A Woman Scorned
A Woman Scorned
E bby forces herself to turn away from the kitchen window, to avoid looking at Henry and Avery. They are on the far side of the river, now, moving along the dirt path that passes the campers. The thought of them together leaves a sour taste under Ebby’s tongue. She fights the urge to spit in the sink.
The worst part of Ebby’s relationship with Henry wasn’t the fact that Henry had decided not to marry her. Okay, that was the worst. The second worst was that he had thought to marry her in the first place. In insisting on linking his life to hers, Henry had pulled Ebby back into the spotlight. As it turned out, Henry wasn’t as poor a Pepper as he’d suggested on the night that he and Ebby had met. His father’s appearance, though brief, on the Forbes 400 list of the country’s richest people, coupled with Henry’s prior relationship with a retail heiress turned online fitness influencer, had set off a buzz of chatter around Henry that eventually grew to include Ebby.
After living for years in the shadow of her brother’s death, Ebby found herself, once again, a character in someone else’s story. Henry Pepper, the rising young star of an old banking family, had “taken himself off the market for the child survivor of a fatal home invasion robbery,” reported one social media page, which also described Ebby as an “African American stunner.” Then Henry left her standing there on her own, on their wedding day. With one shitty move, Henry Pepper had shown the world that Ebony Freeman, try as she might, could not escape the mantle of misfortune that had settled over her.
And Henry had confirmed her parents’ fears that they weren’t doing enough to protect her. Her mother’s persistent plea comes back to her now: Be careful, Ebby. Be careful. Ebby walks over to the shoe rack near the front door and starts to slip into a dry pair of pull-on shoes. She wants Henry gone. He should leave today and take that woman with him. Ebby picks up a promotional postcard with a list of g?tes and other accommodations in the area. She wants to run outside, hurry over the bridge, and call to Henry. She wants to hand him the list, but then she wills herself to stop.
What’s past is past. But the pain feels very present.
Henry left Connecticut in the middle of the night, just hours before Ebby should have been walking down the stone path in her family’s garden to marry him. Several days later, an email arrived from Henry. He wrote, I’m sorry, Ebby, I really am . But only that. Then he texted Ebby on her smartphone and asked to see her.
Give me a chance to explain , Henry wrote. Please .
What could Henry possibly say to justify what he had done? Ebby pressed Delete and turned back to what she was doing. By then, Ebby was three hundred miles north in Maine, wearing a baseball cap and large sunglasses, hoping no one would notice her as she stood in a beauty supply store. She knew her mother had sorority friends up that way. They would take note of her thinner shoulders, her puffy middle. She didn’t want to look as wholly abandoned as she felt.
Ebby tried to focus on the task at hand. She read through the labels on hair color products, checking for potentially harmful chemicals. She had decided to dye the tips of her hair cobalt blue. Just the thought of the color comforted her. It wouldn’t solve her problems, but she would go back to Connecticut looking like a new woman.
As she considered her hair-care options, Ebby could feel someone’s eyes on her. She turned to see a trio of women standing in the same aisle. All three of them were holding packages in their hands but looking at Ebby. As soon as she saw them, they looked away. Were they just checking her out, as women did with one another in beauty shops? Or did they recognize her from one of the unfortunate post-wedding-day reports that Ebby herself had seen pop up on her regional news feeds?
Survivor of violent home invasion robbery jilted by banker fiancé.
Dreamy son of old CT family a no-show on his wedding day.
More bad luck for African American survivor of infamous home robbery.
She’d had to turn off her phone to avoid seeing more push notifications mentioning the wedding fiasco. But she was still thinking about the teasers she’d seen. Ebby noticed that no one had thought to describe her, as they did Henry, as coming from an old New England family. Henry’s family went back a ways, for sure, but so did Ebby’s. Ebby’s people on her mother’s side had been in Massachusetts since the 1600s. Some had been enslaved. Others had been born free or freed later. Most had purchased land.
Ebby’s ancestors had been farmers, craftsmen, teachers, doctors, lawyers, politicians, and investors. Some of the men from her father’s side had sailed into and out of New Bedford and Boston on square-riggers and whalers in the 1800s. What could be more old New England than that? But the Freemans were black. People saw their skin, not their history.
This thinking only added to Ebby’s sense of betrayal. The day Ebby colored her hair ends in blue dye was the day Hannah first urged her to consider a hiatus in France. But it would take her another seven months and two more hair-color changes to act on that idea. When Ebby finally landed in Paris with cherry red curls, Hannah was waiting with a hug and a car.
“In the end, Henry did you a favor, Ebby,” Hannah said once they were settled in the car and driving southwest. She glanced at Ebby over her eyeglasses, then looked back at the road ahead.
“A favor?” Ebby said. “Leaving me standing there like an idiot? Leaving me to cancel the wedding on my own? Leaving me exposed to all that media coverage?”
“It was a cowardly thing to do, I know,” Hannah said. “But yes. You would have married him, otherwise. And then what?”
It hurt to hear Hannah say it. Even though she knew Hannah had a point, it hurt all the same. She had wanted to marry Henry. She couldn’t pretend she hadn’t, even though he’d let her down big-time. There was no way to get around this awful feeling of having made a bad choice. Having ended up with nothing for it. But before she could dwell on it, Hannah switched to speaking in French.
“You need to jump into the language right away,” Hannah said. “You’ll need to fend for yourself while I’m gone.”
Chatting in French during the four-hour drive, Ebby found that her language skills weren’t as rusty as she’d feared. And everything she saw around her boosted her mood. The stone houses. The vineyards and sunflowers. Even the road signs were charming. Hannah turned the car, now, into a driveway leading to her small compound. Ebby saw a wooden sign at the front of the property, shaped like an arrow. It had one word on it: Hideaway . Yes, Ebby thought. Yes. This was going to be her hideaway.
Ebby enjoyed twenty-one days of peace before Henry Pepper showed up. Twenty-one days of lavender humming with bees. The soft voice of the river. The comical ducklings on its surface, trying to follow their mother while bobbing sideways over the counterflow of the water. Those long, flat back roads where Ebby liked to ride Hannah’s bike. Farms lined with wildflowers and yellowing, summer-baked grass. And the feeling that she could be someone else yet, somehow, still herself.
This was Ebby’s new routine: Early morning coffee and gardening. A walk along the river. Breakfast at the village café. Working at the laptop in her favorite room, the one with the large stone fireplace. Listening to the voices of children reaching her from the camper vans on the far side of the river. Taking a break to visit the street market or drive over to another town. Back at the screen in the late afternoon.
Every day, she repeated the mantra her mother’s mother had taught her and Baz when they were little. Hold the moment, Grandma Bliss always said. Before Ebby had ever heard the term mindfulness, Grandma Bliss had a grasp on the concept. Be aware of a beautiful moment as it is happening. Take note of your life as you are living it. Grandma Bliss’s advice had been working for her lately, until this afternoon, when Henry and his Instagram envoy showed up and ruined everything.