Nora laughed. “Thank you. Because everyone else thinks I’m an asshole.”
They trooped up to the front door, and Nora unlocked it. The bins of herbs were sitting in her kitchen, the scent sweet and strong. The firstorder of business was food. Nora was starving. She’d painted through when she should have had lunch, but once she got rolling on it, she hadn’t wanted to stop.
After she’d taken the edge off her hunger, she looked at her friends.
“How were your days?”
“I got more sourdough orders,” Soraya said. “I’m having trouble keeping up.”
“You?” Nora asked Daisy.
“Sam came by the theater to talk to me about what we need for electrical. He’s donating his time to my set, which is just incredible. I thanked him today, but please thank him again and again and again for me.”
“Zach arranged it,” Nora said. “I talked to Sam today.”
“Well, he’s amazing.” Daisy’s face glowed.
Nora experienced a twinge of discomfort over Daisy’s effusiveness about Sam. Noraknewhe was amazing. She had known it for years. But the amazingness of Sam felt like a lovely secret that was only hers, and it felt strange to share it.
“And how are you?” Daisy asked.
“Great. I spent the afternoon boiling in the sun while I painted blackberries and pondered my dwindling fertility.”
“Wow,” Daisy said. “That’s ... a lot.”
“It is. It’s another thing I didn’t think about when he left, because I just wanted him to come back. Like the house, and how I’m going to live. But if he wants a divorce, there are so many things it affects. I was fine with not having kids yet. I’m still not sure that I want them. But I also don’tnotwant them. I’m thirty-five, and if I have to meet someone else, and assuming I go through a bunch of wrong guys first, then meet another one, I’ll realistically be forty before I remarry, and then who knows if I’ll be able to get pregnant if I want to. I hate this feeling that he’s taking choices from me. Decisions we were supposed to make together.”
“Yeah, I getthat,” Daisy muttered.
“I’m scared to talk to him about it. I’m scared of what he’ll say. I’m scared of what all this means.”
“It’s not fair of him to leave you in limbo like this. What David did was horrendous, but it was also definitive. It’s something I can’t get over. I’m not going to get over it. I’m not going to be able to be with him. I—I have to divorce him.” Soraya’s eyes filled with tears. “I can’t forgive it. More than that, I don’t want to. But at least I know what I want.”
Nora looked at Daisy. Daisy took her empty plate to the sink and returned to the table, then unwound a section of twine and began to bundle together some rosemary, sage, and basil. “I just don’t think I can ever trust him again. It’s not even the affair. It’s that he could look at me, devastate me in that way, and have absolutely no emotional response to it. It’s almost better that he cheated. At least I can tell people that. It’s quick, it’s easy. I can use it as this simple way to explain that he betrayed me, but the biggest betrayal was him walking past me when I was crumpled up on the floor crying because he told me he wasn’t happy with me. That he was leaving me. I will never be able to get that image out of my head. I will never be able to forget that he could do that. It was cruel. I’ve always known Jonathan to have flaws, but he’s never been cruel. But I’ve seen his capacity for cruelty now. I can’t unsee it.”
It was a weird thing to have these women feel sorry forher, because what they’d both gone through was so hideous.
Nora’s marriage wasn’t over.
But they were right. She was left suspended. Ben hadn’t given her a timeline or a plan or anything. He wasn’t giving her something to work on about herself. Something to work on about them. Except her emotional availability, she supposed.
“That’s exactly what it is,” Soraya said. “Even when David did things I didn’t like, repeatedly, when we would have the same fights over and over again, I told myself it was okay because he was a good man. A good man I loved, and so I would use that as my compass to find my way back to being content with him. But that’s just gone now. I can’t look at him the same way. But all the people around us still do. All our friends from church. The kids. I feel exposed, I feel embarrassed,I feel like I’m the one who did the wrong thing. I wish he could share even a percentage of my humiliation. Just the tiniest bit. That’s what I want. I want him to be humiliated.”
“You should write it on a bay leaf.” Nora smiled slyly at her.
Soraya shot her a withering glare. “Embarrassing your ex isn’t agoal.”
“Disagree,” Nora said.
“I can’t put that on a vision board.”
“Your magical manifestation board?” Nora affected an innocent expression.
“Regardless.I can’t put it on there.”
Daisy held up the herb bundle. “This is sage, basil, and rosemary. There are properties of protection, cleansing, and healing. Also joy, transformation, manifestation, and growth. Which I think we could all use. Especially ahead of the baseball game.”
“I just don’t—”
