“You’re a jerk.”
“I’m also not on Tinder. Right now. Do you follow your husband on Instagram?”
“Yes. Are you on Instagram?”
“Yes.”
“Let me guess, you DM women in bikinis.”
“They DM me, Nora. But the reason I ask is that I found his tour group. There are a lot of ... group photos.”
She hated herself for this. For being curious and interested. She grabbed his phone before she even gave herself permission to do it and saw a group picture with a bunch of tagged names. One of them was Ben. It was a big group. Lots of men and women. She wondered if they had all left a spouse back at home.
“Yeah. That’s about how I thought it would look.”
“Looks like fun.” He scrolled from the group picture to the next photo, where they were cooking over an open fire at a campsite.
“They’re climbing mountains.”
“Right. It’s just, that’s what he’s doing while you’re sitting here worrying about your relationship. I think that sucks, and I think you should be treated better than that.”
She huffed a laugh. “Based on what?”
“You’re you. What other reason does there need to be for you to be treated better than this?”
His words hit her with the impact of a car accident. Except ... what did that even mean? She was her. She was an inconvenient, abandoned girl who had grown into an even more inconvenient, abandoned wife. There was nothing inherently special about her. Nothing that required any sort of deference or elevated thing she deserved. It was sweet of him to say so. But he was just saying so.
“You don’t deserve to spend the rest of your life alone,” she said softly.
“I’m not alone, idiot.” He took his phone back. “I might open Tinder, though.”
“I would rather you didn’t.”
He grinned unrepentantly, and whether or not he looked at Tinder at any point during the evening wasn’t something he shared.
“Where you parked?” he asked when they walked out of the bar.
“Oh, just up by the store. I ...” It suddenly felt imperative that he not walk her back. It suddenly felt important that she get some distance. Right now. “I’m exhausted. It’s time to go home.”
“Okay,” he said, his expression carefully neutral.
“I’ll call you if my lights go out or anything.”
“Yeah. You do that.”
She went back to the car and drove home without thinking. She just let it all wash over her. She just let the music sweep through her soul and distract her from everything that was happening.
When she got back inside, she dropped her black moon purse onto the floor. The purse that Ben had bought her. When he had probably already known he wanted to separate.
She stared at it and opened Instagram on her phone. She went back to the tour-group page Sam had shown her. She zoomed in on the picture of the group. Ben was smiling. He looked almost like a different person. Wild, free. Happy.
Something she didn’t see in him when they were together. Not in their life.
There was a woman standing next to him. Blond and smiling. She clicked on her. On the tag on the photo. She was suddenly on an Instagram filled with her ass. Because she was apparently double-cheeked up in the Andes Mountains, swimming in streams.
She flicked through a carousel of photos, and then her heart sank. There was one of her in a stream, standing underneath a waterfall. There was a man holding on to her. His hand was pressed against her hip, a smile on his face that had never once been directed at Nora.
Beaming. Unencumbered. Unburdened.
