I don’t talk about that.
There are no words in my vocabulary that are the right size for the grief I felt. The sorrow of losing a life that I’d already fallen in love with.
What made it worse was the guilt, which arrived after and has not left. Because in the weeks before, in the weeks when she was quietly, fiercely, characteristically carrying on, I had been somewhere slightly outside the marriage in my head. Already wondering, already feeling the shape of the mistake before I finished making it. The wondering felt monstrous, and the guilt of the wondering made it impossible to leave.
So I stayed.
I am still here.
I am aware that I am the worst kind of man—not one who does terrible things, but one who maintains and is, by every external measure, a decent husband, and also, by the only measure that matters, absent.
Lucy deserves better. I have known this for a long time. I have done nothing with the knowledge.
“When are you going to tell her?” he persists.
This is the question I have not been answering for six months.
This is the question that lives in the space between Lucy and me, in the politeness of our mornings, in the way she moves through my restored Victorian house in Germantown, which she’s made hers by degrees—a book on this shelf, a plant on that sill, her cast-iron pan on the rack above the stove—like she is a person who has decided to stay and is going about the business of doing exactly that with the determination of someone who has chosen.
“Soon,” I reply, because it has to be very soon or we’ll suddenly be married for two years, and she’s already started to talk about a baby, which I don’t want, not with her, because it will complicate the divorce.
“Good,” Percy grumbles.
I turn back to the window, and I say nothing else, and Percy—to his credit—lets me.
The silence holds.
Outside, the dogwoods are blooming.
The city is going about itself, unhurried, full of its own noise.
Somewhere across town, Lucy is probably in a kitchen, probably cooking something that will be better than it needs to be.
And I have no idea that on the other side of a door I left ajar, it’s already too late.
3
NOW WHAT?
LUCY
Iwish I were the type of woman who could forget what she hears and continue to live the life she has, because, boy, that would be so much easier than what I know I have to do.
I text Dina that I need a day off. She calls worried because I don't take days off. I lie to her that I'm having bad cramps and don't want to be interrogated, so she drops it, albeit with a good dose of suspicion.
I leave the duck and cassoulet with Fox's assistant, with a drab smile. I lie to her as well, saying I have to rush, and it can't wait.
Then, I come home.
Our home. Not for long, though, now that I know this marriage is over.
It's a huge, almost palatial place, and I have always felt like a milkmaid playing Queen whenever I'm here. I love the house, though, because it's ours.
"Add what you want. Take out what you don't want. This is your house, and you should feel at home here, sweetheart," Fox said to me when I moved in after we were married. I didn'tremove anything, but I did add color and coziness to make it feel homey to me. He appreciated all of it. He never said I was changing his home—oh no, he said I was making it our home.
When Margaret wanted us to move into the Bennett estate in Belle Meade—you know the one with boxwood hedges and a live-in chef—Fox told her that was absolutely not going to happen.
"We love our home, Mother, we're not moving." He treated us like a unit.
