5. Stephanie
— ? —
Stephanie
Three years after my divorce, I was climbing out of a bathroom window in a cocktail dress.
The window was small and I was wearing heels, which meant I had to take them off first and hold them in my teeth while I shimmied my hips through the frame.
It wasn’t my finest moment. But it was a considerable improvement over spending one more second at that table listening to Trent describe his cryptocurrency portfolio.
My bare feet hit the cool pavement in the alley behind the restaurant. I jammed my heels back on, smoothed my dress down over my thighs, and walked very quickly toward the street without looking back once.
My phone was already in my hand.
“Gina,” I said the instant she picked up. “What the hell.”
“Oh no. What happened?”
“He talked about Bitcoin for forty-five minutes. Forty-five minutes, Gina. I timed it.”
“He said he was in finance.”
“Finance isn’t the same as a cryptocurrency cult.” I spotted a cab idling at the corner and threw up my arm to flag it. “He had charts on his phone. Actual charts. He showed me his projected returns for 2027.”
“Okay, that’s bad.”
“He asked me to invest. During appetizers. He said I had ‘the energy of a long-term holder.’”
Gina made a strangled choking sound down the line. “Please tell me you didn’t.”
“I excused myself to the bathroom and climbed out the window.”
“Stephanie.”
“It was a ground-floor window. Very accessible.”
“That’s not the point.” But she was laughing now, helpless with it. “God, I’m sorry. His profile seemed normal.”
“His profile was a lie. A crypto-wrapped lie in a bad blazer.” I slid into the back of the cab and gave the driver my address. The vinyl seat was cold against the backs of my legs. “No more blind dates. I mean it this time.”
“You say that every time.”
“And I mean it every time.” I slumped lower in the vinyl seat. “This is my life now. Bad dates and bathroom escapes. I’m going to die alone and my cats will eat my body.”
“You don’t have cats.”
“I’m going to get cats specifically so they can eat my body.”
“That’s dark.”
“I’m a dark person.” I let my head fall against the cool glass of the window and watched the streetlights slide past. “Maybe I’m just supposed to be alone. Some people are built for partnership and some people are built for good books and a consistent skincare routine.”
“You’re not built for alone. You’re just traumatized.”
“Tomato, tomahto.”
The cab wound through streets I still didn’t quite know by heart, past bars I’d never gone into and a park I jogged around but never through.
Three years in this city and it stubbornly refused to feel permanent.
I moved through it on the assumption that I was only visiting, waiting to figure out where I actually belonged, though I’d stopped admitting that to anyone, including myself.
The driver had the radio down low, some love song I half recognized, and I turned my face to the cold glass and let the lights blur.
My apartment was small and warm, exactly what I’d needed the week I moved in.
A fresh start, I’d told everyone, and told myself louder than anyone.
New city, new life. I’d poured myself into work and collected a handful of good new friends, assembled a life that passed for full as long as nobody, including me, examined it too closely.
I just hadn’t managed to build anything that felt like home.
The lights were off when I let myself in. I kicked my heels into the corner by the door and crossed the hardwood in bare feet without turning on a single lamp. I knew the place by feel now. Kitchen to the left, living room straight ahead, bedroom down the short hall.
The mirror in the hallway caught me as I passed, a pale shape in the dark.
The cocktail dress, the makeup I’d taken real care with, the hour I’d spent coaxing my hair into loose waves.
All of it assembled for a man who wanted to talk about the blockchain.
I’d gotten good at the production of it, the armor a woman puts on to be looked at, and lousy at remembering why I bothered.
What a waste.
I reached back and unzipped the dress and let it slither off me into a heap on the floor.
My reflection watched me do it, dim and colorless in the light bleeding in from the street.
Thirty-three years old, supposedly in the prime of my whole life, still shimmying out of restaurant bathroom windows to get away from a man.
How had I gotten here?
I pulled on sweats and an old soft t-shirt without paying any attention to what my hands had grabbed from the drawer. It wasn’t until the worn fabric settled over my shoulders and I caught the loose familiar drape of it that I understood.
