I traced the cover of his book with my fingers. Tonight, reading would have to wait. Maeve Ward’s face loomed like a dark cloud on my horizon. She wanted “something new,” she’d said.
Maybe I’d call Toni first. Talking with my sister always made me feel better. Made her feel better. I reached for my phone, but after six rings, the call went to voice mail. She must be in class. Or maybe she was with friends? I hoped so. She needed to get out more.
And now I sounded like our aunt.Go somewhere. Do something.
I opened my laptop and started a new file.
Half an hour later, I was staring at my cursor blinking againsta bright, mostly blank screen. When my phone pinged with an incoming message, I seized it with relief.Toni!
Not Toni.
GRAY:The semester started and you’re not here.
A sound escaped me, a gulp of air like a laugh or a sob.Gray.
I pressed my fingers to my mouth, memories unspooling in my head.
—
I should have suspected something when Gray didn’t share the details of his new book. He hadn’t asked for help editing or proofreading, hadn’t given me an advance copy to read. Maybe, in the most secret recesses of my brain, I’d known things weren’t right. But I’d gone to his book release party, flush with pride and love, hugging our special relationship to myself. The bookseller introduced Gray. Our eyes caught as he approached the podium. He smiled.
And then he started to read. Out loud.
At first I didn’t get it. People from the department—my friends, his colleagues—started to turn, to look at me. I stood there with my face burning and my heart on fire, convinced this was all some giant misunderstanding. A mistake. At the end of the reading, I waited to catch his eye, hoping for a look, a disclaimer, an acknowledgement.Nothing. I tried to approach him through the crowd of readers and hangers-on. He turned away, enveloped in a swarm of attention and praise.
I couldn’t elbow my way past his publicist and fans. But that was okay. When I got home, I told myself, when I readDestiny Gaylefor myself, the whole story—the story of our love—would be different.
It was worse.
“Despite her name, Destiny exists as a mere accessory in Kettering’smasterpiece of male egoism and literary desire,”said the reviewer in theWashington Post. Elleput it more simply:“Hungry and hollow. A body rather than a character.”
I felt exposed. Used. Violated. How could he do this to me? What had I done?
In the days that followed, Gray wouldn’t answer his phone or the door. He hadn’t replied to my texts.
In desperation, I went to see him during office hours, sitting in the chair on the other side of his desk as he closed his office door and explained with weary finality that it was over. We were through.
I cried. But I hadn’t argued. I hadn’t yelled or screamed or made a scene, too conscious of the department assistant at her desk outside and his colleagues in the adjoining offices. Too aware of my own humiliation.
He had shamed me. Ruined me. I could ruin him, or at least prompt a stern discussion with the dean or a #MeToo piece in the student newspaper.
But I shrank from anything that smacked of revenge. I hated myself, but I still loved him. Had loved him. And he loved me. I had proof. I had emails. Sooner or later, I’d thought, Gray would remember that.
Eventually, he would come back to me. Choose me. (Unlike, say, our mother.)
I imagined it over and over again, the words he would use, the assurances, the excuses. For months afterward, while Covid-weary readers distracted themselves with Gray’s sexy pseudo-confessional, while his detractors and supporters debated on Twitter, I’d read and reread his old emails. Even when I moved back into the farmhouse, even as I applied to Trinity, I’d comforted myself by composing his apology in my head, assembling it like aquilt out of well-loved, well-worn phrases. We were soul mates, he’d told me at the start of our relationship. Partners for life.
I miss you, I dreamed of him writing.I love you. I’m sorry.
I would forgive him, of course.
Except... Standing in the Nortons’ spare room four thousand miles away, I read his text over again carefully.
Nope. It didn’t say any of those things.
My body tingled. My brain buzzed. I needed to reply, to answer him right now, to tell him... what, exactly? I couldn’t think.
I stood, bumping awkwardly into the corner of my tiny desk, lurching like a wounded animal trying to escape. Reeti! I needed my bosom friend. Not fictional Anne of Green Gables. I needed Reeti.
