Chapter Twenty-Six
Shelby and Brandon were fifteen minutes late when they sat down across from Vanessa and Corinne at Café Le Petit Pont.
Brandon had dragged his feet, muttering about how he hadn’t flown all the way to Paris just to eat breakfast with people he could see back home.
It had taken him an inordinately long time to throw on a polo shirt, pressed khakis, and his usual day-off boat shoes.
He could not have looked more American if he’d Sharpied TOURIST across his forehead.
Corinne hopped up immediately when Shelby and Brandon walked in to give him a big hug, but Vanessa stayed seated, her arms crossed over her chest, evaluating him as Corinne gushed about how she was so glad he’d come to his senses and how it was so romantic that he’d flown all the way to Paris to win Shelby back.
“Be nice,” Shelby muttered to Vanessa, who was watching the exchange with narrowed eyes.
“I’m always nice,” Vanessa replied under her breath, giving her a sideways glance before returning her glare to Brandon.
“I mean be polite to him. This is my choice, Vanessa. I choose him.”
Vanessa looked at her. “No offense, Shelb, but that’s just dumb.”
Shelby blinked at her a few times. “Are you serious right now?”
Vanessa took a sip of her coffee. “This is the guy who tossed you aside when it suited him. And now he’s here to win you back because it suits him. Where do you figure into all of this?”
“Things are going to be different,” Shelby said softly. “They really are.”
“Yeah? What’s changed?”
Brandon interrupted then, squeezing between them to lean down and give Vanessa a hug, which she politely accepted without really hugging back. As Brandon backed away awkwardly, his gaze darted between the two of them. “Everything okay, Vanessa?” he asked.
“Why wouldn’t it be?” she asked with a broad, fake smile.
Brandon exhaled. “Phew. I thought you were pissed at me.”
Vanessa’s artificial smile widened, and she shrugged, but she didn’t deny it. Concern flickered across Brandon’s face, but before things could get more awkward, Corinne pulled him aside to regale him with a story about the crazy fondue bar in Montmartre.
Vanessa turned back to Shelby. “What about the hot bartender?”
Brandon glanced sharply at Shelby, his brow furrowing, and Shelby could feel heat rising to her cheeks.
“Shh,” she said to Vanessa, lowering her voice and turning her back to Brandon. “Obviously I don’t want Brandon to know.”
“To know what?” Vanessa said, but at least she was whispering, and when Shelby looked over her shoulder at Brandon, she was relieved to find him fully tuned in to whatever Corinne was saying. “That you had real feelings for him?”
“It was just a fun fling,” Shelby whispered, feeling a surge of guilt for minimizing how she’d felt with Russ.
“Yeah? Well, the way you talked about him the other day wasn’t the way someone talks about a fling,” Vanessa said in a low voice. “And the way he looked at you was not very flingy, either.”
“Flingy’s not a word.” Shelby was stalling, and from Vanessa’s eye roll, it was clear that she knew it.
“What, like I’m going to move to Paris for some guy I hardly know?
” Shelby added, feeling heat rise to her cheeks.
“Besides, what I have with Brandon is real. He wants to try again. He’s all-in, Vanessa. ”
“Is he?” Vanessa asked, her tone sad. “You’re sure about that?”
Shelby followed Vanessa’s gaze to Brandon, who had paused in his conversation with Corinne to stare out the window at a girl with long legs and a very short skirt smoking a cigarette just outside the café.
Shelby’s stomach flipped, and she felt woozy, disoriented.
“Of course I’m sure,” she said, anyhow, but she could hear the doubt in her own voice.
There would always be a girl with a short skirt, and Brandon was always going to look, wasn’t he?
He would never look at Shelby the way Russ had, like she’d hung the moon and the stars.
There would always be something better he was striving for.
She’d never feel like enough if she stayed in this marriage, and the truth of that settled on her shoulders, dark, heavy, and inescapable.
“He’s not going to change, Shelby,” Vanessa said softly.
“I know,” she said, turning away from Vanessa, her throat beginning to close.
“Everything okay, babe?” Brandon turned and gave her an innocent smile, like he hadn’t just been ogling someone right in front of the wife he was trying to win back.
“What’s good on the menu here?” he asked, settling into the seat beside her and grabbing her hand.
In an instant, her palm was clammy and she felt like throwing up.
“Excuse me,” Shelby said, abruptly pushing her chair back from the table.
