2. Izzy
— ? —
Izzy
The restaurant is crowded and warm, and Wilson is on time.
He’s sitting across from me in the charcoal suit I helped him pick out, the one that makes his shoulders look broader and his eyes look darker. The candles waver between us. His phone is nowhere on the table.
His hand covers mine on the white tablecloth, warm and solid.
A couple two tables over gets engaged and the whole restaurant breaks into applause. The woman is crying. The man is beaming.
Wilson squeezes my fingers and leans in close.
“Happy anniversary,” he says, and his voice is soft the way it used to be. Back when we were young and broke and nothing in our apartment worked.
I squeeze back. Warmth spreads through me, a feeling I barely recognize anymore.
“You made it.”
“I’ll always make it.” He lifts my hand and presses his lips to my knuckles, one by one, taking his time. “I promised, didn’t I?”
The bread is warm in the basket. The wine is a Barolo he remembered I loved from a trip we took three years ago, before the trips stopped happening.
I’m wearing the red dress and he can’t stop looking at me. Really looking. The way he used to when we first started dating, when he’d lose track of his sentences mid-word because he got distracted by my face.
This is it.
This is what I’ve been waiting for.
He came back to me.
The waiter brings our appetizers and Wilson asks about my day. My actual day, not the highlights version I usually give him while he checks his phone between bites. He laughs at the story about my failed attempt to grow herbs on the balcony.
He remembers the name of my college roommate when I mention running into her last week.
He remembers.
Then a phone rings.
It’s not on the table. It’s not in his jacket. It rings anyway, getting louder with every pulse, until I can feel it in my teeth.
“Don’t answer it,” I say, and I’m already reaching for him, already knowing what comes next. “Wilson, please. Just this once.”
He’s pulling away from me. His hand slides out of mine and the spot where it was goes cold. “It might be important.”
“It’s our anniversary.”
“One second.” He holds up a finger the way he always does. Like my disappointment is a thing he can deal with later. “Just one second, Izzy.”
The restaurant empties around us. The other diners are gone. All of them, at once. The candles burn down to stubs while I watch, melting into puddles across the white tablecloth. The bread goes stale. The wine turns to vinegar in the glass.
Wilson talks into his phone with his back to me, and no matter how loud I call his name, he doesn’t turn around.
“Wilson.” I stand up so fast my chair falls over. “Wilson, look at me.”
He keeps talking. Tokyo. The deal. The words I’ve heard through a hundred closed doors.
“Wilson, look at me!” I grab his shoulder and my hand goes right through him.
I’m the ghost here, not him.
I’ve been haunting my own marriage for years and I didn’t even know it.
“Wilson, please…”
I wake up saying his name to an empty room.
The villa ceiling is white and unfamiliar in the blue glow of my phone screen. The restaurant is gone. The warm bread, the Barolo, the way he looked at me. Gone.
A dream.
It was just a dream.
Even my subconscious knows he was never going to show up.
My phone is still playing the video on the pillow next to me. I must have fallen asleep with it looping, torturing myself with those six seconds over and over until my brain finally shut down from exhaustion.
Her hand slides up his chest with the easy confidence of someone who’s touched him before. His arm tightens around her waist. Automatic. She laughs at whatever he says, her head thrown back, her throat exposed. She kisses the corner of his mouth.
He doesn’t pull away.
Six seconds, then it starts over. Six seconds, then it starts over.
The clock on the wall reads 4:47 AM. I’ve been asleep for three hours, maybe less. The red dress is twisted around my waist and cutting into my ribs. My neck aches from the angle I passed out at, slumped sideways on the pillow.
My face feels wrong. Stiff and tight in some places, swollen in others. I touch my cheek and my fingers come away gray with mascara residue. The expensive waterproof kind, forty-five dollars a tube, guaranteed to last through anything.
It didn’t last through this.
My phone buzzes against the pillow. One notification.
Then another.
Then three more in rapid succession, the vibrations blurring together into one long angry hum.
I sit up too fast and my head pounds. The champagne. I drank most of the bottle after the video started looping, glass after glass, trying to make it stop mattering. It didn’t work. I see his hand on her waist every time I blink.
The notifications keep coming. I grab the phone and squint at the brightness, my swollen eyes protesting.
Trending: #ObliviousWife
Oh God.
