Chapter Twenty-Four #3
OLIVIA: I mean, there has to be some part of you that’s thought about divorce. Even if it’s just a small part.
LANDON: I don’t think that’s something I should be talking about with you.
OLIVIA: All I’m saying is that in all the time we’ve known each other, I couldn’t name more than three positive things you’ve said about the woman.
LANDON: Well that’s rather bleak.
OLIVIA: Exactly.
The last message wasn’t a message, but a photograph, with a timestamp from two hours ago.
Olivia, in the bathroom, in front of gold vanity, her silky mauve blouse draped lower than Rose thought the shirt capable of without strategic manipulation.
Landon was the only person Rose knew who was either secure or unhinged enough to text with read receipts on, so she could see the message had not only been delivered, but seen.
Had Olivia sent it just before she’d clocked Rose at the chip bowl and lied through her teeth about the wonderful things Landon had shared about her when it was just the two of them?
What would Landon have said in response, when he clicked his phone on in the bathroom later that night while the rest of the house was asleep, had Rose not stumbled upon this betrayal?
She clicked the phone off and placed it back in his waiting hand.
Broken. Landon looked as broken as Rose had sinking into the waves on Cape Cod. “Nothing happened,” he said. “Not even a kiss. I swear it to you, Rose.”
But something had happened. She was stunned he had the audacity to suggest otherwise. “You let her into our life,” Rose said. “Into our marriage.”
“I didn’t,” Landon said. “Please, believe me—”
She believed what she’d just read, and seen, with eyes she trusted far more than Landon in that moment. “Don’t come to bed tonight.”
“I have no idea why she sent that picture. I am just as shocked as you are, I swear. None of it meant anything!” Landon yelled in frustration as she opened the door and did everything in her power to close it gently, without rage or violence.
Rose wondered how many women throughout recorded history had heard some iteration of that same sentiment.
Everything meant something. This certainly had.
Landon had the good sense to stay in the car while Rose paid the sitter.
Then, debating whether to scream or cry or toss their wedding china on the ground, Rose padded up the stairs and woke her sleeping baby, figuring breaking the golden rule of parenting was better than the other three options.
Her daughter latched to her breast and she breathed, in and out her nose.
She worried there were no words that could help her understand this version of Landon—a man who could spend a decade weaving a tapestry only to cut the yarn at the center.
Or had his plan been to just keep weaving so long as she was none the wiser?
A voice that must have burrowed itself in the back of her mind for times just like these whispered in her ear: What would it feel like to forget?
By now it was impossible to hide from it; the forgetting pill was everywhere.
No doctor in their right mind would endorse it, but the world had proven time and time again it did not need doctors.
Celebrities could speak to the drug’s efficacy and safety all the same.
Even on a good day, Rose ate up the stories as though she were starving.
They were juicy and fresh and made her feel smug and self-assured about her life and the choices she’d made.
What would it feel like to forget? A siren song, tailor made for this situation.
Rose had read a story just like this in a magazine the other day: “Cheating Husband Convinces Wife to Take the Forgetting Pill and Saves Their Marriage.” She’d grappled with the headline.
Had they really saved their marriage, or just turned it into something new?
Rose looked down at the baby on her breast, her little hands grasping the soft skin around her nipple.
How many hundreds of hours had she spent memorizing the lines of her face, counting each perfect finger and toe?
Just last week Cordelia had laughed for the first time—a real laugh, not just gas.
The sound was astonishing. What would it feel like to forget that?
Cordelia will laugh again, the half of her who had already bought into the idea reasoned.
But you won’t remember how you felt the first time she laughed, the other half countered.
You’ll experience a new first time.
Believing something doesn’t make it true.
Rose closed her eyes. She didn’t need the further torture of warring with herself.
And she didn’t need the forgetting pill.
She used to laugh about people like that husband and wife from the headline.
“The body will always remember,” she’d told Landon.
There were consequences to blunting the messy, imperfect, horrifying experiences that are part and parcel of being human.
They would make themselves known, one way or another.
If she felt it now, maybe, someday, she would be able to forget.