7. Lucille #2
But I can’t move. I’m frozen on the couch, eyes fixed on the screen, watching my husband sit beside another woman on the night he swore he’d be with me.
“…and the response to the video has just been overwhelming,” the interviewer is saying. “Fans are completely invested in this reunion. What do you think it is about your collaboration that resonates so deeply?”
Ginny leans forward, her hand landing on Hugo’s arm like it belongs there.
“I think some people are just meant to make music together,” she says, her voice warm with implication. “There’s a chemistry you can’t manufacture. Hugo and I had it in college, and rediscovering it now, years later, has been such a gift.”
The interviewer turns to Hugo. “What about you? How does it feel to reconnect with someone who clearly meant so much to your early creative development?”
I watch my husband’s face. I watch him feel Ginny’s hand on his arm, see the way she’s positioned herself, understand exactly what narrative she’s spinning.
And I watch him do nothing.
He doesn’t pull away. He doesn’t mention his wife. He doesn’t correct the implication that he and Ginny are anything more than professional collaborators forced together by contractual obligation.
“It’s flattering,” he says, and his smile doesn’t waver. “Ginny’s incredibly talented. Working with her again has reminded me why I fell in love with music in the first place.”
Why I fell in love with music.
Not with her. With music.
But he doesn’t clarify that distinction, and neither does the interviewer, and Ginny’s hand is still on his arm, and the caption at the bottom of the screen changes to: Hugo Kensington on his musical soulmate.
I pick up the remote and turn off the television.
The sudden silence is deafening.
For a long moment, I just sit there, staring at the dark screen, letting the reality of what I’ve just witnessed settle into my bones.
He’s not coming.
He was never coming.
The “urgent publicist thing” was this interview. The interview he agreed to do on our anniversary, knowing it would air live, knowing I would be waiting at home, knowing he was choosing Ginny and the label and his career over me.
Again.
Always.
I stand up slowly, my body moving without conscious direction. I walk to the dining room, to the table I spent three days perfecting. The candles are still burning, their flames reflecting off the crystal glasses, casting warm light over the untouched place settings.
I look at the chair where Hugo should be sitting. At the meal I cooked with my own hands, from my mother’s recipe, trying to give him a feeling of home.
At the empty seat across from a woman who has spent two years waiting for her husband to show up.
I lean down and blow out the candles.
One by one, the flames flutter and die, leaving trails of smoke that rise and dissipate into the darkness. When the last one is gone, the room is dark except for the faint glow from the kitchen, and I stand there breathing in the smell of extinguished wicks and wasted effort.
The tears don’t come.
I thought they would. I thought this moment, this final, undeniable proof of where I stand in his priorities, would crack me open. Would release the flood I’ve been holding back for months.
But all I feel is quiet.
The kind of quiet that comes after the storm has already passed. After the damage has already been done.
I walk upstairs. My midnight-blue dress whispers against my legs with every step, the seed pearls I sewed by hand catching the light from the hallway. I pass the bedroom door without stopping.
I go to the closet.
There’s a suitcase on the top shelf, the same one I brought with me when I moved in two years ago, never unpacked because I always knew, somewhere in the back of my mind, that I might need it again. I pull it down and set it on the bed.
My phone rings.
Hugo’s name on the screen, his face in the photo I set as his contact picture months ago, back when I still believed in the possibility of us.
I watch it ring.
Once. Twice. Three times.
I think about answering. About listening to whatever excuse he’s prepared, whatever apology he thinks will be enough this time. About letting him talk me down from the edge I’m standing on the way he’s talked me down before.
Four times. Five.
The phone goes silent. A moment later, a text appears.
I’m so sorry. The interview ran over. I’m leaving now. Please wait for me.
Please wait for me.
Always waiting. Always please. Always the assumption that I’ll be here when he finally decides to show up, patient and forgiving and willing to accept whatever scraps of his attention he deigns to offer.
I turn the phone off and drop it on the bed.
Then I open the suitcase and start packing.
Not everything. I don’t need everything. Just the essentials. Clothes for a few days. Toiletries. My mother’s recipe box. The jewelry she left me. The sketchbook I’ve been filling with designs that have nothing to do with Hugo or his world.
The midnight-blue dress I take off carefully, folding it into the suitcase with the kind of reverence reserved for things that mattered. It deserved better than tonight. So did I.
I put on jeans and a sweater, comfortable and anonymous, the clothes of a woman who is going somewhere rather than waiting for someone to arrive.
The suitcase zips closed with a sound like finality.
I carry it downstairs, past the dark dining room with its cold food and dead candles, past the living room where I watched my husband choose someone else on live television. I pause at the front door, my hand on the handle, and I make myself look back.
Two years.
Two years of this house.
This marriage. This slow, steady erosion of self.
Two years of loving a man who never learned how to love me back.
I thought if I was patient enough, kind enough, understanding enough, he would eventually see me. Would eventually turn around and notice the wife who’d been standing behind him all along, quietly fixing his clothes and waiting for him to come home.
I was wrong.
Some people don’t turn around. Some people don’t see what’s right in front of them. Some people are so focused on the horizon that they forget there’s solid ground beneath their feet.
And some people get tired of being the ground.
I open the door and step outside.
The night air is cool against my face, carrying the faint smell of jasmine from the garden I planted in the spring. I load my suitcase into my car and slide behind the wheel, and for a moment I just sit there, breathing, letting the weight of what I’m doing settle over me.
I’m leaving.
I’m actually leaving.
Not because I stopped loving him. God help me, I don’t think I know how to stop loving him. But because loving someone who can’t love you back is a kind of death. A slow suffocation of everything that makes you yourself.
I’m done dying for Hugo Kensington.
I start the car, my hands tight on the wheel, ready to drive toward Alice’s apartment and a night of tears and wine and the brutal kindness of a best friend who will help me pick up the pieces. Toward a tomorrow that doesn’t include waiting for a man who never comes.
Done waiting.
Done hoping.
Done.
The candles are out. The food is cold. The table is set for a dinner that never happened.
Somewhere across the city, my husband is still smiling for cameras, still sitting beside a woman who isn’t his wife, still choosing everything but me.
I hope the interview was worth it.
And I hope it was worth everything he’s about to lose.