The shirt was Kevin’s.
Johns Hopkins Medical, it read across the front in letters that had cracked and faded to almost nothing.
He’d worn it into the ground during his residency, until the collar stretched out shapeless and the navy washed down to a soft dishwater gray.
I’d stolen it somewhere in the middle of our marriage, for sleeping in, for lazy rainy Sundays, for the nights he stayed at the hospital and I missed him and wearing his clothes was the nearest I could get to being held by him.
I should have thrown it out. After the divorce, after I packed my entire life into boxes and drove it up the coast, I should have burned every last thing that carried any trace of him.
But I hadn’t.
I brought the collar to my nose and breathed in.
Nothing. No scent of him left at all. Only old cotton and the dryer sheets from a laundromat a whole coastline away from the man. Whatever had ever made this shirt smell like Kevin had faded out of the fibers years ago, and I’d kept washing it anyway, which was its own quiet kind of stupid.
I stood there in my dark bedroom wearing my ex-husband’s dead shirt and let myself feel, for one unguarded minute, the ache I spent most of my waking hours pretending didn’t live in me. It sat low behind my ribs, patient, exactly where it always had, and it still knew my name.
Three years. Long enough to build a whole new life out of nothing. Nowhere near long enough to stop missing the old one.
Kevin had texted me a few times, mostly that first year. Happy birthday. Thinking of you. I hope you’re doing well. Short flat messages that said nothing and meant everything, that I’d read forty times each and never once answered.
What was I supposed to say back? I’m fine, thanks for asking, still haven’t forgiven you for being at a dinner while I lost our baby on the stairs? Weather’s lovely out here, and by the way some mornings I still roll over and reach for you before I’m awake enough to remember you’re gone?
Silence was easier. Silence was clean, and it didn’t require me to decide anything.
I sighed and wandered back out to the living room and dropped onto the couch, the cushions still holding the shape of every other night I’d ended right here.
There was a hairline crack running across the ceiling that I kept meaning to report to the building manager.
One more thing on the endless list I was letting slide.
The radiator ticked. Somewhere below me a neighbor laughed at a television, and the sound of another person’s easy evening made the quiet in my apartment louder.
My phone buzzed on the cushion beside me.
I almost didn’t look. Probably Gina, checking that I’d made it home in one piece. Or, worse, Trent, having somehow harvested my number to send me his overnight thoughts on the Ethereum merge.
But the name lit up on the screen and I sat straight up.
Tris Coleman.
My ex-mother-in-law. My former family. The woman who had held my hand through the worst hours of my life in that hospital room and then quietly helped me fold my clothes into a suitcase, and who had never once, in three years, let me feel like the divorce meant I was losing her too.
I answered on the second ring.
“Tris.”
“Stephanie, darling.” Her voice came through warm and unchanged, and my throat closed around it, the sound of a door I hadn’t let myself notice I’d been standing outside of. “I hope I’m not calling too late.”
“Never. How are you?”
“Old and cranky and tired of my husband leaving his socks everywhere.” She laughed, low and rich. “But otherwise wonderful. How are you, sweetheart? Really?”
I sank back into the couch cushions and pulled my knees up. “I climbed out a bathroom window tonight to escape a bad date.”
“That’s my girl. Was the date at least cute?”
“He talked about cryptocurrency for forty-five minutes,” I said, and could hear her wince down the line.
“Oof. What’s a cryptocurrency?”
“Trust me, you don’t want to know.”
We talked for a few minutes about nothing and everything at once.
Her garden and the deer that kept eating it, Harry’s latest case that she wasn’t supposed to know about and half knew anyway.
Easy talk with someone who’d known me since I was twenty, who had watched me fall in love and then, from very close range, fall entirely apart.
“Actually,” Tris said, and her tone shifted a half step, “I’m calling for a reason. My birthday is coming up.”
“I know. I already sent your present.”
“You spoil me.” I could hear the smile riding under the words. “But that’s not what I meant. I’m having a little gathering. Just family. A weekend thing, at this beautiful place I rented. I want you to come.”
