Chapter 41
Theo
Being in love is as awful as I’d suspected it would be.
I stare at the phone in my hand with no idea what to do next. I miss her. I miss her the way you miss oxygen when you’re drowning. The way you miss your home when you leave it for the first time. I miss her in all these ways and I miss her beyond that too.
She’s right, of course, about everything.
I’ve given her nothing. I’ve promised nothing, and it had less to do with this story going public than it did the fact that I was still hoping I could save myself.
There are pieces of Bex—just like her mother—that are unknowable.
She is capable of understanding things I’ll never be able to grasp and doing things with such subtlety that I won’t even know they’re happening.
I wanted to avoid a relationship because you can never entirely know another person…
and now I’ve fallen for the most unknowable person of all and probably destroyed any chance I had with her.
I go for a long run, hoping to drive this ache from my chest, but it’s still there when I return to my barren flat, a flat that no longer serves me.
Do I actually miss Rick and Jessie’s house?
No. But I miss the sight of my glowing wife there, with a frayed blanket over her legs and some unwieldy tome or unexpected magazine in her lap.
I miss her mattress and mine, pushed together on the ancient shag carpet, our hands linked as we fall asleep under the hum of the air-conditioning.
Until Bex, and in spite of owning the company, I was never a fan of travel—it seemed like a lot of effort when London had enough of everything I need: museums, beautiful architecture, great restaurants.
Now, however, I’d give London up in a heartbeat if I could be exploring the world with her instead.
Dawn comes, and the story breaks. I’m made to look exactly the way I knew I would: like a suave lothario with a reputation, one who was “close” with the husband he cuckolded, though I’d met Wendy’s husband only a handful of times over the past decade.
My lawyers will demand a retraction, but the story is halfway across the world by now.
People are going to remember what they read today, not the press’s one-line clarification a week hence.
It’s only six a.m. in New York when Lars calls.
I let it go to voicemail. What the fuck am I going to do?
How do I fix this? I’ve probably ruined any chance that the show will get picked up.
The company’s done. Bex will try to forgive me, but I doubt she can.
Not when I kept her in the dark about everything—not when I can’t give her the things she needs.
I spend the day in my apartment, ignoring the ringing phone—reporters asking for a comment—and photographers outside.
Instead, I swipe through all the pictures I took of Bex when I was pretending to photograph the view. I’d tell her to get out of the way, then make sure she was in the outer third of the frame and hope she didn’t notice.
Pulling her hair back after a long run in Paris—I told her I wanted a picture of the Seine.
In Capri, laughing at something and so lovely the camera barely caught the scenery behind her.
Holding the decapitated doll by its leg in Amsterdam, shivering on a black sand beach in Iceland.
I was gone for her long before I ever recognized it.
I pick up the phone for at least the twentieth time and put it down again. She asked me not to call and anything I say will be insufficient. She never knew where she stood with her family. I can’t be one more person in her life giving her a pat on the head but letting her think she’s not my world.
When I’ve gone through her photos for at least the tenth time, I look up “Bright Star,” the Keats poem Rick used to quote to Bex’s mother.
It describes a star, serene and mysterious. A star that surveys the earth, removed from it, beyond it—I’d have assumed it was just about a star, but I guess Rick thought it was about a woman he couldn’t understand but didn’t want to be away from.
It’s how he felt about his wife. It’s precisely how I feel about Bex, the girl who peacefully floated beside me in Porto Moniz, barely a year after she got arrested for threatening to punch a horse.
Who’d make a joke about her dead family and kiss a stranger, graveside, then burst into unexpected tears.
It bothered me that I couldn’t understand her, because not understanding her meant I could never predict whether she’d stay.
Except you can’t know whether anyone will stay.
You can’t know if they’ll choose someone else, if they’ll take the wrong train, if they’ll jump off a balcony.
A streak of sunlight—it can’t be held. You can only stand beneath it for as long as it chooses to remain.
Maybe that’s what real love is. If you get lucky, it lasts.
If not, your sunlight vanishes in the most painful way possible, the way it did for my brother three years ago or for Bex’s dad when his first wife died.
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft swell and fall,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest
I wasn’t an English major. I don’t like poetry. But if I were forced to draw a conclusion, I’d say Keats has chosen to remain with her in spite of the risks.
And even if Bex remains a mystery to me, the one thing I’m certain of is that beneath the jokes and the tears and the threatening to punch a horse, there’s a loving little heart, just waiting for someone to see and adore everything she is.
Which I do. And I’d be content to worship at her feet, to lie beside her for as long as she was willing to have me if I can only convince her to give me the chance.
I hated the way Kieran shouted what he felt to the world, the way he allowed himself to look like such a fool. But when you love someone, that’s what you do. Bex deserves all that and more.
I pick up the phone and return Lars’s call. I cut him off as he launches into a tirade about how I’ve fucked up everything.
“Lars,” I tell him, “I have an idea.”