Day One
One
Things I remember about the night before the world changed forever:
The marble-shaped knot in my calf Wells coaxed with his thumbs, digging into the muscle like the way I used to mine the sand for clay. The last photo I uploaded to my social media, Wells and me with our arms wrapped around one another, tanned and freckled and salt-swept. A riotous field of wildflowers on the strip of highway between the Hamptons and Manhattan, as if someone’s oil painting had been dropped in the center of a stream of clanking traffic. It was gorgeous and efficient all at once, beauty and boredom dosed together.
Before the emails came, if someone had told me the catalyst to my breakup would be two cups of Sleepytime Tea and a forgotten bottle of melatonin at my fiancé’s family home in Sagaponack, I would’ve laughed. The concept that tea and a tiny bladder plus the absence of a synthetic hormone being the x and y variables that led to the discovery of my imploded relationship will never not be absurd. But they weren’t responsible for the demise of our six years together. That was all him. The distinction is important because facts are facts, and having to pee didn’t bomb things for Wells Stratton and me.
I missed the first notification, the one sent around the world. Wells had fallen asleep with his phone clutched in his hand, the same way he did every night, even after I’d mentioned theproven link to sleep disruption I’d storyboarded for my job at Per Diem news.
Our bedroom was an ode to my insomnia. Sixty-six degrees, fan on, blackout curtains, soundproofing panel inserts meant to block the New York night sounds. A recent addition was the luxury mattress and coordinating pillows Wells had purchased when I’d said not to, because I couldn’t stomach the price. When he’d had everything delivered and referred to me as the princess and the pea, I’d wrinkled my nose and retorted that I’d spent my whole life figuring out how to sleep before him. From my bedroom in Cape Cod, where spiders arrived in the corners every June, to the double dorm room I had shared with my best friend Natalie, to the roach-infested studio I’d inhabited for eight months before we moved in together. Icould live just fine without that mattress.
And then he’d play-tackled me and whispered that he likedmejust fine on that mattress, and we’d been very happy on it for the next twenty minutes. Maybe fifteen.
Most nights, if I’d been bothered by a phone light shining red behind my closed lids, I probably would’ve rolled toward the blackout shades, slipping back into a melatonin-soaked slumber until my 4:00 a.m. work alarm. But not this night—the one the world changed forever.
When Wells’s phone lit again, the liquid pressure in my abdomen won. I cracked one eye, squinting at the man I loved, trying to muster the energy to slip from beneath the duvet and into our bathroom. Instead, I came face to face with something I was most certainly not supposed to see. Amessage from a familiar contact.
Cambrey Coyle
If she’s working this morning, I can come over again??
A thunderclap of dread hit the center of my chest. I recoiled so fast my cheek landed on a cooler spot of the pillow. The message captioned a blurry thumbnail of what first appeared to be desert mountains against a black night, but of course, sleep clouds vision. When I zeroed in, a pair of breasts were unmistakable. The stray thoughtso that’s why they’re called moundsfluttered into my mind and vanished just as quickly.
Cambrey. Wells had been lifelong best friends with her brother before Charley had died in a snowmobiling accident out in California after their junior year of college. It was something we’d trauma-bonded over.
And now she was sending him this. In the middle of the night.
Adrenaline squeezed my throat. Wells.MyWells? He was the friend-of-a-friend who had lifted me in the air the second night we met for our paired bridesmaid/groomsman entrance. The date who kissed my hips the first time we had sex—the hips I had grown up resenting thanks to early aughts magazine culture, and now loved. The boyfriend who brought me fresh flowers every Sunday from various farmers markets or the Whole Foods on the corner in the winter; the live-in partner who cooked swordfish even when he preferred steak, the fiancé who arranged my bacon in the shape of a heart when he made Saturday breakfast so I could sleep in after a full week of pre-dawn wakeups.
His screen darkened.
I was generally ignorant of my heart with the exception of exercise or tragedy, so clocking it now felt monumental. My vision pixelated. In the effort to clear it, I bolted upright, gasping for air, my hands pressed to my chest.
I ripped the phone from Wells’s hand. He didn’t wake up. My hair glossed over my face, and I swiped it aside with a clammy palm.
I tapped the screen, the text still there. It was 3:01. The proverbial princess would not be going back to sleep that night. Not with this pea. I’d possibly never sleep again.
If she’s working this morning, I can come over again??
She. I was theshe, of course. The one who was supposed to be working this morning. Nausea curled in my stomach. Possibly the worst word wasagain, though the worst character was the winking emoji, and the worst content was definitely the naked picture.
Cambrey had been here before. Probably on this bed. Istared past the smudged phone in the dim night, trying to strategize. After the horror that edged my childhood, my path had been so clear. I’d made it to stability, to love, to work I enjoyed. But now I had the sickening hunch this would be one of those life pivots, the kind everyone has, but being wrenched from sleep to experience something so enormous was a very rude way to have your life changed forever.
I tilted my head and scrolled. My fiancé was brazen enough to not change the setting to show a simple notification instead of the message content. This seemed foolish to me, but I was a person whose phone was programmed to ring only if someone called me three times straight. The only people who knew this were Wells, Natalie, and my parents.
I wondered if Cambrey had lain on my side of the bed, if Wells had the gall to leave the sheets unchanged, or if both of us have had bare asses on this fabric. Below her text was a notification for an email from an unknown sender, but I paid next to no attention to that. For now.
“Hey.” I shook his shoulder, thinking,Wow, I have never sounded like this before. “Wells?”
“Mmm,” he murmured, his face pressing into the pillow. His hair was perfectly soft, perfectly sleep-mussed, perfectly Wells.
A wave of numbness slipped over me, with one exception: my screaming bladder. I was equal parts grateful and resentful of it. What if I hadn’t had that extra cup of tea? Biology dictated that the human body was a complex machine, and I couldn’t ignore mine any longer.
I placed Wells’s phone on the mattress, then thought better of it. I flung it across the room, where it landed with an unsatisfying thud on the soft faux-sheepskin rug he loved and I despised because it was impossible to vacuum.
In the winter, our black-and-white hexagon-tiled bathroom floor was heated; in the summer, the tiles were borderline unmanageably hot. They seemed to suck heat directly from the sunbaked bricks outside. No matter how high we cranked the central air, the floor was toasty, and hot feet keep me up at night.