My heart stumbled and caught. Family meant Kevin. Family, said out loud like that, meant the man I’d spent three years arranging my whole existence around not seeing.
“Tris.”
“Before you say no, hear me out.” She took an audible breath. “Kevin won’t be there. He’s traveling for work. Some conference in Europe he can’t get out of. I asked specifically because I knew you’d worry.”
The relief that went through me was so total it embarrassed me, there alone in the dark. “You’re sure?”
“Positive. He sends his regrets and a very expensive bottle of champagne.” A small pause. “I also invited Hugo.”
“Hugo?” My brother. Who I hadn’t seen in person in nearly a year. Who had been so blind with fury on my behalf at the end that he’d broken Kevin’s nose in the driveway and had to be hauled off him by our father. “Hugo is coming?”
“He said yes. Your parents can’t make it, but Hugo will be there.” Her voice gentled. “I miss you, Stephanie. Harry misses you. And I know this is complicated, but you’re still family to us. Divorce doesn’t change that.”
I pressed my free palm flat against my sternum, trying to press down the ache that had risen up under it. “I’ve missed you too.”
“Then come. It’s one weekend. Beautiful property, lots of space. I’m renting the whole thing just for us. Cabins, a main house, the perfect spot for relaxing with people who love you.”
“In Nantucket?”
“Where else?”
I closed my eyes. Nantucket. The island where I’d spent every childhood summer, where Hugo had first dragged his brilliant friend home for a week, where I’d fallen headlong in love inside a dusty guesthouse with the water going silver outside the window.
I could still call up the smell of the place without trying, salt and cut grass, the particular quality of the light off the water at the end of an afternoon.
Three solid years of steering wide around every memory tied to that island, and now Tris was asking me, in that warm certain voice, to walk straight back into the middle of it.
But Kevin wouldn’t be there. And Hugo would. Harry, and Tris, and a whole weekend of people who still felt like home to me even though the marriage that had made them mine was long over and filed away.
“It’s been so long since I’ve seen everyone,” I said slowly.
“Too long. Come fix that.”
“One weekend?”
“Just one, I promise, nothing complicated. Just good food and better company and absolutely zero cryptocurrency talk.”
I laughed before I could stop myself. “You drive a hard bargain.”
“I learned from the best. Is that a yes?”
I thought about my quiet apartment with its crack in the ceiling. My parade of catastrophic dates. The shirt I was wearing right now that had stopped smelling like Kevin years ago and that I still, somehow, couldn’t make myself throw away.
Maybe I’d been running long enough. Maybe one weekend of turning around to face the past head-on wouldn’t actually kill me.
“Yes,” I heard myself say. “I’ll be there.”
Tris made a sound of pure delight, high and young. “Wonderful. I’ll send you the details. Oh, sweetheart, I’m so happy.”
“Me too.” And to my genuine surprise, I found I meant it. “It’ll be good to see everyone.”
“It’ll be perfect. Rest up, darling. I plan to keep you very busy with gossip and wine and unsolicited advice about your love life.”
“Can’t wait.”
We said our goodbyes and I set the phone down on the cushion, and I sat there in the dark for a long time afterward with a strange bright flutter of anticipation working its way through my chest. I hadn’t felt it in so long that it took me a minute to place it.
Some stubborn part of me had been waiting, without permission, for a reason to go home.
I was going back to Nantucket. Back to the place where all of it had started. Back to the family I had somehow never quite managed to leave, even after I left their son.
One weekend. No Kevin. Just the people I loved and the closure I probably needed and had been putting off for three years.
How hard could it be?
My fingers found the frayed hem of Kevin’s old shirt and worried at it. Then I pulled the whole thing off over my head in one motion and tossed it toward the laundry basket in the corner.
It missed and landed in a heap on the floor, one sleeve flung out toward me across the boards.
I left it there, one gray sleeve reaching toward the bed like it was still trying to hold on, and I turned off the light so I wouldn’t have to look at it. My heart was already halfway to the island. I told myself that was the wine.