I should put the phone down. I should turn it off completely, throw it in the ocean, pretend the rest of the world doesn’t exist until I can figure out how to breathe normally again.
I scroll instead.
@wifeyradar: She had to know. Wives always know. We just pretend we don’t because it’s easier than admitting the truth.
@dailyteaspill: The oblivious wife lmao. Sitting at home while he’s out there living his best life with someone who actually keeps his attention.
The words blur and I blink hard to clear my vision. I can’t get a full breath. It gets worse with every comment I read.
@nycgossipgirl: Poor thing thought she was the main character. Plot twist: she was the obstacle.
@truthhurtsbabes: Seven years of marriage and he’s out here acting single. She had to see the signs. We all see the signs. We just don’t want to admit what they mean.
Someone has dug up a photo from a gala three years ago. I remember that night. I remember how proud I was, standing next to Wilson in front of the step-and-repeat, wearing a silver gown that cost more than my first car. He had his arm around my waist. He told me I looked beautiful.
In the photo, I’m beaming at the camera. A woman who believes she has everything she ever wanted. Wilson is looking somewhere off to the side.
And there, three feet behind us, right in the frame: Sabrina Burnham. Blonde hair loose over bare shoulders. Red lips curved in a smile I never thought twice about.
@carterwatch: they’ve been together for YEARS apparently ?? the wife was either blind or just didn’t wanna see it
@moneymovesonly: girl he’s a billionaire what did u expect?? loyalty??? in THIS economy??? lmaooo
@blinditemqueen: ok but he’s been bored for years look at her then look at sabrina… can u honestly blame him ??
Four hundred and seventeen likes on that one. Four hundred and seventeen people who looked at me and decided I wasn’t enough.
I drop the phone on the mattress. My hands are shaking. I press my palms against my thighs and they keep shaking anyway.
The oblivious wife.
Is that what I am?
Is that what everyone sees when they look at me?
Poor Izzy Carter, so desperate to believe her husband loved her that she ignored every sign screaming in her face.
I need to move. I need to get out of this bed and do anything at all, because if I stay here one more second I’m going to fall apart, and I already promised myself I wouldn’t.
I swing my legs over the side of the mattress and try to stand. My ankle catches in the twisted sheets and I go down hard, my knee cracking against the marble floor. The sound echoes through the empty villa.
The pain is immediate and almost a relief, one hurt I can point to that makes sense.
I stay there for a moment, kneeling on the cold floor in my ruined red dress, breathing through the throb in my knee. Then I get up, because that’s what I do.
That’s what I’ve always done.
I get up, I keep going, and I pretend everything is fine until it has to be.
The bathroom is twenty feet away. I make it in stages.
The mirror shows me a stranger. Mascara smeared down both cheeks in gray streaks. Eyes so swollen I can barely see through the slits of my lids. Hair matted flat on one side where I slept on it, tangled on the other.
The red dress is wrinkled beyond saving. There’s a wine stain on the bodice I don’t remember making. The hem is torn where I must have stepped on it at some point during the night.
Look at her.
Can you blame him?
I turn on the faucet and cup cold water in my palms. I splash it on my face once, twice, five times, scrubbing at the mascara until my skin burns. The white hand towel comes away black, gray, pink with foundation.
I grip the edge of the sink until my knuckles ache. I stare at the ruined woman in the mirror and I make her breathe.
In, hold, out.
You are alone on an island in the middle of nowhere.
You will not fall apart here.
You will not give him the satisfaction.
You will not prove those comments right.
I can breathe again, just barely. Enough.
I leave the bathroom without looking at the mirror again and walk out to the main room of the villa.
The dining table is exactly where I left it, set for a romantic dinner that never happened. Two plates still waiting under silver cloches with the food long since cold. Candles burned down to stubs. Champagne sweating in a bucket of melted ice.
And in the center of it all, the crystal vase of peonies. Pink and white and perfect, their petals soft and full, completely untouched by the disaster happening around them.
I walk to the table and pick up the vase. It’s heavier than I expected and the crystal cuts patterns into my palms as I carry it to the kitchen.
These aren’t the first peonies Wilson has sent me.
He sent them after our fifth anniversary, the one I sat through alone at a restaurant while the waiter kept refilling my water out of pity. Three dozen pink and white blooms arrived the next morning, hand-tied, with a cream card in his assistant’s handwriting.
Next year. I promise. W