“No... Wait... yes, he mentioned a Cressida.”
“She’s an author in her own right, more literary fiction than the boilerplate pulp he puts out. Anyway, she talked about their relationship in an interview—they were a hot literary couple for a while, on some magazine covers posing with antique typewriters. They were engaged and had bought and moved into a Kensington town house. But then he had an affair with one of his writing students. Can you believe it? Cressida said she wishes him well, but she just couldn’t trust him anymore.”
“He told meshe cheated on him. And yes, now I can believe he would cheat with a student. Jeez. What a creep!”
“Absolutely! And what a lot of nerve! He and Cressida are both public figures, so it’s not like you wouldn’t be able to find out about this.”
“Right? Poor man. Doesn’t he know he’s going to find himself lonely and old one day?”
“He will soon enough...”
“Annabel, it’s coming on,” Dad says from the doorway.
I tell them both goodbye and close my laptop.
From the screened porch, I watch Heathcliff play in the backyard with a friend. They’re both in full Batman costumes, chasing each other with plastic light sabers. Superhero hybrid play, I guess. Late-afternoon cicadas hum from the trees all around, and I take a long sip from my glass of iced lime water. I have syllabi to polish andI don’t want to know how manynumber of emails waiting for me now that I’m plugged in again.
But it can all wait.
I know like I did in Haworth that I’m going to be okay.
And Dad is happy.
Three Years Earlier
The wedding of Philip’s law school friends Meg and Will falls on one of those beautiful, butter-melting Carolina summer evenings. It’s outdoors, in Meg’s family’s backyard, not far from the Azalea Dream. The ceremony over, the reception is in full swing, with a jazz band playing from the back deck of the large house. Long rows of white linen–covered tables decorated with ivy garlands and flickering candles in glass globe centerpieces line the yard. Servers bring steaming platters of Low Country boil to each table and refill champagne glasses generously.
Philip and I give our warmest wishes to the couple before visiting with some of his other law school friends at our table during dinner. But Philip and I enjoy each other’s company best, and eventually find ourselves meandering to the celebration’s boundaries, closer to the quiet edge of the Ashley River. Twilight settles around us as we walk along the banks. As much as I hate the South’s stupid conservative politics and asshat politicians, I never tire of the landscape. Cicadas buzz around us, drowning out the noise from the party, and Spanish moss drapes curtain-like from the surrounding oaks.
I feel particularly cleaned-up tonight having splurged on a vintage, shell-colored cocktail dress with a scalloped skirt and chandelier earrings. Philip looks dapper in the suit he usually reserves for court. It’s a glorious childless evening as Mirabel has Heathcliff for the weekend and we’re staying at a CharlestonAirbnb. We both feel a rare lightness, like two teenagers allowed to stay out past curfew.
We’ve had a few glasses of champagne and everything has that nice fuzzy glow; we’re both bolder, brave enough to talk about our deeper fears and longings.
As we talk about the ceremony, I bring up that part of wedding vows that always makes my heart skip a little with dread, that fly in the ointment. “‘Till death do us part.’ Does that bother you like it does me?”
“What? Death?”
“No, that one of us is probably going to die first.”
We watch the fiddler crabs scurry along the pluff mud banks. Philip exhales loudly, then picks up a thin rock and throws it across the water so that it skips three times.
“I do. But that happens to everyone, Lizzie.”
“But what about when it happens tous?”
“Lizzie,” he says softly.
“No, you know what I mean. You and I, we don’t have normal couple boundaries.” And I’m buzzed enough in this beautiful Low Country twilight to keep going. “We’re the rare ones like Heathcliff and Cathy where we don’t know where one of us ends and the other begins. People in nineteenth-century novels die all the time of fucking heartbreak. What will we do when one of us dies before the other?”
He steps closer to me, puts his hands on my shoulders. The setting sun catches on his short, neatly trimmed blond beard. The wind blows at my ridiculously long earrings, and they tickle my neck.
“We keep living.”
“How?”
“With happiness and purpose.”
I lean forward, my face in the crease of his neck. He smells vaguely of dinner’s heavy cardamom spice, the citronella-scentedtorches back at the reception. I drink in his smell and put my arms around him.
