I looked down the street, the wind whipping between the tall buildings, the night alive with the smells of the city, trash competing with a food truck, cigarette smoke drifting over from a nearby group. There were no taxis in site, and I waited, wrapping my arms around myself and taking a deep breath. I was alive. It was a blessing easy to forget, in the rush of everyday life. How precious that simple gift was.
A navy sedan skidded to a stop beside me, and its door opening, Chase stepping out. He stood for just a second, looking at me as if testing his sight, and then everything inside of me broke open as he rushed forward.
“Oh Ty.” He clutched my face, his eyes searching over me, noticing the bandage, the bruises. “Fucking game traffic. I didn’t hear the news until I got home. Then I went to your house, and th—”
I shushed him, grabbing at the front of his T-shirt and lifting to my toes, pressing my lips to his. “Take me there?” I asked.
“I’ll take you anywhere.” He kissed my forehead so gently I wanted to cry. “I love you.”
“I love you too.”
In his arms, in the back of the car, shuddering over potholes as it carried me to the house, I cried. I cried out every emotion left inside of me. And somewhere between the Bronx station and the security gates of my home, I found peace.
It was over.
All of it.
114
Six Months Later
“Let’s talk about your happiness.” My therapist’s favorite topic. I often wondered, hitting this stage of the appointment, if Tracy recycled the question with everyone in her life, every damn member of her family forced to prove, on an everyday basis, that their smiles and laughter were real.
“I’m happy.” I looked away from a wrinkle in her cleavage and to her eyes, sharp holes of black behind bright red glasses. “Everything is great.” It was. It was better than great. It was a painful happiness, the kind so precious that it scares, each moment filled with an edge of panic that it will all be lost. A person should not be this happy, our love should not be this strong—it just didn’t seem fair, seem possible, to be so blessed.
“How is the public handling your engagement?”
I shrugged. “I’m not sure. I haven’t paid attention.” Probably not well. Yankee Nation hadn’t been pleased when their first lady had abandoned her post. They’d ignored the carefully worded press release that Tobey and I had given. The one that emphasized our continuing friendship, and the joint decision we had made to end our four-year marriage. The paparazzi had caught my climb onto the private jet, Chase behind me. They’d seen our kisses on the beach in Bali. Overnight, I’d been branded a cheater. I hadn’t cared, not when it had been the truth. I had cheated. There wasn’t really any getting around that. Besides, Tobey had been in the trenches right next to me, Dan’s mouth as loud in prison as it’d been outside of it. Everyone knew about his affairs, the media all but having a field day between the two of us. It was comical, though I seemed to be the only one seeing the humor in all of it.
“When is the wedding?”
I glanced down at my hand, at the simple band there. We’d skipped a diamond, Chase wanting something that could be worn under a glove. I preferred it, every giant rock reminding me of my first one, the stone that had seemed more like a shackle than a symbol of love. “In six months.” I wasn’t in a rush, though Chase seemed to be counting down the seconds, frantic to change my name and haul me off to his cave where he could properly claim me as his own.
“Anything else happen since our last session?”
“I visited Dan again.”
Her brows raised. “Why?”
I didn’t know. But she didn’t like answers like that. She liked to dissect, the process exhausting yet helpful. Every session, I told myself I wouldn’t come back. And every session, when I checked out and the perky receptionist asked if I wanted to book another appointment, I did. It was a cycle I wasn’t yet ready to stop. Like peeling chapped lips.
I slid my palms under my thighs, knuckles against jeans, and tried to work through her question. “I like seeing him. It makes me feel in control.”
“What did you talk about?”
“Love.”
“You know what I don’t understand?” I folded over the gum wrapper, my nail sliding across the edge, each bend in the foil drawing Dan’s eyes to it.
“What?” There was glass between us. Dirty glass, fogged at the top, a few greasy handprints scattered over its surface. He peered at me and waited.
“You wanted Tobey and I to be together—that’s why you did all of it, right?” He said nothing, and I pressed forward. “But then you were going to kill me. Which would have meant that we wouldn’t be together. It would have defeated the entire purpose.”
I don’t know how I never saw his crazy before. Maybe I just hadn’t known where to look. Didn’t know that the slow tilt of his head meant that he was turning over a lie in his head before he spoke it. Or that he smiled when I said something that angered him, and he frowned when he was thinking. Now, he smiled, but it was a sad one. An almost genuine one.