Chapter 15
The wedding invitations had been printed in January, and by February they had become artifacts of a future I was less and less certain about.
They were beautiful — heavy cream cardstock, letterpressed in navy ink, with our names in a font Eli had spent three evenings choosing because he believed that typography communicated more than content and that the wrong serif could undermine even the most sincere sentiment.
Emory Tate and Eli Strand request the pleasure of your company.
Forty-eight of them, addressed in Eli’s careful handwriting, stacked on the hall table in the apartment we shared, waiting to be mailed.
I hadn’t mailed them yet. The invitations had been ready for twelve days and I hadn’t mailed them, and the not-mailing was becoming its own kind of communication — a silence that grew louder with each day the stack didn’t shrink, each morning I walked past the hall table and didn’t pick them up and take them to the post office, each evening Eli glanced at the stack and said nothing because Eli understood that silence was sometimes the beginning of a conversation the other person wasn’t ready to have.
The internet, meanwhile, had decided my life was a romance.
It had started with the identity reveal — Lena Marsh’s article, which had stripped Maren Hale away and left Emory Tate standing in the spotlight with her scar and her pen name and her story.
The story was irresistible. A wronged hockey wife writes a bestselling novel under a pseudonym, rebuilds her life in Brooklyn, falls in love with a literature professor.
It had everything: betrayal, redemption, a new beginning with a quieter man, the triumph of the woman who was left behind.
The internet loved it with the possessive love the internet has for narratives that confirm what people want to believe — that leaving is the right choice, that starting over works, that the kind professor is always better than the hockey star.
I was the main character of a story I hadn’t written.
The public version of my life — the version that lived on Instagram accounts and podcast episodes and those aggregation websites that repackage real people’s pain into shareable content — was a story about escape and redemption.
Emory Tate, who walked out of a marriage and a hospital and a city and kept walking until she found a bookshop in Brooklyn and a man who made every day Saturday.
The problem was that the story was true.
All of it was true. The leaving, the rebuilding, the bookshop, the professor, the novel that had turned private agony into public catharsis.
Every detail the internet had seized on was accurate.
I had been wronged. I had left. I had rebuilt.
I had found Eli. These things had happened, in this order, and the order made a shape, and the shape was a narrative, and the narrative had become a prison.
Because the narrative didn’t include the rink.
The narrative didn’t include the fellowship in my maiden name.
The narrative didn’t include the handwritten note about the fifty pages or the fired agent or the sold penthouse or the man who’d moved to a town that didn’t want to be named and was coaching twelve-year-olds at six in the morning and was learning how to show up for nothing.
The narrative was clean. It had a beginning and a middle and an ending, and the ending was the wedding — the kind professor, the navy tie, the forty-eight invitations on the hall table — and the ending was supposed to be happy, and the ending was supposed to be the point.
And I was looking at the stack of invitations and thinking about a community rink in Tennessee.
The engagement ring caught the morning light as I poured coffee.
Eli’s ring — the one he’d chosen without help, without a jeweler’s consultation, without the performative infrastructure that had surrounded Cade’s proposal.
He’d found it in an estate shop on Atlantic Avenue, a thin gold band with a small diamond that he’d paid for with savings from a summer teaching program, and he’d proposed at the kitchen table on a Tuesday evening while I was eating leftover pasta and wearing his Columbia T-shirt, and the proposal had been three sentences long and the third sentence was “I know I’m not the dramatic type but I promise to make every day Saturday,” and I’d said yes while crying into spaghetti, and it had been perfect.
It had been perfect. The proposal, the ring, the pasta, the T-shirt.
The whole architecture of our love was built on the opposite of spectacle — on quiet, on dailiness, on the domestic joy of two people who had found each other after losing other people and were grateful for the finding.
Eli hadn’t proposed at center ice. He hadn’t proposed with nineteen thousand witnesses.
He’d proposed at a kitchen table with a secondhand ring and a promise about Saturdays, and the privacy of it was the point, and the point was that privacy meant something to a woman who’d been made public against her will.
