12. Imogen #2
That gets under the armor sideways. Through a gap I didn’t know was open, into a space I was certain I’d sealed.
Walking to my car, I catch myself wondering what he might write next, and the catching is its own alarm going off somewhere behind my ribs.
Because wanting the next letter means the first one worked. And the first one working means the armor has a seam. And the seam has the exact dimensions of a single page of slanting handwriting, naming the smallest true thing about me.
I hate how much I want the next one.
I hate it, and I don’t throw the first one away, and those two facts sit side by side in my bag and in my chest, and I let them both stay, because I do not have the energy tonight to choose between them.
Thursday morning, my phone chimes with a calendar reminder I forgot I ever set.
[ Carver Foundation Annual Museum Benefit. Saturday. 7 PM. ]
I stare at the notification for a full ten seconds before the implications finish assembling themselves into a shape I can understand.
Then I remember, I committed to this event back when the marriage still felt like a partnership.
Back when putting my name beside Hendrix’s on a patron program felt like pride instead of performance, back when I still believed the two of us were building a thing together instead of taking turns disappearing from it.
My name is in the printed materials. It’s on the website. It’s attached to a donation that’s already been processed and acknowledged and thanked in a note signed by someone I’ve never met.
My phone buzzes again. The coordinator I share with the foundation board, the one who has spent the week doing the job of three people and sounding, somehow, unbothered by all of it.
“Please tell me you saw the calendar reminder,” she says, in place of hello.
“I saw it.”
“And?”
“And I’m thinking.”
“Think faster, if you can. The benefit team has been calling me all week. They want to confirm your attendance, your seating assignment, and whether you would prefer to be seated near the Carvers or in an entirely separate section, which, I am reliably told, would require reprinting every table card and possibly restructuring the north wing of the gallery.”
“That seems like an overreaction.”
“These people restructure a room the way normal people move a chair. It is genuinely what they do for fun.” A pause. “Imogen. Are you going, or are you not going?”
I lean against the kitchen counter of my sublet, in the small bright rooms that are entirely mine, and I run the math.
Skipping the benefit is its own headline. I can see it already, fully formed.
The estranged wife who couldn’t even manage to show up for one night, who let a scandal keep her from a commitment she made when things were good.
It feeds the story. It hands Bridget and the internet another chapter, the one where Imogen Hearst-Carver is too fragile, too broken, too thoroughly defeated to stand in a room with the man she is divorcing.
A few weeks ago, I might not have had the ground to stand on. I would have gone as an ornament, or not gone as a coward, and either way it would have been about him.
But I am not that woman anymore. I have a studio now.
I have fourteen kids and a signed contract and a place that told me welcome home, and a life with my own name on it and no one else’s, and a woman with that much under her feet does not skip a room because a beautiful stranger might be standing in it.
I am not too fragile. I am not too broken.
And I am absolutely not going to hand anyone the satisfaction of believing I am.
“I’m going,” I tell her. “Same seat. Don’t reprint anything.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure. Send me the guest list, though. I want to know exactly who I’m walking into.”
“Already forwarded to your email. It came through yesterday.”
After that, I hang up. I open my email, find the attachment, and scan the list the way you scan any document for the piece of information that decides whether your evening is going to be survivable or catastrophic.
Quickly. Looking for one name.
I find it on the second page. Third line from the bottom.
Bridget Walton. Confirmed.
My phone stays in my hand while the realization settles over me, and it isn’t a crash and it isn’t a wave. It’s slower than that, a steady weight distributing itself across my shoulders one degree at a time as the full picture of Saturday assembles itself in front of me.
In just a few days, I am going to walk into a museum benefit with my name printed on the program beside the husband I am divorcing, and stand under a thousand cameras, in a room full of the same glittering society that watched my marriage get turned into content and never once looked away.
And I am going to do it in the same building, under the same lights, as the woman the entire world has decided my husband actually loves.
Bridget. In the same room. With the cameras pointed at all three of us at once, everyone in that gallery waiting, politely, breathlessly, for exactly the kind of moment that becomes a headline before the valet has even brought the cars around.
I set the phone down. I pull my bag onto the counter, unzip the inside pocket, and look at the folded letter sitting there where I put it.
Saturday night.
Hendrix. Bridget. A thousand cameras.
And me, standing somewhere in the middle of it, between a man who is learning how to remember me and a woman who is determined to finally be seen, in a room full of people who came to watch which version of the story wins.
I zip the pocket shut. The letter stays inside.
For now, I have three days to figure out how to survive a night that has every possible way of going wrong and exactly one way of going right, and the one way requires a version of Imogen I am still in the middle of becoming.
I had better become her fast.