Chapter 8
Naomi
The prenup was Aaron's idea.
I want that on the record, because it's the best part. The most satisfying part.
Five years ago, three weeks before the wedding, Aaron had slid a folder across the kitchen table with the particular sheepish charm he used when he wanted something unpleasant to go down easy. Just a formality, he'd said. My dad's lawyer insists. Protects us both.
Except, it didn't protect us both. It protected Aaron — his family money, his future earnings, the assets he came in with. I'd signed it without a fight because I was young and in love and couldn't imagine a version of us that ended.
But somewhere in all that boilerplate his father's expensive lawyer had drafted, there was a clause. A clean, symmetrical little clause about infidelity — and it was there because of me.
It had been my one condition. I'd signed away everything else without a murmur, but I'd looked up from that folder and asked, in a small voice I'm still proud of, for something about faithfulness.
Not because I distrusted him but because it was the one promise that mattered to me more than money, and I wanted it written down.
In the event either spouse commits adultery.
They'd humored me. I remember the way the lawyer had looked at Aaron. A warning. But Arron probably thought he could get away with anything, so he’d squeezed my hand under the table and told me of course, anything, whatever put me at ease.
It put me at ease for five years.
He never once imagined I’d find the proof.
Diane Sullivan read it aloud to me in her office with the flat satisfaction of a woman who has watched a lot of men build their own gallows. The house — the house Aaron loved, the house he'd chosen— came to me. Free and clear.
I signed those papers with my own last name. Naomi Cross. And I did it with the same pen I'd signed the divorce papers with. I'd kept it. Framed it even. I called it my revenge pen.
The first thing I did was gut the living room.
Not out of rage — I want to be clear about that too. I wasn't smashing things. I just needed to excise every bit of Aaron from the space and replace it with something wholly me.
I stood in the middle of a room I'd decorated to Aaron's taste, in colors he'd approved, around a sofa he'd picked and I realized I didn't like a single thing in it. I looked around and could not find myself anywhere.
So I started pulling it apart.
The gray sofa went. The art he'd chosen went. The heavy drapes that kept the room dim and moody came down, and light poured in, and I stood there in the sudden brightness and actually laughed out loud in my empty house.
I painted a wall the deep, unreasonable green of an emerald. Because hell if I was going to let those two ruin my favorite color. I had that emerald to thank for my newfound freedom.
Now, the personal glow-up? That wasn't planned. It just happened.
That's the thing most people get wrong. I didn't sit down and decide to reinvent myself. I just started doing things I wanted to do, one at a time, and looked up months later to find a different woman looking back at me in a mirror.
I cut my hair. Not a breakup-chop, nothing frantic — I just went in and, when the stylist asked what I was thinking, I told her the truth for once instead of describing something low-maintenance and easy to live with.
I bought clothes in colors. I started running in the mornings, not to shrink myself but because it felt good to move through the world taking up space.
Small things. But I'd spent five years arranging myself around another person, and it turned out there was a lot of me that had been folded up and put away. I unfolded it, piece by piece, and the house filled up with light and color, and somehow, so did I.
Then there was the new business. That came unplanned too.
I was mid-transformation — half the downstairs done, colorful, cheerful and full of personality— when Carol from two doors down came by to drop off a package the courier had left at hers by accident.
She stepped inside and stopped dead.
"Naomi," she said. "Naomi. What did you do in here?"
I saw it through her eyes for a second — the light, the green wall, something you’ll admire in a magazine but never dare put in your own home. Except I had.
"I just... redid it," I said.
"You just redid it." She turned a slow circle.
"It looks like a great. It looks like a person with actual taste got hold of a house.
" She caught herself. "I mean — you obviously have taste, I just — my living room has looked like a dentist's waiting room for eleven years and I don't even know where I'd start. "
"I could show you," I said. It just came out.
"Would you? God, would you really? I'd pay you."
I opened my mouth to wave it off — the old reflex, oh no, don't be silly, I couldn't take your money — the reflex of a woman who did enormous amounts of work for free and let other people take the credit.
I closed it again.
"Great," I said. "When do you want to start?"
Carol's living room led to Carol's sister's condo, which led to a woman from Carol's book club whose whole house needed help before she sold it.
Word moved the way it moves in a place like this — over fences, at the good coffee shop, in the pickup line — and within two months I had a good thing going, and a small, growing list of people who wanted it done to their homes too.
I called it And After. As in, before and after. Because that was the most important part.
The first real check from a complete stranger — not anyone Carol or I knew — who’d found out about me from word of mouth, felt so good. I photographed it before I deposited it.
Life was good. and I’d learned first hand that no matter how bad the messy before and the middle, it was the after that was the most important.
The only thing that remotely even bothered me was the fact that Keith and Jillian’s wedding was coming up, and I would have to face the two people who I erroneously trusted, being together as a happy couple.
But that was a problem I’ll face when I get there. One day at a time.