But the invitations were still on the table. And the not-mailing was its own kind of truth.
The public narrative pressed in from every direction.
A magazine — one of the ones that existed at the intersection of literature and lifestyle, the kind that featured essays about divorce alongside advertisements for expensive candles — had requested an interview about “life after The Penalty Box.” A podcast wanted to do an episode called “The Woman Who Wrote Her Way Out.” A literary organization had invited me to speak at their annual gala about “finding love after betrayal,” and the invitation had included a line about Eli — “your fiancé, the Columbia professor” — as if he were a character in my public story, a plot point in the redemption arc, the happy ending made flesh.
I hadn’t accepted any of them. But I couldn’t stop reading them, the way you can’t stop touching a bruise — not because you enjoy the pain but because you need to confirm its location, to map the exact dimensions of what hurts.
The comments were the worst part. The comment sections under every article about the reveal, every podcast episode, every social media post that mentioned my name.
I knew better than to read them. Every writer knows better than to read the comments.
But the comments were about me — not about Maren Hale, not about the character in the novel, but about Emory Tate, real person, real scar, real divorce — and the line between author and subject had been erased, and reading the comments was like reading a jury verdict delivered by strangers.
She’s living her best life. The professor is SO much better for her.
Imagine leaving a man like Cade Calloway and upgrading to a man who actually reads. Queen behavior.
If she goes back to him I swear to god. DO NOT go back to him Emory.
They didn’t know. They didn’t know about the rink, the fellowship, the fired agent.
They didn’t know that the narrative they’d built — Emory leaves, Emory writes, Emory wins — was missing chapters.
Essential chapters. The chapters where the man who’d hurt her was doing the only kind of work that mattered — the invisible kind, the kind without an audience, the kind that costs everything and impresses no one.
The requests kept coming, and each one reinforced the narrative, and the narrative reinforced the trap, and the trap was this: if I chose Cade — if I even considered choosing Cade — the public would see a woman going back to the man who hurt her.
Not a woman making a complicated choice based on evidence and change and the private knowledge that a community rink existed and a fellowship existed and a handwritten note about fifty pages existed.
The public would see weakness. The public would see a betrayal of the story I’d written, the story they’d adopted, the story that had made me theirs.
I’d written my way out. And the writing had built the walls I was trapped inside.
The February sun was thin through the kitchen windows, casting long shadows across the tiles — the blue ones, Eli’s choice, the color of the hideous ceramic bowl he loved.
I sat at the table with the coffee and the invitations and the ring and the laptop open to the second novel, which was now at twelve thousand words and was definitely about a woman who drives back to a place she swore she’d never return to, and the woman in the novel was braver than I was, or dumber, or both, and the highway in the novel was straight and the highway in my life was not.
I called Joss. She picked up on the second ring.
“The invitations are still on the table,” I said.
“Still?”
“Twelve days.”
“Emory—”
“I know.”
“Do you? Because twelve days is — twelve days is a sentence. Twelve days of not mailing wedding invitations is a paragraph, and the paragraph says something, and the something is the thing you haven’t said out loud yet.”
“I’m not not mailing them. I’m just — not mailing them yet.”
“Those are the same thing. Those are exactly the same thing and you know it.” A pause. The Joss pause — shorter than usual, sharper. “Have you told Eli?”
“Told him what?”
“That you’re thinking about Cade.”
“I’m not thinking about Cade.”
“You’re thinking about a community rink in Tennessee and a fellowship in your maiden name and a handwritten note about fifty pages. That’s thinking about Cade, Emory. That’s the definition of thinking about Cade.”
She was right. She was always right. The specificity of Joss’s rightness was one of the more inconvenient features of having a best friend who had been an editor for a decade and could read a subtext the way other people read highway signs — automatically, without effort, unable to not see the meaning underneath the surface.
“I have to go,” I said.
“Mail the invitations or don’t. But don’t leave them on the table. The table is the worst place for them. The table is purgatory.”
Eli came home at five.