“Babe?” Brandon asked, sounding concerned now.
But she ignored him. She couldn’t be here anymore, pretending that everything was okay. She hurried to the back of the restaurant and down the spiral stairs to the bathroom in the basement.
In the ladies’ room, she stared at herself in the mirror. “What are you doing?” she whispered. The answer should have been easy. She was reconnecting the dots of her life. She was getting back to normal. She was doing the thing her mother wanted her to do, that most of her friends wanted her to do.
But what about what she wanted? Where do you figure into all of this? Vanessa had asked. The truth was, Shelby didn’t really know the answer. There were so many reasons to get back together with Brandon. But what about the one big reason that made everything else null and void?
“I don’t actually want to be married to him,” she said to her reflection in the mirror, stunned at the sudden clarity of the thought, almost breathless at the way that as soon as she’d said the words, it felt like a huge weight had been lifted from her shoulders.
“I don’t want to be married to him,” she said more firmly, really listening to herself say the words this time.
Once they were out of her mouth, she could feel the truth of them in the very marrow of her bones, and a powerful wave of relief swept over her.
She exhaled slowly, then she turned away from the mirror and went back upstairs, settling into her seat between Vanessa and Brandon.
“You okay?” Vanessa asked softly.
“Not yet,” Shelby replied. “But I think I will be.”
She turned to Brandon, who was studying his menu with a frown. “Why do you love me?” she asked abruptly.
He looked at her and blinked a few times, processing the question. “Because you’re hot as hell, babe,” he said after a few beats, giving her a charming, broad smile.
Did it say something about her that he expected this would be the right answer? “No, really,” she said.
He darted a glance at Corinne. Vanessa crossed her arms over her chest again, waiting. Brandon cleared his throat. “You’re my wife,” he said. “We promised each other forever, didn’t we?”
“I’m pretty sure that the divorce papers your attorney presented to my attorney promised the opposite of that,” Shelby said.
“I told you. That was a mistake.”
“No,” Shelby said. “I think maybe this is the mistake.”
He looked blankly at her, again shooting a nervous glance at the others. It was clear in that moment that what they thought of him mattered just as much as the conversation at hand. “What are you saying?”
“This is the mistake,” Shelby said, the wobble in her voice disappearing as she went on.
“This, Brandon. You broke my heart. And I thought that the only way to pick up the pieces was to hand them back to you and ask you to reassemble me. But that’s not true.
I can fix the broken parts myself, and even if my life doesn’t look like I thought it would, it’ll still be my life I’m living, not yours. ”
Brandon’s nostrils flared, a sure sign that he was getting angry.
He’d never raised a hand to her, but he had flown into a rage more than once, smashing glasses in their kitchen, slamming doors so hard they came loose from their hinges.
She had managed to erase that from her collection of idealized mental pictures of their marriage, but now, looking at the fire smoldering dangerously in his eyes, she had a sudden memory of him punching a hole through their bedroom wall after demanding to know why she couldn’t just get pregnant without so much drama, like all his friends’ wives had.
That, she realized, was the image she needed to deliberately go back to every time she wavered. Brandon as he looked now, his face turning purple, his eyes bulging as he tried to control his anger. That was the real Brandon, not the smooth, polished version he presented to everyone else.
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” he said finally, some of the color fading from his face as he got ahold of himself. There were, after all, other people present. “You go to Paris for a week and suddenly you don’t want to be married to me anymore?”
“You were the one who didn’t want to be married to me, Brandon,” she shot back.
“I told you, that was a mistake! I thought you wanted me back. And now, for some reason, our marriage isn’t worth fighting for? What the hell changed, Shelby?”
“You did,” she said quietly. “And I did, too. Or maybe we just both became who we really were, the way people do when they grow up. The thing is, Brandon, I want to be with someone who works to understand me, who doesn’t blame me for everything that goes wrong, and who would never walk out when life got hard.
” Was it strange that it was Russ’s face that flashed across her mind for an instant?
She barely knew him, but she knew she could trust him to care for her feelings with a respect Brandon had never shown her.
How had she convinced herself that Russ was the one she needed to walk away from?
Brandon’s eyes darted to Vanessa and Corinne again. Vanessa was glaring at him, and the warmth had even gone out of Corinne’s expressions. “Nobody will give you the life I’m able to give you, Shelby,” he said after a long pause.