13. Jillian
— ? —
Jillian
The community center smelled like industrial cleaner and old coffee, and I loved it.
“Okay, so we’ve got the venue for free, obviously, since it’s literally this building,” I said, tapping my pen against the planning spreadsheet I’d printed out like some kind of prehistoric cave person. “But we need to talk about catering. What’s our actual budget?”
Carmen, who ran the after-school program and had recruited me for this committee three days ago when I’d shown up to donate some of my old event supplies, slid a paper across the folding table. “Four hundred dollars.”
I blinked. “For food for how many people?”
“Two hundred. Maybe two-fifty if we’re lucky with turnout.”
Four hundred dollars. For two hundred people. I used to spend four hundred dollars on napkin rings. I used to agonize over whether the letterpress invitations should be cream or ecru while someone handed me a check with more zeros than I could process without feeling vaguely ill.
“Okay,” I said, and I meant it. “Okay. We can work with that.”
The woman next to me, Destiny, twenties, nose ring, ran the teen mentorship program, looked skeptical. “How? We did a potluck last year and three people brought store-bought cookies and one guy brought a bag of ice.”
“Just ice? Not even drinks?”
“Just ice. He said he panicked.”
I laughed. Actually laughed, not the polite performance laugh I’d perfected at Foundation events, but the real one.
It felt rusty. “All right. Here’s what we do.
We partner with the culinary program at the vocational school, they’re always looking for real-world practice.
We reach out to the grocery store on Fifth for day-old bread donations.
And we do a taco bar, because taco bars are infinitely scalable and everyone loves tacos. ”
Carmen was writing furiously. “Go on.”
“For decorations, we hit the dollar store hard, but strategically. And I know a florist who owes me a favor.” Technically, I’d done her wedding for free three years ago as a gift. I’d never called in the marker. “She’ll give us centerpieces at cost.”
“You’ve done this before,” Destiny said. It wasn’t quite a question.
“Yeah.” I clicked my pen. Open, closed. “Yeah, I used to do this. Before.”
Before I gave it up. Before I decided that being Trevor Anderson’s wife was a full-time job that left no room for the things that had made me me. Before I’d let myself shrink, one compromise at a time, until I could barely remember why I’d started event planning in the first place.
I remembered now.
We worked for another hour, mapping out the timeline for the community center’s annual fundraiser, and by the end I had a three-page plan and a feeling in my chest I’d almost forgotten. Purpose. Direction. A thing that was mine.
“Same time Thursday?” Carmen asked as we packed up.
“I’ll be here.”
***
Harper was waiting when I got back to her apartment, which she’d insisted I treat as home base for as long as I needed. She was practically vibrating on the couch, phone in hand, looking like she might explode from the pressure of news she was clearly dying to share.
“Sit,” she commanded.
“I just walked in. I haven’t even put down my bag.”
“Sit down, pour yourself wine, and prepare yourself, because I have information.”
I dropped onto the couch beside her. “What kind of information?”
“The Trevor threw Chloe out kind. The Trevor cut off Margot in front of witnesses kind.” Harper grabbed my arm. “Jill, I’m talking scorched earth. I’m talking family civil war. I’m talking the Anderson clan is in shambles and apparently it’s all because your husband…”
“Soon-to-be-ex-husband.”
“…your husband has decided to actually develop a spine three years too late.”
My heart did a complicated thing. “Tell me exactly what happened.”
Harper pulled up her phone, scrolling through what appeared to be a text chain.
“Okay, so you know my friend Melissa? Her sister is married to someone who works at the country club. And apparently, Trevor showed up there two days ago when Chloe was having lunch with some of her society friends, and he, this is a direct quote, ‘told her to get her things out of his mother’s house by sunset or he’d have security remove them. ’”
“He said that? In public?”
“In the dining room. During the lunch rush.” Harper’s eyes were gleaming.
“Chloe apparently tried to do the whole ‘let’s discuss this privately’ thing, and Trevor said, again, quote, ‘I’ve been private for too long.
You manipulated my marriage and my mother helped you do it, and I’m done pretending that’s acceptable. ’”
I sat very still.
“And then,” Harper continued, “he turned to leave, and Chloe called after him something like ‘you’ll regret this,’ and Trevor said, ‘The only thing I regret is every minute I wasn’t fighting for my wife.’ And he walked out.”
The words landed somewhere in my chest and stayed there, taking up residence.
“And Margot?” I managed.
“Cut off. Fully. Trevor told her he won’t take her calls, won’t attend family events, won’t participate in Anderson Foundation business until she apologizes.
To you. Directly.” Harper set down her phone.
“Jill, the woman is apparently apoplectic. The whole family is ‘concerned about Trevor’s emotional state.’ Which is rich, considering none of them were concerned about your emotional state when you were drowning. ”
I stared at the coffee table. There was a ring from a water glass someone hadn’t used a coaster for. I focused on it because focusing on anything else felt too big.
