Bex
The phone rings early. We’ve got a full day of waterfall rappelling and cliff-jumping planned—all of which I’m slightly too sore to enjoy after yesterday’s run—but I certainly didn’t plan to have it begin four hours after I fell asleep.
Theo grabs his cell and takes it outside. I’m out of bed and making coffee when he returns, and I see the change in him before he ever says a word.
His eyes are empty. “There’s an issue at home,” he says, looking away. “I need to make a few more calls.”
He walks back outside with his phone and continues onto the beach, and every joyful thing inside me evaporates as if it was never there at all.
Nothing about our company would require privacy, not from me, and that sends my brain to all the worst places just the way Bronwyn’s used to.
She allowed herself to care enough to be wounded by people. I guess I finally have too.
He returns to the house looking no happier than he did when he left. “I’ve got to get back to London,” he says. “I’m so sorry. There are just some things there that can’t wait.”
I nod, striving to be the girl I’ve been all along, the one who doesn’t care what he’s hiding, who isn’t expecting him to stick around. There’s this ache in my chest that suggests I’m not that girl any longer. “Okay. When do you leave?”
He glances back at his phone. “I’m trying to get a flight out today. I’m sorry…can you give me a few minutes to see if I can make it work?”
He’s already back on his laptop, clearly relieved to be rid of me before I’ve even left the room. The feeling is familiar—it’s how Jessie looked every single time I was heading back to school. It’s probably how my mother looked too, pushing me on the swings while plotting a new life without me.
I remain out on the pool deck in my pajamas, watching the sun rise over the horizon, so sick to my stomach that nothing on my phone can distract me. What the hell has gone wrong and how did I not have a clue it was coming?
When I return, Theo is dressed and shoving clothes into his bag.
He glances at me, his jaw tight. “I was able to get on a nonstop, but I’ve got to hurry. I’m so sorry about this.”
“It’s fine,” I reply, my voice entirely flat. “Work comes first.”
He swallows, hesitating. I wait for him to admit it’s not work he’s returning for, and he doesn’t. Maybe a healthier person would take this moment to ask him where things stand. To tell him where I stand. To say, I think I’m falling in love with you. I need to know if this is what you want.
Instead, I hold every one of those thoughts inside me and walk him out to the waiting cab.
Lars and Katrina come down the street to join us—Theo must have texted Lars to let him know, though I’m not sure how Katrina heard…
unless they were together. “We’ll see you in Maplewood,” Lars says, with a hand on Theo’s forearm.
Theo thanks him and then glances at me. “I’ll talk to you soon,” he says.
I nod, and he hoists his bag higher on his shoulder. He’s about to turn for the car but at the last minute steps forward, pulling me against him. “I’ll call when I get in,” he says quietly. It would be entirely sufficient if there wasn’t uncertainty in his voice too—as if he’s not sure he means it.
“Okay,” I whisper, taking in one last hit of him—minty breath, that soap he always uses. He releases me and then he’s off, in a car that disappears over the hill before I even have time to wave goodbye.
What are you not telling me, Theo? Because this seemed like an ending.
Maybe it was.
Three hours later I head out to the Valley of the Nuns for our final day of shooting. It’s gloriously green—surrounded on all sides by sky-high volcanic cliffs. A beautiful place that I’m absolutely miserable in.
Everyone keeps saying how much it sucks that Theo is missing this…
and I agree, but not for the reasons they think.
It sucks because he chose to leave. It sucks because there’s so much he hasn’t told me…
and if he’s still being this evasive with me now, it’s hard to imagine I’m not fooling myself into believing there’s more between us than there is.
I slide down waterfalls, I rappel, I jump off a cliff.
My body aches from yesterday’s run but the pain is almost inconsequential next to my anxiety about Theo.
I’ve been telling myself since this started with him simply to enjoy it while it lasted.
But I’ve been leaning on him, even before we were together, in ways I never realized until this moment and I want to take every one of them back.
I rappel down one last waterfall and Lars positions me on the river’s edge afterward to pepper me with questions, on camera.
“How was it today?” he asks.
“It was great,” I reply through clenched teeth.
“Complete sentences, Bex,” he reminds me—they want, as much as possible, to keep their voices out of this.
“Today was great,” I say woodenly. “I loved the rappelling.”
