“How’s your summer going?” I ask.
“Pretty well. Yours?”
“Okay. I’ve been in the city mostly, hanging out on the roof garden when I can.”
“It’s nice your building has that,” he says flatly.
What’s he really thinking? That if we were still together, I’d be spending every weekend here with him and taking advantage of the summer weather, rather than baking on the tar beach of a midrise apartment building on the Upper East Side of Manhattan?
“How’s your grandmother these days?” I ask.
That’s another reason Jamie feels committed to Litchfield County. His grandmother on his father’s side, an awe-inspiring retired pediatrician, is in assisted living not far from here and suffering from advancing Alzheimer’s.
“I just saw her today as a matter of fact,” he says. “Her short-term memory is even worse, but if you get her talking about the distant past, she can still engage.”
“I’m glad you’ve found a way to connect with her.”
I notice his date again, edging a little closer to us, but he makes no move to introduce us. With a start, I realize that she’s not the only one who is watching us. So are some of the other guests in the room. They’ve probably heard about the breakup and, just as I expected, are eager to see if we’ll behave ourselves.
And then it occurs to me. Some of them probably assume I’m the jilted party, left at the altar by a catch like Jamie Larsson. They wouldn’t necessarily know that I’m the one who called off the wedding.
“If you’ll excuse me,” Jamie says. “I promised Vic I’d help open the wine before dinner so it can have a few minutes to breathe.”
“Of course,” I say. As he strides off, his friend Sam shoots me a withering glance.
I slip out of the study through the door near the bar and end up wandering the house for a few minutes, trying to get a handle on my emotions. The encounter was stilted, unnerving for me on one level, especially the rubbernecking from the other people in the room, but Jamie seems to be doing pretty well. Though it’s hard to imagine us ever being the kind of friends who grab a beer after work, at least I didn’t see open loathing on his face.
After passing the entrance to the solarium, an addition built a few years ago, I find myself in the small mudroom at the rear of the house, where the door to the backyard is wide open. The pegs along the walls hold barn jackets, slickers, scarves, and well-worn cardigans.
What I need, I realize, is a short break outside. I give the screened door a push and step onto the flagstone patio, where I’m greeted by a cacophony of crickets and katydids. I tip my head back and stare up atthe sparkly night sky, and almost instantly the tension in my shoulders begins to subside.
I’m just about to go back in for dinner when I hear a voice coming from the mudroom.
“You doing all right?” I’m pretty sure the speaker is Jamie’s friend Sam.
“Yeah, hanging in there.” He’s talking to Jamie, I realize. The two of them must be right on the other side of the door, only inches away. “Feels like a fucked-up situation for me but it would have been rude to Vic not to come.”
A voice in my head tells me to move away, that I won’t like where the conversation is going, but curiosity gets the better of me.
“So, she just showed up?”
“Yeah, even though she knew I didn’t want her here.”
My stomach tightens. Jamie had assured me it would be fine.
“Anything you can do about it?” Sam asks.
A pause.
“Ignore her, I guess,” Jamie says. “And try to learn from my mistake. She’s a complete and total fraud, not at all who she pretended to be—but I’ve got no one to blame but myself.”
2
THE WORDS STING SO MUCH THAT I FLINCH. IS THAT WHATJamie really thinks, that I’m a fraud? That I conned him or something?
I get that he’s angry and upset. My decision to end our engagement tipped his world off its axis. But would he have preferred I go ahead with the marriage out of decorum, knowing that eventually my true feelings were bound to catch up with us as a couple? Though I loved Jamie, admired him fiercely—he’s not only smart and charming, but also steady as a rock—and we got along really well, I’d begun to understand that I wasn’tinlove with him in that delirious way you should be with the person you marry. I’d allowed things to progress, I came to realize, because I liked how secure the relationship made me feel. It was a mistake I’d also made once in my professional life—by sticking with a “safe” job in HR for half a decade, even though I knew it wasn’t right for me.
Would Jamie have wanted to exchange vows with a woman who’d been drawn to him in large part because he was a sheltered harbor, a woman who couldn’t reciprocate his passion, a woman whose head was more and more filled with thoughts of another man?