“This is what you wanted,” Harper said, softer now. “Isn’t it?”
“I don’t know what I wanted.” That wasn’t true. “No. I know. I wanted him to see me. For three years. I wanted him to choose me, just once, without me having to beg for it.”
“And now he’s choosing you.”
“Now he’s making gestures.” I heard how hard that sounded.
I felt the hope underneath it, dangerous and fragile, and I was so careful with it.
So careful. “Throwing Chloe out isn’t the test, Harper.
Standing up to his mother isn’t the test. The test is whether he can change what’s inside him.
Whether he can be someone who shows up, consistently, without needing a crisis to remind him that I exist.”
Harper nodded slowly. “That’s fair.”
“I’m not going back to someone who only notices me when I’m leaving.” My voice cracked slightly. I cleared my throat. “I can’t be that desperate again. I won’t survive it twice.”
Harper reached over and squeezed my hand. We sat like that for a moment, quiet, the weight of everything settling around us.
“For what it’s worth,” Harper said finally, “I think you’re handling this exactly right.
Protecting yourself while leaving room for the possibility that people can change.
” She paused. “Even if that person is Trevor Anderson, who I still think deserves to step on a Lego every day for the rest of his life.”
I almost smiled. “Just one Lego?”
“One Lego per day. It’s a long-term curse. Very sustainable.”
***
Two days later, I was back at Harper’s after a committee meeting that had run long, the vocational school was on board, the florist had agreed to help, and I’d spent an hour teaching Carmen how to make a spreadsheet that didn’t look like a crime against formatting, when Harper came home from work with a look on her face I’d never seen before.
“Okay,” she said. “Okay. Sit down.”
“Again?”
“This is bigger. This is…” She took a breath. “I got a call from Natalie Anderson.”
I froze. “Trevor’s cousin Natalie?”
“The one who always liked you. The one who told you at Christmas that you were the best thing that ever happened to the family.”
“I remember.” I’d cried in the bathroom after, because no one else in his family had ever said anything like that to me.
“She called me because she knew I’d get this to you, and she thought you deserved to know what happened at the Anderson family dinner last night.”
The Andersons had monthly family dinners. Mandatory attendance. I’d sat through thirty-four of them, give or take, always in the same chair, always feeling like I was being evaluated and found slightly wanting.
“What happened?”
Harper sat down across from me. “Trevor showed up. First time since everything went down. And the first thing he did, before he said hello, before he sat down, was he walked to the empty chair where you always sat. And he just… stood there for a second. Looking at it.”
My throat tightened.
“Then he said, and Natalie wrote this down, so I’m reading exactly, ‘My wife isn’t here because I failed her. And because some people at this table helped me fail her. And that’s going to be addressed.’”
I pressed my hand to my mouth.
“He looked right at Margot when he said it. Apparently, the whole table went silent. Dead silent. And Margot said something like ‘this isn’t the time or place,’ and Trevor said, ‘It’s the perfect time and place, because everyone here should know that I won’t be attending any family function until my mother delivers a genuine, face-to-face apology that Jillian can accept or reject. Those are my terms.’”
I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t…
“Margot told him he was being dramatic. That he was ‘throwing away his family over a woman.’” Harper’s voice had gone hard. “And Trevor said, Jill, I need you to hear this exactly, he said, ‘She is my family. She was always supposed to be. I just forgot.’”
The tears came before I could stop them.
I put my face in my hands and cried, not prettily, not gracefully, but in huge, ugly sobs that tore out of me like they’d been trapped for years.
Because they had been. Because I’d spent three years wondering if I was crazy, if I was asking for too much, if wanting my husband to choose me over his mother was somehow unreasonable.
And here was Trevor, finally, finally, standing up in front of everyone who’d made me feel small and saying out loud that I mattered.
That I was his family. That he’d forgotten, but he remembered now.
Harper held me through it. She didn’t say anything, just let me cry until I was empty, until I was wrung out and exhausted and my face felt like it had been sandpapered.
“I don’t know what to do with this,” I whispered.
“You don’t have to know yet.”
“He’s doing everything right and I’m still so scared.”
“That’s because you’re smart.” Harper handed me a tissue. “Being scared doesn’t mean you can’t also be hopeful. Both things can be true.”
I wiped my face, trying to put myself back together. Words kept echoing through my head. She is my family. She was always supposed to be.
My phone rang.
I looked at the screen, expecting Trevor. Bracing myself for Trevor.
The name on the screen was not Trevor.
MARGOT ANDERSON.
I stared at it. Harper stared at it. We both sat frozen as it rang a second time, a third, the sound impossibly loud in the quiet apartment.
“Jill,” Harper said carefully. “You don’t have to answer that.”
But I was already reaching for it. Already pressing accept. Already bringing it to my ear with a hand that barely shook.
“Jillian.” Margot’s voice was exactly as I remembered, cool, controlled, every syllable precise. “We should talk.”