Chapter 10 #3
Whitney doesn’t answer. She stands on the sidewalk in the emerald dress with tiramisu on the hem, and her silence is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard.
It’s louder than the cabs and the dog and the couple who are definitely pretending not to watch.
It’s louder than the laughter still leaking from the restaurant behind me where twenty people are eating fondue and none of them know that my life is splitting apart on this curb.
“I’ll never forgive you for this,” I say. My voice doesn’t sound like mine. It sounds like someone reading from a script they found on the ground—flat, rehearsed, belonging to a woman I don’t recognize but am choosing to be. “For making me choose.”
I turn around. I walk back into the restaurant. The warm light swallows me. The door closes behind me and the cold air and the cake and the emerald dress and Whitney—my Whit, my twin flame, my eighteen years of someone who knew me better than I knew myself—are on the other side of it.
I sit down. Greg asks where I went. I tell him I needed air.
He pours me more wine and goes back to his story about the golf trip and the celebrity, and I drink the wine and I laugh in the right places and I never once look at the empty chair beside me where the person I love most in the world was sitting ten minutes ago.
The chair stays empty for two years.
Six months later, I catch Greg with his hand on someone else’s wrist. Not a waitress this time. An intern from our company. In our bedroom. And Whit’s voice echoes through me like a bell I can’t stop ringing: When you’re ready to be brave. When you’re ready to face it.
I face it. I file for divorce. I do the brave thing, finally, too late, after the woman who begged me to be brave got tired of waiting and walked away.
I never call Whit. I mean to. Every day, I mean to.
But what do you say to the person who told you the truth and got punished for it?
What do you say to the friend who offered to hold your hand through the fire and got told I’ll never forgive you?
I keep meaning to call. I keep rehearsing the words.
I keep telling myself: next week. When the divorce is final.
When I’m ready. When I’ve earned the right to apologize.
And while I’m stalling, Whitney gets sick. While I’m being a coward, Whit finds a surrogate. While I’m lost in my own life, Whitney dies.
She dies on a Tuesday in May two years later…
And I’m still rehearsing.
I wake up with my face wet and the duvet twisted around me like a cocoon that failed at its one job.
The apartment is bright now—mid-morning light, aggressive and specific, the kind that exposes every smudge on every surface.
My phone is off. The Valencia call happened without me.
The world kept turning while I lay here drowning in memories of a restaurant that closed after Christmas last year after a grease fire that got out of control.
It’s all just gone now. The building, the people, all moving on to their inevitable fates, the memories burned to ash.
I roll onto my back and stare at the ceiling.
The cracks are still there. The apartment is still empty.
And somewhere across this city, Saylor is checking his phone and seeing my cancellation text and probably thinking I’m fine, because I wrote not feeling well instead of what I actually am, which is broken open, gutted, lying in the debris of a friendship I destroyed with my own cowardice.
I picture the baby. I do this sometimes—close my eyes and try to imagine her, even though I don’t know if it’s a her yet, even though Raven’s next ultrasound hasn’t happened.
I picture a girl anyway, because Whitney would have a girl.
Red curls. Freckles. Whitney’s face in miniature—those eyes that always saw too much, that always knew the truth before you said it, staring up at me from a bassinet with the quiet, devastating expectation of someone who is counting on me to be better than I’ve been.
One day, this child with Whit’s eyes will look at me and I will have to be the woman Whitney believed I could be—not the one who walked back into the restaurant. Not the one who chose Greg. Not the one who spent two years rehearsing an apology she never made.
The brave one. The one Whit kept waiting for. The one who was always in there, somewhere underneath the high-end pantsuits and the executive boardrooms and the perfectly structured life, too afraid to live until it was too late.
I can’t be too late again.
I sit up. The room tilts, but less. The headache pulses, but quieter.
My hands are still trembling, but I realize in perfect timing, my hands have trembled before and still cut fabric, still sketched, still held a pen steady enough to sign divorce papers.
Trembling is not the same as broken. Trembling is what happens when something inside you is trying to move.
I don’t turn my phone on. Not yet. The world can wait another hour.
For now, I sit in the bright, empty penthouse and let myself feel all of it—the grief, the anger, the guilt, the terrifying hope—without folding any of it into squares, without locking it in drawers, without designing my way around it.
For now, I just sit with it.
It’s the bravest thing I’ve done all week.