5. Josh #2
“You already did. The question is whether you’ll let her go with dignity or drag her through more pain.”
“I need to fix this.”
“Some things can’t be fixed,” he said, gentler than he’d been with me since I was a boy. “They can only be mourned. She needs time and space. Don’t suffocate her. Sometimes loving someone means letting them go.”
“That’s supposed to be me. The person who loves her.”
“Then be that person. Love her enough to let her go.”
After they hung up, I finally faced what I’d been avoiding for two days.
I watched the interview. Really watched it, not the clips everyone was sharing, but the whole thing.
Watched myself sit there in a suit she’d helped me choose, next to her sister, and systematically humiliate the woman I’d sworn to honor.
The comfort era comment. Jesus Christ, I’d actually said that.
Made fun of the woman who’d spent six hours cooking for me, who’d dressed up and waited.
The ADHD tangents that I’d once called brilliant, reduced to a punchline for strangers’ amusement.
And then the laugh. My genuine laugh when Grant made the trading-up joke.
Before my brain caught up, before the filter kicked in, I’d laughed at the idea of replacing my wife with her younger sister.
I made it to the kitchen sink just in time to throw up.
Then I took my laptop, the one she’d left behind because I’d bought it without asking her, and threw it against the wall.
It shattered in a way that felt satisfying and horrible, pieces of expensive technology scattered across hardwood she’d chosen.
At dawn, instead of sleeping, I drove out to the specialty fish market. I didn’t know why until I was standing there, searching the seafood counter for answers it couldn’t give.
The owner recognized me immediately. His face went cold with genuine disgust.
“Your wife called three times last week making sure we’d have the right salmon. The kind my grandmother used to buy. Drove all the way out here at seven in the morning day of. Nicest woman I ever met. Asking about the best way to prepare it, taking notes on her phone like it was life or death.”
I stood there, unable to speak. What was there to say? That I’d forgotten? That I’d been getting my ego stroked on television while she drove all that way, twice, for fish that would rot on a table I’d never come home to?
He was right to look at me like that. I’d have paid him to keep doing it.
It was the first honest reaction I’d gotten from a stranger in years, a man who didn’t care in the slightest that I was famous, who saw exactly what I was and made no effort to hide his opinion of it.
I wanted more of it. I wanted the entire world to look at me the way that fishmonger did, because it landed closer to the truth than any review I’d ever been handed.
“You buying something or just here to feel sorry for yourself?” he asked.
I bought nothing. Sat in my car in the parking lot, crying into the steering wheel while early morning customers pretended not to film me on their phones.
Tomorrow it would be everywhere. Josh Gardner having a breakdown at a fish market.
Good. Let them see it. Let them see what destroying the best thing in your life looked like.
My agent called while I was still in the parking lot.
“The studio’s concerned about optics. We need damage control.”
“What kind?”
“Go on Grant again. Say it was scripted. Play up reconciliation. America loves a comeback story.”
My stomach turned over. A month earlier I’d have taken the note without blinking, found the angle, built the version of the lie that tested best. I sat there on the phone and let the old reflex die where it stood.
“It wasn’t scripted. He told me the direction he wanted, to be funny, to play up the chemistry with Sloane. I chose what to say.”
“Josh-”
“I meant every word. That’s the problem. I meant it because I’d forgotten who she was. Who I was. Who we were together.”
“You’re going to lose everything if you don’t fix this narrative. The studio’s already talking about recasting you in the franchise.”
“I don’t care. I already lost the only thing that mattered.”
I hung up. Then, for the first time in my life, I googled therapists, scrolled through websites until I found one who had an emergency appointment tomorrow.
Dr. Reyes, five stars, specialized in, among other things, “relationship trauma and self-sabotage.” Perfect. I was apparently an expert in both.
Back home, I gathered the place cards one by one, careful with them, evidence from a crime scene. Which maybe they were. Evidence of who we used to be, before I’d killed it with neglect and public humiliation.
I placed them in my nightstand drawer, next to the cufflinks she’d given me our first Christmas when we were broke. The ones I hadn’t worn in two years because they weren’t designer enough for red carpets.
I was going to keep these cards. Going to read them every day until I became someone who deserved them again. Or die trying.
The sunrise leaked through our bedroom windows, lighting up the empty space where she used to sleep. Her pillow still held the indent of her head. I hadn’t been able to bring myself to fluff it, to erase that last evidence of her presence.
I was going to earn those place cards back. Even if it took the rest of my life. Even if she never knew I was trying.
Reading that sentence back now, in the journal Dr. Reyes makes me keep, I can see how much of it was still about me.
Earning them back, like they were a prize with my name already engraved on the far side of enough suffering.
It took me another year of Tuesdays to understand that you don’t earn a person back the way you earn a role or an award, through visible effort designed to be rewarded.
You just become someone worth choosing, and then you let go of the choosing entirely.
But that first dawn, on my kitchen floor with ten place cards, earning them back was the only frame I had, and it got me off the floor, and some days getting off the floor is the whole of the job.
I was going to earn them back or die trying.