“Evie!” she calls, giggling. Falling into my arms, a welcome beam of sunlight. “Daddy took me to thebeach! We had ice creams and went swimming and built sandcastles and he buried me up to myneck!”
I feel like he’s buried me up to my neck, too, and that I’m forever trying to extract my arms and dig myself free.
“We forgot sunscreen,” she confesses, holding out her little arms, investigating the redness.
“I put it on you,” he says, irritated.
“Daddy, you said not to tell.”
“Stop lying, Harri.”
She looks crushed and confused, and I ask her what flavor ice cream she chose—practiced sorcery designed to distract and diffuse.
“Come on,” he says, extending his hand and pulling me roughly to my feet by my wrist. He scoops up my gym bag and starts walking in the direction he came from, while Harriet grasps my hand and swings happily between us as we go.
“Let’s getmilkshakes!” she suggests, hopefully. I’m about to say yes, when Oliver turns around and drops her hand.
“You had ice cream. We need to take you back to Mummy.”
It’s not drop-off time until five. I hope we don’t ruin Chloe’s plans for a relaxing afternoon. It’s a tough gig raising a child mostly alone, and I love having Harriet. I shiver at the idea of divorcing him and rupturing this second family of hers, even if we see her only every other weekend and during the holidays. Harriet is the only part of this relationship that is real.
As we follow Oliver across the park, I watch him unzip my bag, pull out a chocolate bar, and toss it into a bin as he passes. “You don’t need that crap, Evie.”
There are moments in life when everything comes into sharp focus. I’ve felt stuck in this nightmare for so many years that I blocked out much of it. You’d think it would be something big and obvious that would cause me to snap. His screaming at me for inadvertently leaving my phone on silent after going to the movies. Throwing a glass at the kitchen wall when I was home late. But in the end, it’s the simple act of flinging a Mars bar into a rubbish bin in front of his impressionable daughter, whom he’s just gaslit over sunscreen, that pushes me to a place where I’ve not only had enough but have dredged some lost pocket of courage I need to fight back.
We buckle Harriet back into the car and drive to Chloe’s. She lives in the kind of ramshackle rental I’d adore right now. A little two-bedroom terrace with vines running riot up the bricks, potted plants crowding the front steps, and nowhere near enough room for all their stuff. It feels like a home should.
She flings open the door in shorts, a T-shirt, and headphones, like she’s about to go for a run. “Oh, hi! I didn’t expect you this early!”
Harriet disentangles herself from Oliver’s arms and runs in to play with their new puppy. It’s all okay. Chloe will just haveto reschedule her exercise. Everyone has to reschedule and rearrange and fit in.
“I thought you said you’d taken off the tracking app?” I say, as we walk back to the car after saying goodbye. It’s a bold statement, given the bad mood he’d been covering until we’d off-loaded Harriet. We’d argued over the app again recently, when I told him I was sick of him knowing my every move.
“It’s to keep you safe, Evie,” he says now. “That’s all I ever want.”
I’m not particularly unsafe. Not physically. At least not when I’m out in the world without him. Psychologically, I’m in real danger, but that’s his doing.
“You’re always underestimating risks,” he continues. “People get obsessed with things—and with people that they can’t have.”
He is out of his mind. I’d suggest a psych evaluation for delusions and paranoia, but of course he’d never go for that.
“I love you,” he tells me, for the millionth time. “I love you more than anyone else ever could.” He means Drew, of course. It’salwaysabout Drew. In fact … right now, as I look at the jealousy contorting across Oliver’s face, the penny finally drops. The explanation for why I’ve never felt good enough. Why I’ve endlessly wondered what he saw in me and why he held on so vehemently to our floundering relationship when he could have released me and had his pick of anyone else that he wanted. It was never about loving me. It was about hating Drew. From the moment Drew reached in and pulled me out of that swimming pool away from him.
“I just don’t want anything to happen to you, Evie. I’m protecting you,” he says now.
We’ve been around this buoy a thousand times. We never getanywhere, other than into an angry mess, devolving into him going silent, eventually, and that is always the worst part. There’s power in silence. More power, sometimes, than when things are explosive.
We reach his car and he opens the passenger door for me. Always the gentleman in public. An elderly woman nearby nudges her companion, hand on her heart, and smiles in our direction. I can almost hear her thoughts:Look at that, Shirley! Chivalry isn’t dead …
Oliver’s brand of chivalry is going to kill me.
I get in and pull my seat belt on, feeling even further restricted.
He swings into the driver’s side, pushing angry energy into the car, his demeanor shifting again, plunging me into a familiar mental tussle as I attempt to work out what he wants from me and how I’m going to navigate my way out of this. Whatever I deduce is on his mind, it never seems to be that. Whatever steps I take to try to shift his mood, they’re always wrong.
So this time I do nothing. I say nothing to try to change him. I disengage.
Of course, that’s wrong too.
