Maybe I should have gone after him when he walked out of that trailer, but there was nothing more to say—we’d carved each other up enough as it was—and so in his wake I found myself glued to that cold metal floor, knowing my next step would be the first in a string of them that would take us further and further away from each other. We’d had our last lazy Sunday morning. We’d had our last laugh. We’d had our last kiss—a hurried peck on the corner of my mouth on his way out the door. If only I’d known, I’d have appreciated the casual intimacy. Or turned my face an inch to the right.
The trailer door banged open as Lacey and Cilla barged in, armed with water bottles and Kleenex.
“Blistering hell,” Cilla said as soon as she saw my sodden face. Lacey said nothing; she simply snapped to my side and wrapped me in her arms.
“Someone has to check on Nick.” I hiccupped. “He’s upset, he’s on that motorcycle—”
“Bea and Clive went after him,” Cilla said, smoothing my hair. “He’ll be all right.”
I gulped the water, then slowly found my feet and glanced through the chipped window. Misery was so packed that the crowd had overflowed outside. People sat slumped on the stoops of the crumbling converted tenement, or leaned against the carbon-crusted burnt-out walls, all nodding in deep existential appreciation of “Cat’s in the Cradle.”
“Well, shit,” I said. “Now our great memories of this place are ruined.”
They just looked at me, sad and sympathetic and worried.
“I can’t believe it’s over,” I said, my voice cracking on the last word. “I don’t know what to do. This whole country feels like Nick to me.”
Lacey stood decisively. “Then maybe it’s time to go home,” she said.
*
I’d expected to touch down in the States and feel healed—by the familiar territory, the beautiful sunsets, the cozy embrace of our two-story converted farmhouse. Mom and Dad sold their starter home once the Coucherator took off, swapping it for a larger, rural spread with a basement for his tinkering and enough bathrooms that Lacey could play with makeup for hours without me banging on the door. In typical Lacey fashion, she’d taken one look at the biggest of our two bedrooms, clasped her hands and spun around in it, and then spent the rest of our tour helpfully exclaiming over how the smaller one simply radiated me. And in typical me fashion, I didn’t care enough to stoke the squabble, so I’d expressed an agreeable passion for the garret-like room with the sloped ceiling and the bay window. I painted the walls a funky gunmetal color, positioned my bed so that the angled wall hovered over me when I slept, and hung posters on it of Cubs greats like Ryne Sandberg, Greg Maddux, and Mark Grace (and a small picture of Derek Jeter; it appalled my father to have a Yankee on my wall, but some forces of nature are too powerful to be denied). Art supplies littered the floor as I sat in the window and drew, tapping my foot to music, relishing my refuge—in a way, Lacey had been right—even as Lacey habitually insisted I crash for the night in hers. But now, the old watercolors and pencil sketches were stacked neatly atop a high shelf in my closet, next to a box of trophies and faded team photos. My old quilt with the softballs all over it had been boxed up when I left and replaced with an itchy, girly Laura Ashley floral that gave me metaphysical hay fever, and Mark Grace and Ryne Sandberg and Greg Maddux were, as in life, warped and curling at the edges. (Derek Jeter, also as in life, still looked perfect.) I’d wanted to return to Muscatine to feel like myself again, but instead I felt like a tourist.
My first full day home, news broke that Nick had jetted off for a hunting weekend with Gemma, and it became obvious that I had underestimated the international appeal of my perceived role in this intrigue. The Mirror reported I’d flown home in a jealous tizzy; The Sun believed Nick and Gemma had been having an affair for years but were afraid to tell me because I am so unpredictably violent. And they all—in a move I knew had to have Nick spitting nails—quoted an anonymous source saying Emma had expressed her distaste for the bawdy American with unrefined hair. Lacey and I used to wonder how it felt for celebrities who couldn’t dash out for toilet paper and ice cream without being surrounded by magazine stories about their fictional Baby Joy or their ex frisking someone new. That was now my life, and it was worse than I’d imagined. Two high-school-age girls at the local market started whispering and pointing as they pored through an Enquirer story titled JILTED BEX: “I’M KEEPING THE BABY,” to the point where I excused myself from the checkout line to grab the largest box of tampons I could find. A girl from Lacey’s cheerleading squad pretended not to see me at a gas station, then took a photo of my L.L.Bean duck boots that showed up later in a Glamour slideshow about shlubby breakup fashion. The anonymity I’d hoped to find in Muscatine proved as elusive as a warm hug from Barnes.
And Gemma’s face haunted me. Of course she was the first place he ran. I knew tabloid appearances could be deceiving, but not all of them, not always, and those pictures with Gemma made me feel like the four years Nick spent with me might as well have been forty-five minutes. I wrote him a hundred frustrated emails I never sent. I couldn’t eat. I barely slept. I did nothing but go on long predawn runs and then sack out in front of the television, pretending I wasn’t Googling Nick and then secretly bingeing on whatever rumors I could find about him and the irresistible, illustrious, insidious Gemma Sands. By the time Lacey came home for Thanksgiving and marched into my room holding an open laptop, I was a stringy-haired wreck.
“Crikey, you look awful, Killer.”
Freddie’s voice and image burst out of her computer. It was jarring that he should be so much the same when nothing else was.