“You don’t seem happy,” he says. “Is that because of Theo?”
Internally I groan. He’s trying to get me to say something that indicates an issue in our marriage. It frustrates me more than normal because this time…there is an issue.
“It was disappointing that Theo had to leave for work early,” I say, my voice flat. “I think he’d have enjoyed this.”
“Bex,” Lars groans, “you sound like a CEO talking about a merger that went poorly. This is your husband. You flew thirteen hours for this trip only to have him take off early and miss the best day. Where’s the emotion? Where’s the sadness or the rage?”
“Is that how you’re planning to edit this?” I ask, my voice rough. I narrow my eyes at LJ, my signal to stop rolling, but he ignores me. “Are you planning to make it look like I got left again?”
“Is that how you perceive this?” he asks. “Do you feel like Theo left you?”
“He didn’t leave me. He was always meant to be Bronwyn’s anyway.”
God. I can’t believe I said that. “Stop filming,” I demand, wiping my eyes as I turn toward the van.
No one brings up my outburst on the way home, but they’re on eggshells, discussing anything but Theo and the trip, which is almost worse.
Why the hell did I say that about Bronwyn? Did I think admitting what I’d taken from her would somehow set things right? That it would magically make Theo call? Because he hasn’t. He must have arrived in London hours ago, but there’s nothing from him even after we’ve reached the house.
I climb into the shower and press my face to the wall as Lars’s final question rings in my head.
Do you feel like Theo left you?
“Yes,” I whisper aloud. “And I don’t know what more I could have done.”
There’s never been a time when I wasn’t left behind somehow, and despite my apparent IQ, I’m not smart enough to make it stop happening.
I was too young to do much about it when my mother was deciding to leave. No three-year-old has the wherewithal to make herself slightly more lovable.
But after that? I did everything I could. I failed tests and classes on purpose, gave up travel soccer, never voiced a word of complaint about anything, and it still wasn’t enough. Jessie still didn’t invite me to family dinners and bad-mouthed me whenever she got the chance.
Every fucked-up family needs an anchor. That way, you can blame the anchor for what’s gone wrong and ignore the fact that your boat was never all that seaworthy in the first place.
I became that anchor, but they all still left me behind, and I asked nothing of Theo, not a single thing, and that wasn’t enough either.
I never asked him what he wanted. I never asked what would happen after the show ended, if I was at all different from the hordes of women who came before me, why he never suggested I come back to London with him.
I never demanded a single whisper of assurance, hoping that, for once in my life, someone would just choose me.
It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. And I’ve been knocked to the ground at many points over the past year, but this is the first time I haven’t been sure I can pick myself back up.
· · ·
In the evening I join the crew on the patio for our final meal together until the marathon.
“You’re quiet,” says Katrina.
I smile. “It’s just kind of sad, having it end.”
She raises a brow. “Really? I thought you hated filming.”
I don’t know what to say because yeah…I don’t like filming.
I don’t like having pretend conversations with my pretend husband about places I’m mostly pretending to visit.
But I liked having Theo by my side. I liked it enough to put up with almost anything, even the pain of loving him when I suspected he wouldn’t love me back.
Lars appears just as the sun is setting to announce he’s taken a crack at the show’s first trailer if we want to watch. We follow him into the living room. Everyone is enthusiastic as he connects his laptop to the TV. I would be, too, under other circumstances.
The lights lower, and the chatter stops as the first images appear.
There’s some handheld video of our wedding, the two of us kissing at the Eiffel Tower. It’s sort of amazing how much a few seconds of footage can tell a piece of a story—each of them is a chapter.
I’m in a bikini at Sky Lagoon and Theo walking behind me—with something in his face I’d never guessed was there at the time. He liked me. Even when I was generally awful to him. So why the hell is he rushing off to London and treating me like an afterthought now?
He’s carrying me over the rocks on the way to the boat in Sorrento, growling, “Not everything is a performance,” then laughing in bed with me in Capri.
He asks me in Amsterdam about kids, and I tell him I hadn’t even thought about it.
In Norway we’re arguing about where we’ll live while I look up at him with starry eyes, so ridiculously besotted a child could have seen it.
And then there’s a glimpse of the fight—Theo lunging at Caden, though you can’t quite make out who he was lunging at, and then me today, telling them to stop filming as I walk away in tears.