Chapter SEVENTEEN
VICTORIA
Talia never once pushed me toward divorce, which I was grateful for in a way I hadn't fully anticipated needing, given how easily a friend's outrage on your behalf can start to feel like pressure rather than support.
"You don't have to decide anything yet," she said one evening, the two of us sitting on her back porch with the last of the summer light fading behind the overgrown garden she kept meaning to deal with. "You're allowed to just sit in the not-knowing for a while."
"I keep waiting to feel more certain," I admitted. "Like at some point the fog's supposed to clear and I'm supposed to know exactly what I want. It hasn't happened yet."
"Maybe it doesn't work like that. Maybe you're supposed to know some things and not others, and you just have to move forward with the mixture."
I thought about that for a long time after she said it, turning it over the way I'd turned over so much else that month.
I did know some things clearly. I knew I still loved Trevor, not in some diminished, complicated way but fully, the same love I'd carried for fourteen years, undamaged by everything that had happened even as everything that had happened sat directly on top of it, refusing to be ignored.
I knew I wanted my husband. I knew I missed the specific texture of our life together, the small rituals we'd built, the particular way he laughed at something only I found funny, the warmth of having someone who knew the full sweep of my history without my needing to explain it.
None of that had disappeared, and pretending otherwise would have been its own kind of dishonesty.
What I didn't want, with equal clarity, was the marriage we'd had before the gala.
That marriage hadn't been miserable, exactly.
I simply no longer believed it had been what I thought it was.
I'd believed, for years, that our arrangement represented two people compromising for each other in roughly equal measure.
I understood now that the compromise had run almost entirely in one direction, and I couldn't unknow that, couldn't simply fold myself back into the same shape once I'd seen its actual outline.
"I don't want a different husband," I told Talia. "I want the same one, but I want him different. Does that even make sense?"
"It makes perfect sense. You're not trying to replace him. You're trying to figure out if he can actually become someone new inside the same marriage, instead of just performing contrition until you let him go back to how things were."
That was exactly it, I thought, more precisely than I could have put it myself.
I wasn't auditioning other lives, other men, other versions of what my future might look like without Trevor in it.
I was trying to determine whether the man I'd married for fourteen years could genuinely become someone who saw my feelings as load-bearing rather than optional, and I understood that determining that would take longer than a single conversation, longer than a single grand gesture,
longer than I think either of us wanted it to take.
I still couldn't wear the ring. I kept it wrapped in its soft cloth in the bottom of the small bag I'd brought to Talia's, checking on it occasionally the way you check on something you're not ready to face but aren't willing to lose either.
Every time I unwrapped it and looked at the diamond, I still saw Celeste's hand catching the ballroom light, still felt the specific cold shock of recognizing something that belonged to me sitting on someone else's finger because my husband had decided my objection wasn't worth the thirty seconds
it would have taken to hear it.
I didn't know yet whether that image would ever fully fade, or whether the ring, in its current form, would always carry some trace of that evening no matter how much time passed or how thoroughly Trevor changed.
I didn't have an answer for that yet. I only knew I wasn't ready to force the question, and that whatever answer eventually arrived would need to come honestly, rather than from talking myself into readiness before I actually felt it.
Trevor texted that Friday, brief and undemanding. Not asking you to come home. Just wanted you to know I moved the Whitfield board retreat so it doesn't conflict with your mother's visit next month. Should have checked your calendar before committing us to things a long time ago. Starting now.
I read it three times before setting the phone down, feeling something complicated move through me, not quite hope, not yet, but something adjacent to it, a small data point in a column I hadn't yet decided how to weigh against everything else still sitting on the other side of the scale.
I went back to work at the Bellweather that week with a focus I found almost grateful for, the theatre's ongoing restoration offering a place to put my attention that had nothing to do with the parts of my life currently sitting in limbo.
The contractor had uncovered an issue with the original plaster molding in the east wing, more extensive than anyone had budgeted for, and I spent two full days working through funding options with the board, grateful for a problem with a solvable shape,
one where the variables were finite and the outcome depended entirely on decisions I was fully entitled to make on my own.
Talia came with me to the site one afternoon, mostly out of curiosity, and stood beside me looking up at the half-restored ceiling while I explained the molding issue.
"This is where you actually come alive," she said. "I don't think I've seen you talk about anything with this much energy in weeks."
