Chapter 4
Livingston, Montana
It was the evening after Shelby met their nosy neighbor Vivian, who’d strode across the stream and involved herself where she wasn’t wanted.
Shelby still couldn’t get the memory of that woman’s gaze from her mind.
Vivian had seen the light bruising around Shelby’s wrist, and she’d given Shelby a knowing look, one meant to tell her, I’m here if you need me.
You aren’t trapped. I can help you. But there was so little that woman knew about Shelby, about Shelby’s children, and about Shelby’s husband.
There was so little Vivian could understand from a glance.
Now, Shelby’s husband was out for the night, and Shelby’s three children were tucked away in bed, dreaming their dreams. It was eight thirty, which meant that Shelby still had another two or three hours before she wanted to go to bed herself and probably another four hours till her husband got back from wherever he was.
Usually, when she was alone and the only one awake, there were countless chores to be done.
Usually, she set about preparing for tomorrow: packing lunches, prepping breakfasts, or doing any of the innumerable tasks in their house of five people, going on six.
But for some reason, Shelby wanted to spend time within her own head today.
She didn’t want to break her back doing another minute of work.
She wondered if it was Chad’s wedding invitation that had made her so thoughtful and lazy.
After she’d opened the letter, she’d known immediately to hide it from her husband, tucking it into the back corner of her dresser drawer, the one where she kept her personal underwear and toiletries.
She didn’t want her husband to know that her family knew where they lived. She didn’t want to talk about it.
Then again, she didn’t want to let herself fantasize about attending the wedding. It was an impossibility, something she needed to shove out of her mind.
They had very few books in the house, and all of them had been written by men: Herman Melville, Ernest Hemingway, William Shakespeare, William Faulkner.
Shelby had read all of them back at Columbia University.
But right now, she ached for the kind of stories that they hadn’t told—female-driven stories that spoke of romance and heartache and women’s inner lives.
Shelby had moved quite a few of her notebooks from the East Coast to Montana, but she kept them hidden, also in her dresser drawers.
Now, she tugged a few of them out and spread them on the dining room table, flipping through their pages to read her old and hopeful writing.
Back in high school and early college, she’d loved writing love stories.
She’d loved dipping into romance genres and subverting them.
She’d loved building characters and worlds and finding new and interesting ways to build emotionality on the page.
She’d hardly written anything since she’d gotten married.
There had been so much heartache and drama back then, so much life to be lived, that she hadn’t had time to put it on the page.
Should she write about it now? she wondered.
But rather than write of anything real, anything that had actually happened, she picked up her pen and started to write another romance, something silly that could take her away from her chores and her children and all their needs.
For more than an hour, she wrote, until her wrist felt numb and her heart felt floaty.
In her romance novel, she crafted a twentysomething heroine who loved reading and going on adventures alone.
She found herself falling in love with her own descriptions and the way they pulled her out of her life.
She forgot about her pregnancy nausea. She forgot about all the dishes still in the sink.
Her wrist throbbing, Shelby decided to take a break.
Her mind lost to stories of romance, and her heart thinking again about Chad’s upcoming wedding, she set the pages aside, then went to the bookshelf, where she dug around behind the Shakespeare and the Faulkner to find the little photo album.
In it, she’d slotted the twenty-four photos they’d taken of themselves on their wedding day.
The first was a photograph of only Shelby and her husband, holding hands, gazing into one another’s eyes.
The looks on their faces seemed to say, We’ve fallen in love against all odds.
We’re going to fight through this life together.
Nobody else understands us. Nobody else can comprehend our love.
Despite everything, the photos touched Shelby’s heart.
After that, in the album were other photographs, ones of Shelby with her sister Lily and her mother Rebecca, wherein only Shelby was smiling, trying to generate for them the joy she wished they had for her.
There was one of her husband with his parents, who scowled in the way they always scowled, being from out East and from so much money and expectation.
There was a picture of their families together, with Shelby and her husband in the middle, Shelby clutching a bouquet and grinning.
Every other face in the photograph was shadowed, as though they’d been put under some curse.
Shelby remembered telling Lily, “This is the happiest day of my life! Why aren’t you happy for me?” She remembered Lily bursting into tears. She hadn’t been able to answer.
Maybe because Shelby was so immersed in looking at the photographs, she didn’t hear her husband come back from the bar.
All at once, he stood over her, holding the notebook into which she’d been writing a silly romance novel.
His eyes were beady, maybe from the beers he’d drunk at a bar. Shelby was stricken with fear.
Rather than argue with him, rather than rip the pages out of his hands, she sat there, clutching their wedding photo album and waiting for him to say whatever it was he wanted to say—whatever cruelty he wanted to land on.
“I see you’re writing your stupid girly stories again,” he growled. “Your stupid girly stories about other men.”
Shelby flared her nostrils and tried to laugh it off. “Those are from years ago, before we were married,” she lied.
“Which means you moved them out West with us?” her husband asked.
Shelby swallowed the lump in her throat. “I was going to get rid of them tonight. Spring cleaning.”
Her husband tore four of her written pages from the notebook, and then stripped them in half.
He let the pieces flutter to the floor, a floor that Shelby had swept and scrubbed earlier.
“I don’t want to have to come home and see this garbage,” he said.
“I don’t want to be reminded of how much my wife wishes she was with someone else. ”
“I don’t wish that,” Shelby said. She considered showing him the photo album in her hands.
She considered telling him that all she wanted was their love, the one they’d chosen together all those years ago.
But already, having torn up the rest of her story, her husband turned on his heel and stomped back to their bedroom, where, soon, he would be sprawled on his back and snoring.