Chapter Eighteen
“Maaattheeeew,” a voice called out from the path between the villas. It was his mother, Izzy. I’d expected her to be at the wedding. After all, she’d been Mom’s best friend since they were kids. But Matty? He hadn’t been at Mom’s last wedding. Why would he show up to this one?
As he turned toward Izzy, I hurriedly fumbled with my key card, praying for the lock to flash green so I could slip into my room before he saw me. Once safely inside, I slammed the door closed and slid down the back of it, falling like a marionette with its strings cut.
I crawled over to the large glass slider that led to the patio and peeked through the slatted blinds. There Matty was, standing in the sun, deep in conversation with Izzy. Was he real? Was this more magic? Had that witch of a fortune teller, or whatever she was, conjured him back into my life too?
No. No. No.
I hadn’t seen him in, what was it now, at least five years?
Maybe a little more? I’d worked hard to avoid anywhere I thought he might be.
Places we used to go. People we knew in common.
I had erased Matty from my life, so what on God’s green earth was he doing here?
And if he’d been invited, wouldn’t it have been at least a little humane for Mom to give me some kind of a heads-up? !
Just the sight of him knocked the breath out of me, like my body still hadn’t forgiven him. Well, because it hadn’t. How could it? A betrayal like that stays with you like a wound that never fully closes, its rawness always just beneath the surface.
And suddenly, I was back there, in our senior year of college, me at Brown, him just a few hours away at Boston University.
We’d defied the odds, staying together through the ups and downs of undergrad life, and even my brief stint abroad.
Despite my rocky childhood, my parents who were never exactly role models, and all my doubts about conventional happily ever afters, I’d believed in Matty. I’d believed in what we had.
I may have doubted everything else—marriage, commitment, whether love could be enough. But not him.
Not for one second, him.
If anything, the distance between our schools served to strengthen us.
Sure, I missed out on some typical college experiences: frat parties, late-night gossip sessions with my roommates, and weekends spent cramming in the library with a study group, because I was spending the weekends with Matty in Boston.
But it was worth it. Matty was my best friend, my confidant, my future.
And I loved him. I loved him so much that when he called to say he had the flu and couldn’t make it to my a cappella group, The Brown Soundwaves’, big showcase, I skipped the after-party and rushed over to check on him right after the performance.
I remembered how it was pouring rain the whole drive into the city.
Even so, I made a quick detour to his favorite delicatessen in Brookline to pick up his beloved navy bean soup and their famed roasted chicken and cranberry salad.
I had circled his apartment building half a dozen times before I could even find a parking spot within a reasonable distance, one that would let me dash from my car to the entrance without getting completely soaked.
Shoving the bag of takeout under my raincoat, I was relieved when Matty’s nighttime doorman, who was just settling in for his shift, recognized me and motioned me into the lobby.
“Hey, Lou,” I said, shaking the rain off my jacket, droplets scattering across the floor.
He looked up from his newspaper. “Miss West? Is Mr. Adler expecting you?”
“No, but he’s down for the count with the flu. I come bearing soup and TLC. Actually, would you mind giving me the key? He might be asleep, and I’d rather not wake him just to open up the door.”
“Course not,” he said, unlatching the wooden cabinet behind the desk, pulling Matty’s spare key off one of the hooks, and handing it to me.
I thanked him and pressed the elevator button, riding it up to the eleventh floor.
I lowered the bag of soup and bread to the ground, then quietly eased the key into his lock.
Inside, the apartment was dim, lit only by a thin strip of light spilling from his bedroom.
I crept toward it, careful to muffle my steps as I reached to close the door without disturbing him.
But suddenly in the deafening silence, I heard a giggle.
A woman’s giggle, followed by a low murmur and the unmistakable rustle of sheets.
My stomach dropped and my entire body froze in horror, my hand still hovering near the doorknob.
The rhythmic creak of the mattress, a breathy laugh, and then Matty moaning a name over and over again.
Hannah.
Hannah.
Hannah.
I wanted to turn and run, but I couldn’t. I was all lead and glass. Too heavy to move, but too fragile, I feared, to survive it if I tried. Then, without meaning to, without even realizing what I was doing, I started backing away, the wooden floorboard creaking underneath my feet.
I heard Hannah say, “What the fuck was that?”
After, Matty’s voice, sharp and alarmed, said, “I heard it too. Shit, is someone in the apartment?”
Then feet thudded across the floor, and his bedroom door flung open so that Matty and I were standing face-to-face.
“Christ, Elliot, what are you doing here?” he shouted.
“You . . . you said you were sick. I came to, um, to check on you . . . to bring you soup,” I managed to squeak out.
Behind Matty, the girl, Hannah, was next to his bed, scrambling to get dressed, like she’d been caught mid-crime, which she kinda had.
His eyes darted between me and Hannah, his face a mix of shock and guilt. “I didn’t expect . . .”
The air, tight in my lungs, was a pressure cooker expanding in my chest. I held up a hand, cutting him off. “Don’t. Just . . . don’t.”
What could he possibly say to make this okay? Absolutely nothing. Not one damn thing. He’d betrayed me. Lied, cheated, and shattered every promise we’d made. The one person I believed would never hurt me had just broken me in the most intimate way . . . and I’d never even seen it coming.
“Please, El, let’s talk. I’ll ask . . .” He paused, maybe realizing that saying her name would make her real.
“Hannah,” I supplied.
He turned an even more pronounced shade of crimson. “I’ll ask Hannah to go.”
“No, please, don’t get rid of her on my account. Just tell me one thing: How long? How long has this been going on?”
