1. Imogen #5
Flat, cold, and empty. The sheets are already gone to room temperature, which means he’s been gone for hours.
I lie there with my hand pressed to the dent where his body should be, and I don’t open my eyes yet, because for one more second I want to live in the version of the morning where the whole beautiful day wasn’t just a thing I dreamed.
Then I open them.
There’s a pink rose on his pillow.
A single stem, laid careful across the cool white of the pillowcase where his head should be, and propped against it, folded once, my name on the front in his slanting careful hand.
I sit up slowly. I pick up the rose first and then I unfold the note, as I read it in the gray light with my knees pulled up to my chest.
[ Imogen,
The book grabbed me by the throat at four this morning and wouldn’t let go.
I didn’t want to wake you. Yesterday was the best day I’ve had in a year and I’m greedy for another one, so hold this over me, because we’re going to do it again soon, and I’m putting our anniversary in ink where I can’t wriggle out of it.
Musso’s. Just us. I promise.
- Yours, H ]
I read it three times.
It’s a good note. That’s the terrible part.
There’s nothing wrong with a single word of it.
It’s warm and it’s specific and it’s him.
There’s also a pink rose on the pillow that means the one thing we never say, and any reasonable woman would hold this note to her chest and float through her whole day on the strength of it.
But I’ve gotten a version of this note before.
Different words, same shape. From a hotel lobby in another city, dictated to a concierge who spelled my name wrong.
And I know, the way you know a season is turning before the weather admits it, that “soon” is a word my husband uses when he’s already gone, and that the anniversary he just put in ink is one more promise that will have to survive whatever the book decides it needs from him first.
Still. He left the rose. That counts. It has to.
I hold it, and I hold the note while I let myself have one more minute of the good version before I get up and rejoin my life.
That’s when the phone starts.
It’s on the nightstand, and it lights up once, a soft pale glow against the ceiling, and I almost ignore it.
Then it goes again. And again, faster, buzzing itself in a slow crawl across the wood, notification stacking on notification until the whole screen is a wall of light I can see from across the bed.
I reach for it, expecting him. Expecting another line to go with the note, another apology with a promise stapled to it, the usual.
It isn’t him.
The name at the top of the pile is Trisha, my oldest friend from my ballet days, the girl who held my ankles through a hundred stretches and has known me since before I could spell my own last name.
Her text is in all caps because Trisha only shouts when a thing is either the funniest event of the year or the end of the world.
Trisha: IMOGEN. ARE YOU SEEING THIS ????Trisha: WHO IS YOUR HUSBAND WRITING ABOUTTrisha: CALL ME RIGHT NOW !!!!!!!!
Underneath her, the alerts keep coming.
Entertainment feeds. Book accounts. Gossip pages I don’t follow but that apparently follow me. Every one of them is attached to my husband’s name and a title I have never seen in my life, a book I’ve never heard him mention, spreading across the internet in real time.
Whole chapters, surfacing on forums and feeds faster than anyone could pull them down. Already trending. Already everywhere.
I tap the first link with a thumb that’s gone strangely steady.
It’s a manuscript. A full one, with Hendrix Carver’s name on the cover, written in a voice I don’t recognize as the man I danced with in the dark eight hours ago.
I read the first page, and then the next, the pink rose still in my other hand.
? She had hair the color of a struck match, he’d write, red enough to find in any crowd, and he’d found her in the worst one, a party neither of them wanted to be at the autumn they were nineteen. She was going to be somebody. She said it the way other people said the weather.
He never learned how to tell her what he felt while she was in front of him. He only ever knew how to put it on a page, after, when it was already too late to matter, when she was a color he chased through every room she’d already left.?
I don’t recognize the woman in these sentences. I don’t recognize the man writing her, either, this open, aching voice that spills longing across the page like it costs him nothing, when the man I married can’t tell me I look nice without going quiet for an hour first.
Slowly, sentence by sentence, I understand that I am reading a love story.
Just not one I was ever in.
The whole perfect day folds up behind me and I finally see it for what it was, a dream I let myself have, and now the alarm is his name in a hundred headlines and a book full of a woman who isn’t me.
I’m awake now. Wide, brutally awake.
And the rose in my hand, the one that’s meant our one quiet promise for almost three years, has stopped meaning it.
It’s just a flower somebody left on a pillow before he walked out the door.