“Of course,” I said with a confidence I didn’t feel. It was an unfair question to ask anyone who has become disenchanted with a relationship, who is angry or sad or broken, because of course they won’t be able to remember what it felt like when they were in love. Hindsight is 20/20, et cetera. I could see clearly that I had been attracted to Phillip, to the same things that attracted everyone to him—his charm and his chiseled features and his perfect hair and the way he had of offering the perfect toast for any occasion. And I knew I had felt relieved by his proposal, that part of my attraction had been gratitude, and that I had been in love with the idea of marriage and family and finally, for once, fitting in and doing what I was supposed to do rather than endlessly letting people down. But we had hardly known each other. I had loved the image he presented to me, but he had held me at arm’s length, and our engagement had been short, and then, finally, when he had what he wanted, a woman with a social pedigree who would let him criticize her when he felt small and the money to rescue his family’s business, and we had begun to live together and been unable to hide our true selves, I had come to realize I didn’t love him, and most days I didn’t even really like him, and to be brutally honest, he probably felt the same way.
That was all my fault, wasn’t it? One more in a string of Madeleine-shaped failures. And why should I put my mother through that much humiliation at the Ladies Association over something as trivial as my own happiness? I thought of all the money—the money my father had given to Phillip to rescue the business, the money they had spent on the wedding. I thought of all the people who had come, all the gifts, the endless thank-you notes, all the people who would have to be told. All the people who would say, “I knew it wouldn’t last,” who had looked at my plainness and Phillip’s glow and raised an eyebrow, all those people who had seen the years before go by without my getting married and tutted and said of my mother, “That poor woman,” as though I had been living off their largesse instead of supporting myself.
I didn’t want to endure that.
“Were you ashamed? Of the divorce, I mean,” I asked Henry in a small voice. That’s what it was, the emotion behind everything. Shame. Shame I had failed in this thing I had claimed I wanted, shame I had failed in this thing that mattered so much to the people around me, shame I had failed in something so public.
Henry lay back and looked up at the sky. It was a clear night, and stars speckled the darkness above us. I knew there were thousands, tens of thousands, millions more we couldn’t see because of the light pollution, but it was still so much better than in the city, where the best I might be able to see were Orion’s belt and the North Star, and I felt rudderless, like a lost sailor looking for direction under a cloudy sky.
“I was, a little. But more brokenhearted than ashamed. We’d been in love at one point, and it was so sad, that breaking apart of something that had once been beautiful. I knew it was the right thing to do, and it didn’t make me question the decision, but I mourned it. It was something real, and I felt—I still feel, actually—a tenderness toward that relationship. At least the way it was when it was new.”
“I don’t feel brokenhearted. I only feel ashamed,” I said. I lay back on the grass beside him. There was no funeral in my heart. If I mourned anything, it was the time I had spent with Phillip, the way I had buried myself in our marriage in order to be the person my mother needed me to be, to be the person Ashley Hathaway needed me to be, the person I had thought I had to be in order to belong.
Don’t you still? something inside me asked.
I turned my head, as though my thoughts were something unpleasant I could look away from, the honesty of my conscience too much to bear. My head rested on Henry’s arm. He was wearing a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up, his arms hairy against my skin. I wanted to roll over and bury my face in his chest, breathe in the scent of him, feel his heart beating against my cheek, feel someone solid and strong and alive.
And, I realized with a jolt, I felt attracted to him. Alive and aware and even aroused. He felt real, felt solid and imperfect, and so close, and his eyes were on me, seeing me, knowing me. We talked and I was aware of our lips moving in the darkness, aware of the smell of the flowers in my mother’s garden and the vegetables in his, of the earth and the air and mostly of him, strong and solid beside me.
I bent my elbow and rested my head in my hand, looking down at him. His eyes were dark and unreadable, shining dimly in the starlight, but I felt as if something were pulling us together, and when he rolled onto his side, I felt his closeness in my entire body—an awareness of not only his eyes and his mouth but every inch of him.