He didn’t need to answer. The look on his face told me everything I needed to know, that it hadn’t been going on long enough for me to catch the signs, but long enough for him to think I was blind to them.
But now my eyes were wide open and staring at the truth, ugly and undeniable.
Matty had become the living embodiment of everything I feared most about love.
That it could make you vulnerable and powerless, so much so that you found yourself standing in the hallway of your boyfriend’s apartment, clutching his get-well soup, wondering how the hell you ended up here.
And at that moment, I vowed I would never wind up in this place again. I wouldn’t ever allow myself to be that gullible or unguarded. That naive or that trusting.
That open.
So I closed off my heart, reinforcing it with walls of skepticism and a fortress of emotional distance.
And when Monday rolled around, instead of the usual disc-jockeying and dishing I typically served up on my college radio show, Go West, I launched into a diatribe on the deceptions of love, so sharp, so vitriolic, that the number of calls flooding into our phone bank nearly crashed the whole system.
I’d harnessed all my hurt and sadness into a far more productive emotion: rage.
It radiated from me, oozing from every inch, every pore, and blasted out full force over the airwaves.
But instead of turning off my listeners, it seemed to ignite them.
We were unified in our common experience of heartbreak and the messy, glorious aftermath of survival.
Suddenly, I was inundated with interest from people who, like me, had their souls shattered in one way or another by love.
Through word of mouth, Go West took off like gangbusters.
Eventually, at Ravi’s suggestion, it was rebranded as Love Is a Four-Letter Word—a title he felt better captured the show’s new tone, rawness, and depth.
And just like that, the entire trajectory of my life changed.
After Ravi sent over a reel of my best segments, a top New York agent reached out with an offer of talent representation and negotiated my deal with WNYC, where my show quickly became the highest-rated one on the air.
I put Matty in the rearview mirror, only revisiting that wound when I needed new fuel or a hit of the righteous rage that started it all.
Only now here he was. In Belize. Just four villas down from me.
As I crawled around on the ground like an adrenaline-fueled Roomba, I told myself I was fine.
Repeated the mantra over and over as a way perhaps to convince myself that the Matty thing was a chapter closed, a ship that had sunk to the bottom of the sea with a Do Not Resuscitate tag zip-tied to its hull.
But all it took was one unexpected glimpse of him, bare chested, suntanned, and comfortably joking with his mom, for my insides to short-circuit as if he’d spilled battery acid into my central nervous system.
I grabbed my phone to text Marin and typed:
Me: Are You Done With Your Downward Dog yet?! S.O.S. Emotional Defcon 1. Come to My Villa Stat!!!
Ten minutes later, she burst into the room, her beachy braid unraveling as she tumbled in. “What? What happened?” Marin panted, not even bothering with a hello.
And before I could stop myself, I launched into it.
“Matty’s here. I saw him. Like, saw him, saw him.
He was tanned, Marin. And happy. And barefoot.
Like, why would my mother not mention anything to me about inviting him, or worse, that he’d decided to attend?
! I thought she was just dippy, but maybe she’s actually diabolical. Like seriously, what. the. hell?!”
Marin winced. “Girl, I don’t even know how to emotionally triage all of that. I’m gonna need flash cards or a whiteboard or something.”
I flopped onto the bed. “Jesus, I thought I was over this. No. I am over this.”
That was an outright lie. I knew I wasn’t. Not completely, but I’d stuffed my feelings down so deep that even I’d almost made myself believe they weren’t there anymore.
And maybe that was the scariest part. Because if I could still unravel this easily over Matty, then what did that say about me now?
Marin sat beside me and nudged my shoulder with her own, pulling me out of my thoughts.
“So we keep you occupied. Strategic avoidance. We’re talking packing your schedule so full that you physically can’t spiral unless you pencil it in.
Beach massages. Snorkeling. Dramatic sun-hat brunches.
Obviously, lots of mimosas. Maybe even that mezcal tasting you said sounded pretentious.
” Her voice lifted with well-meaning encouragement, which only made my panic feel sharper, more unreachable.
“I’m serious, Marin. I never got closure.
I just . . . converted my trauma into a brand and built a career on my new personality.
What if I see him again and I just, like .
. . combust? What if I punch him?” I gasped with the realization of a whole new caliber of horror.
With my hand over my mouth, I cried, “What if he tries to talk to me, and I ugly-cry in the hotel lobby while Cannon and Allegra live stream my self-destruction on their TikToks as they sip their virgin pina coladas?”
She took my face in her hands to slow my tirade and smiled gently.
“Then I’ll dramatically fake a medical emergency, and we’ll blame it on bad ceviche.
Or I can just wrap you in a towel like a beach burrito and heroically fireman-carry you out of there.
I mean, I’ve been really kicking some ass at CrossFit lately. I think I totally could.”
Finally, she cracked my hard veneer of worry, and a tiny, almost involuntary smile tugged at my lips. Grateful for my best friend wasn’t even close to a good enough descriptor. I was overwhelmed by her support.
“Full Matty Containment Protocol. FMCP,” she confirmed. “You’ll only see him when absolutely necessary, like during the wedding ceremony Saturday, or like if he’s choking and you’re the only one around who knows the Heimlich.”
I gave a weak laugh. “Meh, even then, I’d have to think about it.”
She laughed and nudged me again. “Good, a joke. That feels like progress. Hey, you’ll be okay. It’ll be okay.” She raised her hand, her fist closed and her pinkie hooked out for me to clasp with my own. “Whatever it takes, we keep him away from you. Far away from you. Promise.”