"It's easier to be sure of myself here. Nobody's ever suggested I'm overreacting about historical plaster."
"Maybe that's the answer, then. Maybe you need Trevor to actually treat the rest of your life the way this contractor treats you here. Like your judgment is simply trustworthy, without requiring you to defend it every single time."
I thought about that comment for the rest of the afternoon, standing amid the scaffolding, watching workers carefully remove decades of water damage from ceiling medallions that had waited nearly a century for someone to notice they were worth saving.
I wanted that, I understood, more clearly than I'd allowed myself to want it before.
Not just an apology for the ring. A whole different relationship to my own judgment within my marriage, one where I didn't have to keep proving, over and over, that my preferences carried real weight.
I didn't know yet whether Trevor could actually build that with me, over time, in a way that held once the crisis passed and ordinary life resumed its usual rhythm.
I only knew, standing in that half-restored theatre, that I wasn't willing to settle for anything less than genuinely trying to find out.
I met with Foster that same week, not about the ring, which still sat wrapped in its cloth at the bottom of my bag, but about a small brass plaque the Bellweather board wanted commissioned for the theatre's restored lobby, honoring the original architect.
Foster's shop felt different to visit under these circumstances, knowing what I now knew about the ring's history there, though he greeted me with the same easy warmth he always had, apparently unaware of how central his small shop had become to the events of the past several weeks.
"How's the ring holding up?" he asked, midway through discussing the plaque's lettering. "Prong still solid?"
I hesitated, unsure how much to explain. "It's actually not on my hand right now. Long story."
Foster's expression shifted slightly, a flicker of understanding crossing it that suggested he'd perhaps heard some version of events already, the way these things traveled through small, interconnected social circles.
"I hope whatever happened gets sorted out," he said simply, without pressing further.
"That's a special piece. Made it with real care, back when your husband first brought me your grandmother's stone. I remember exactly how careful he was about getting the setting right."
I thought about that comment for the rest of the day, the specific care Foster remembered from all those years earlier, set against the careless decision that had unraveled things more recently.
It struck me as its own kind of evidence that the man who'd built the ring so thoughtfully and the man who'd handed it away so casually weren't entirely different people, but rather the same person capable of both depths, depending on how much attention he was actually paying in any given moment.
I spent a Saturday that month helping Talia's husband Adam with a home project, an unplanned afternoon that gave me space away from both the Bellweather and the ongoing questions about my marriage, and Adam, working alongside me in his garage,
asked eventually about how things were going without any of the careful delicacy most people brought to the subject.
"Honestly? I don't know yet," I told him. "Some days I feel like we're building toward something real. Other days I wonder if I'm just watching him say the right things because he knows I'm listening for them."
"For what it's worth, Talia's told me some of what he's been doing, the stuff you might not even know about directly. Declining things. Correcting people. It doesn't sound like performance to me, from what I've heard."
"I hope you're right. I want to believe it. I'm just trying to stay honest with myself about the difference between wanting something to be true and it actually being true."
"That seems like the right instinct to hold onto," Adam said, handing me a wrench. "Better to find out slowly and be sure than rush back in and find out the hard way you moved too fast."
I appreciated his measured perspective, neither pushing me toward reconciliation nor away from it, simply offering the outside view of someone with no particular stake in which direction I eventually decided.
I ran into Marguerite from the Whitfield Foundation a few weeks after the gala, at an unrelated planning meeting for a different charity event entirely, and she approached me with visible hesitation, clearly unsure whether the topic was still too raw to broach directly.
"I've thought about that night a lot," she said. "I should have said something to you directly, once I understood what was happening with the ring, instead of just trying to manage around it quietly."
"You didn't do anything wrong, Marguerite. You were managing a genuine crisis with the Averys. None of what happened afterward is yours to carry."
"I appreciate you saying that. I still feel like I should have pulled you aside the moment I noticed something was off, rather than just hoping it would resolve itself before you arrived."
"Hindsight makes a lot of things look clearer than they actually were in the moment," I told her, understanding the truth of that statement more fully than I once had. "I don't think anyone in that room, including me, fully understood what was actually happening until it was too late to stop it."
She seemed genuinely relieved by my response, and we moved on to discussing the actual business of the meeting, though I found myself, walking away afterward,
grateful that at least one more thread of that difficult evening had been resolved with something like mutual understanding rather than lingering guilt.