6. Imogen #2
And then the woman on the white couch turns her face to the camera, and I recognize her, because I’ve spent the last hour looking at her.
Bridget Walton.
She’s in white, a dress expensive and simple, and her eyes shine in a way that reads as barely-held-together without a single drop ever falling.
The host is leaning toward her with the gentle voice people use when they’ve smelled blood and want you to think it’s sympathy.
“I have to ask,” the host says. “Because the whole world is asking. The leaked Carver book. People are saying it’s about you.”
Bridget looks down. She lets the pause sit, lets it stretch and gather weight, and when she looks up her chin does a small brave lift, and I have to hand it to her, it’s a good performance. At least, to my eyes right now.
“I never wanted any of this,” she says softly. “I want to be so clear about that. When it all came out, my very first thought, honestly, was for his family. For his wife. I would never want to cause anyone pain.”
“But it is about you?”
“We had a special relationship.” She says it as a confession she’s being so brave to make.
“A long time ago. And some loves, they just… they stay with you. They change you. I think anyone who’s read the book can feel that on the page.
You can’t fake that kind of thing.” A delicate breath.
“I truly wish the family nothing but the best. That’s all I’ll say. They deserve their privacy.”
Surprisingly, I am not shocked. Just in awe at the utter absurdity.
Here I sit on my sad little couch in my four-hundred-square-foot freedom and I watch a woman take a relationship I know nothing about and inflate it, in real time, into a grand doomed love story, and I watch her do it so gracefully that she never once says the thing she’s saying.
She never says he still loves me. She just leaves a beautiful him-shaped space in every sentence and lets the whole watching world rush in to fill it for her.
Maybe I’m bitter but it’s as if she’s really milking this act out.
And I can already see tomorrow’s headlines writing themselves. Still the love of his life. The muse speaks.
Underneath, the version of me they’ve all agreed on: Imogen, the rebound. Imogen, the arrangement.
By now, it’s getting old that I’m numb to it already.
I turn the television off. I sit in the quiet it leaves behind.
One thought rises up through all of it, clean and cold and awful, the thought I’ve been circling since the middle of the night I first found the manuscript.
Perhaps this is the answer to the question I never let myself finish asking.
Maybe this is why. Why three years never quite became what a marriage is supposed to become.
Why we were always pushing and pulling, always almost, always reaching across some gap I could never name.
Why he could be so warm on a Sunday morning and then vanish for a week, why he loved me in flashes and disappeared in between.
Maybe there was never any mystery to it at all.
Maybe the reason there was never quite room for me in that man’s heart is that the room was already occupied, and had been the whole time, by a girl in soft light who stayed with him, who changed him, whom he wrote three hundred pages about and me not a single line.
Stop, I told myself. Stop spiraling. Don’t do this to yourself.
Still, I feel it coming, the enormous wave of it, the grief and the humiliation and the sheer stupid waste of the years, and I make a decision.
So I let it come… only for a minute.
When I look at the clock on the microwave, the little green numbers, and I give myself ninety seconds. That’s the deal I make with myself, sitting on that couch.
Ninety seconds to feel every bit of it, the full catastrophic weight, no flinching, no managing.
I let my face crumple. I let the tears come, hot and fast, and I press the heel of my hand against my mouth and I let myself grieve the marriage and the muse and the woman I might have been if any of it had been real.
The moment the ninety seconds are up, I stop.
I wipe my face with the back of my wrist. I breathe and I say it out loud to the empty room, because saying things out loud makes them true in a way thinking them never does.
“Okay,” I tell the brick wall and the squeaky bed and the whole small brave shape of my new life. “That’s the last ninety seconds she gets. That’s the last ninety seconds any of them gets.”
Because I am not going to do this.
I am not going to spend one more year of my life orbiting a man and a marriage and now a beautiful stranger, arranging my whole existence around a story I’m not even the main character in.
My world stopped revolving around Hendrix Carver the moment I turned that lock. I’m not going to let it start again just because a woman on a white couch has damp eyes and better lighting.
The next time I pick the phone back up, I don’t open a single one of them.
Not his messages, not the thread, not the tags, not the strangers who’ve appointed themselves the audience of my humiliation. I swipe past all of it.
It’s just senseless noise.
I go into my contacts instead, into the long buried list of names that come with a life like the one I married into.
Lawyers and fixers and people who make things quiet for people with our last names. I find the one I want. Someone good. Someone who’s handled this kind of thing for our kind of people, who’ll know how to do it cleanly and calmly and without turning it into more of a spectacle than it already is.
All I want is out.
I want to be free of the ache and the waiting and the shrinking.
I want to stop being the wife in someone else’s love story and go find out who I am when I’m nobody’s arrangement, nobody’s rebound, nobody’s placeholder.
I want to remember the version of me who had a spine and a spotlight and a whole enormous life in front of her before I traded it all away for a handshake between families.
My goal is to be free, I think, my thumb hovering over the name.
My goal is to find myself again.
So I press the call.
Then I stand up and I walk to the good window, the one with the afternoon light, and I wrap my free arm around myself and I hold on, because my hands are not quite steady and my heart is doing a complicated, wrenching thing.
I look out at the ordinary rooftops of a neighborhood that is mine now, all mine, chosen by me and paid for by me and answerable to no one.
It rings once.
The waiting lifts off me as it does, that enormous weight I’ve been carrying so long I forgot it wasn’t part of my body.
It just lifts, and floats off, and leaves the grief behind, sure, the grief can stay, I’ve made my peace with the grief.
But the waiting is done. The waiting is finally, blessedly done.
It rings twice.
I chose myself, I think, and I press my arm tighter around my ribs, and I feel the truth of it settle into my bones. I chose myself. It’s the first real thing I’ve done in three years.
The ringing stops. A voice comes on the line.
And I open my mouth to end my marriage.
“This is Imogen Hearst. I want to file for my divorce.”