For weeks on end after that, she avoided her mailbox, but every time she steeled herself to work through its pile of envelopes, no notice of divorce proceedings had ever arrived. She still braced for it, every time. And it still never came. Maybe for him, too, divorce was a last wrenching, heart-breaking act he couldn’t quite stand to face. When he did finally move to divorce her, it would doubtless mean he had met someone else, a new, fresh love who motivated him to clean up his past so that he could move on from it for the new woman’s sake. At a distance, Kai had gotten used to that idea. She even knew that she should actually want that for him, a new, bright love without all the stains she had left on theirs. She was supposed to want that for him. It was her fault she had made him so unhappy.
Some of the money from the sale of the house had gone to rent this luxury cabin from his mother, and she had sat up here, with her arms wrapped around her knees, watching the snow fall, so peaceful, so freeing, shutting her off from everything, including him. She had thought the grief would kill her then. That she would literally die and no one find her body until spring. But it hadn’t worked out that easy.
“But I couldn’t stop,” she said, and her breath came out too hard, skittering sugar across the granite landscape.
He nodded and looked out the window, hands in his pockets. He had such a beautiful body. It had always worked just right for her, that long, rangy over-analyzed athleticism, the way he could keep it so carefully fit and yet not quite know how to have fun with it, until he met her. She remembered, still, the first time he had ever burst into laughter for her. It had been their third date, two weeks after they met at his mother’s enormous estate while Kai was setting up a spring flower-food photo shoot for Anne in her beautiful gardens.
For their third date, Kai had suggested a hike, because Kurt’s carefully planned dinners just weren’t working out the way their instinctive rapport in those gardens had suggested they would. Fascinated though she was by his over-thinking, she had wanted to get him away from it for a little while. They had rested in a glade on that gently sunny afternoon, him stretched out with his arms behind his head, thoughtful and serious, and her sitting with her legs folded, knees nearly but not quite brushing his ribs, fingers just itching to touch that stretched-out body, the body that he so carefully did not offer to her because he was so busy plotting how to get his approach to her just right that he didn’t realize how right for her it already was.
And finally she had just reached out and dove her fingers with devilish precision into his ribs. He had twisted uncontrollably—she had known someone that careful had to be ticklish—and then burst out laughing. He had grabbed her wrists to stop her and when that pulled her body into a lean over his, looked up into her face with his hazel eyes brilliant with that unexpected laughter and something else, something even more hungry and delighted. It had been the first time they kissed. (Because he was so careful, so courteously respectful when he said good night those first two dinners.) If a couple of hikers hadn’t passed about fifteen minutes later, it would have been the first time they made love, too.
He’d always liked to make love outside in the grass when he could find a spot, ever after. It just always seemed to make him so happy.
She’d always seemed to make him happy. As if she brought ease and laughter into his whole life.
Until she hadn’t.
Until she had destroyed all that ease and taken all his laughter with it.
It had been the most terrible thing in her life that she had ever done. Her body had killed three other dreams of laughter and life and happiness, but at least she hadn’t had control over those decisions.
She wiped the smudge mark she had made completely clean with a bit of sponge, then took a tiny pinch of powdered sugar and rubbed it between her fingers to let it fall over that cleaned spot, hoping to repair the damage in a way that did not show, that would not make her start the whole thing over. Did that look right? Sometimes she focused on a food styling issue so long that she lost all perspective.
She removed the other four snowflake wax patterns without smudges and stood back to evaluate the look of the black granite forms showing through the white sugar. Were the snowflakes a too obvious choice? Should it be Christmas trees? That seemed so facile. Stars maybe? If she did some stars eight-pointed and some six-pointed, to reach more than one demographic, would that make the holiday shot over-reaching, ruining the whole effect?
“It was always fascinating to me,” Kurt said, that steady, modulated voice of his just hurting her skin, “how you were so cheerful and careless everywhere else, as if life was pure fun and you weren’t going to let anxiety over details get in the way of embracing every glorious part of it. And yet when you set up a shoot, you were always so obsessively careful. As if you, too, under all that fun, felt the same need to get everything, somewhere, exactly right.”