The moment the taxi whooshed away, she’d cried her eyes out, but the reality was that she’d already chosen her destiny, and it didn’t include a New York-based husband who wanted her living with him back east.
In those dark days after he left L.A., she expected divorce papers to arrive in her mailbox every day. After shooting, she’d come home to her rented bungalow and open her mailbox with trembling fingers. And every day that she didn’t find a manila envelope with his return address felt like a reprieve and gave her hope. False hope, probably, but hope nonetheless.
Maybe he wouldn’t stop loving her.
Maybe he loved her enough to hold on.
Maybe someday they would find each other again.
But then she would remember his face as he stepped into the taxi. His shattered face. His cold green eyes. She saw hate in those eyes—or something close to it—and the memory made her want to die because his love had been the purest and best thing her life had ever known.
Days turned into weeks, turned into months, turned into a year, and losing Preston—something that Elise had willfully engineered—became the biggest regret, the biggest heartbreak of her life. But the more time that stretched between them without contact or correspondence of any kind, the more impossible it felt to address it, let alone fix it.
The night she wrapped up filming on The Grapes of Wrath and returned to her dark, quiet home without the distraction of an early call the next morning, she’d stared at the ceiling of her bedroom, the question circling in her head as she longed for her husband’s arms around her: You haven’t seen or heard from him in almost two years. And sure, you’ve finally realized what you lost, but there’s no chance he will ever forgive you for walking out on your marriage…so what now? Elise had no answer for that question, so that’s where her internal dialogue had ended.
Since it was impossible for her to entertain thoughts of a future with him, her thoughts of Preston were confined to the past. With a perspective that came with time, Elise had been able to look at their courtship and marriage objectively over the past two years, and she’d come to fully understand her raw urge to run to L.A. when the opportunity was offered.
Two years ago, she simply hadn’t been ready for marriage. She’d loved dating Preston, being his girlfriend, even living with him. And she’d been in love with him for certain, but she hadn’t been ready to prioritize her marriage to him over her career. Her Broadway career had barely taken off. She’d invested years of her life—and all but severed ties with her family—in order to be a star, and it was finally on the verge of happening. She didn’t need to be distracted by a hot, loving, thoughtful lawyer who wanted to give her the world. She’d feared him getting in the way of her ambition, or in any way interfering with her career. She’d almost resented the power of his love for her, and hers for him, because it was a weakness that could eventually jeopardize everything she’d worked so hard for.
What had confused things terribly in her head, was that she had been more than ready to lose her virginity to Preston at the time…something her Mennonite conscience wouldn’t countenance without a formal commitment between them. Most girls would have gone ahead and had sex with him as the next logical part of their relationship, but she wasn’t able to do that. So when he’d proposed so romantically, she’d reviewed her feelings—deeply in love, check—and her ever-increasing desire for him—scorching, check—and jumped into matrimony without a sober review of her readiness to be someone’s wife.
It made her profoundly sad to think about all of this, to realize that despite their deep love for each other that their timing had been, once again, epically shitty. Preston had wanted their marriage vows to suddenly mean that they had morphed overnight into this happily bound unit…whereas Elise was too independent and ambitious to let anyone, even her husband, get in the way of her dreams.
Two years ago, Elise Klassan wasn’t ready to be Elise Winslow, and rushing into marriage had been a mistake.
Two years later, with the gift of time and perspective, what she wanted most in the world, was another chance with Preston Winslow.