The Missing Piece
THIRTY-TWO
The second season of Nashville started much like the first. We’d film all day, then I’d go home and pass out, exhausted.
Allie was still living with me, but we’d started to drift apart.
I’d become close to a different group of people in Nashville, and Allie had a new boyfriend, who she was getting serious with.
In a few years, they’d get engaged, and she’d start to plan a mountaintop wedding that was going to include her skiing down a hill in her wedding dress, right up to her future husband and all her bridesmaids.
I tried to talk her out of it—no one wanted to see her do the pizza pie over her veil and break her leg—but she insisted.
Believe it or not, no one was hurt, and Allie skied away a married woman.
You’d think that Allie and I would find comfort in the fact that we were both moving in mature, sensible directions—even if it meant we saw less of each other—but the opposite happened.
I was working so much that I was often in a bad head space, unable to be the kind of friend I prided myself on being.
I didn’t want to drag Allie down, so instead I pushed her away emotionally.
I hardly brought up anything that wasn’t superficial.
This hurt her, and she pulled back as well.
Allie finally decided to move out, and we didn’t speak for almost a year.
But I wanted to. If Wlad wasn’t happy, I had to be doing something wrong. Surely, I thought, there must be something about me or the situation that I could fix. I was letting down the man I loved more than anything in the world, and disappointing another person was far and away my worst fear.
Just being in love wasn’t enough. If we didn’t have a common home or language or purpose to keep us together, we had to find something to tackle together. If we didn’t have excitement and expectation and a great, big goal, I worried we were doomed. And I couldn’t lose Wlad the way I lost Allie.
That’s about the time I convinced Wlad to propose to me.
After five years of legal wranglings, separation agreements, and stalled negotiations, my mom and dad still weren’t divorced.
I tried as hard as possible to stay out of it, but my family had always lived on top of each other emotionally, and they needed me.
I also agreed to give both of them some money to make their lives easier, and that pulled me in even more.
A big part of me worried that my generosity was allowing their divorce to drag out, though, and I thought if I exited the scene, maybe they could wrap things up.
Or, maybe not. I was so close to the situation it was hard to be sure.
I decided I had to talk to Wlad about it. He was sensible with money, so surely, he’d know what to do.
“What would you do if you were me?” I asked, looking into my phone, where I could see Wlad in his gym in Hamburg. “Would you give them money to help end this?”
“I would continue to help,” Wlad answered. “That’s what families do.”
I sighed. “All this legal fighting is starting to make me lose faith in marriage. If this is what it all comes to, what’s the point?”
Wlad smiled. “Don’t lose faith, kukolka. Their marriage created you. It was worth everything.”
“You’re right,” I said. “Despite this mess, I believe in marriage. It worked for your parents.” Wlad’s dad had passed away in 2011 after a long battle with cancer, which was caused by his work cleaning up Chernobyl.
I’d seen him suffer through his illness, and I admired how lovingly Wlad’s mom took care of him.
Wlad looked away, like he was distracted by the memory of his parents together. “Hayden?” he asked. “Would you ever marry me?”
“Excuse me?” I yelled, almost dropping the phone. Wlad had told me he never wanted to get married. I was also unsure whether he’d asked a hypothetical question or delivered an actual marriage proposal. If Wlad was asking me to marry him, it was the most half-assed proposal I’d ever heard.
Wlad cleared his throat. “I asked if you would ever marry me.”
“Ever? Or now?” I asked. “I mean, are you proposing to me on Skype? Is that what’s happening?”
Wlad screwed his face up and looked away. “I think so. Do you want to get married? Because…”
I refused to play this awkward game of chicken a second more than I had to, so I cut him off.
“Yes, Wlad, I would like to get married to you. I accept.”
We set a date and chose a location: December 31, 2013, in Bali, with the festivities spilling over onto New Year’s Day.
With Wlad’s blessing, I designed my own ring: an emerald-cut diamond on a split rose gold band lined by pavé diamonds.
It was gorgeous, and I loved it. I also called up my dream wedding dress designer, Georgina Chapman, who was founder of the fashion label Marchesa.
She and I set up a time to meet, and she promised to have a book of fabrics for me to choose from.
Wlad and I batted around flower and design ideas, and we talked about bridesmaid dresses and what kind of ties the groomsmen should wear so they would complement Wlad in his Armani suit.
I still wasn’t a girlie girl, but I did love weddings, and this was going to be the wedding I’d dreamed of since I was little, with dancing and speeches and my whole family together, celebrating the beginning of my new life.
After we broke our engagement news—but not the wedding details—to the press, my former publicist lined up a photo shoot for the spring 2014 cover of Brides magazine.
The editors promised it would be classy, and it was, with me dressed in a strapless, beaded wedding gown designed by Naeem Khan, holding a bouquet of lilacs and roses.
I gushed about how sweet and simple Wlad’s proposal had been—gritting my teeth the whole time because I knew I was stretching the truth—but I told myself that I didn’t need Wlad to get on bended knee or treat me like a princess.
I needed stability, not fireworks. I just wanted this man in my life, not all the things he could shower me with.
In the midst of our planning, Wlad and I took a vacation on a boat with two friends of ours, a married couple who would later become Kaya’s godparents.
The husband was a photographer, and he spent much of our days taking pictures of the scenery, the food we enjoyed, and his wife.
A few days into the trip, I took notice as he lifted his camera toward his sightline and began searching for the right angle, adjusting the lens for the perfect light.
As he paused, then snapped a few photos, I realized how present he was.
He wasn’t distracted by the sound of the water rushing past our boat or bothered by the fact that his wife and I were opening a bottle of wine.
He didn’t mention all the emails he hadn’t answered or the social media post he hadn’t checked.
He was in the moment, enjoying it with his friends and the partner he’d chosen to spend his life with.
I looked over at Wlad, and his face was once again buried in his phone.
For the rest of the trip, Wlad and I bickered about how unavailable he was, with me arguing that he needed to spend real time with me and him arguing that he couldn’t leave his work behind.
I pleaded with Wlad that it made no sense for me to neglect my career for a vacation while he spent all his time working on that same vacation.
Wlad wasn’t in the moment—at least as far as I was concerned—and I needed him.
So did our friends. All I wanted was the man I loved, and my heart was screaming that he wasn’t with me.
After the vacation ended, we said goodbye to our friends and returned to Germany. We still hadn’t resolved our differences. Just like my parents, neither of us felt validated by the other person. Even worse, we both felt ignored, misunderstood, and unloved.
Not long after we returned, Wlad and I went out to lunch.
“There’s something I need to tell you,” he said over appetizers.
I put my fork down. “When someone says they need to discuss something, it’s never good,” I responded. “So spit it out.”
Wlad hesitated, then cleared his throat. “I think we should postpone the wedding.”
Searing pain shot through my body. Suddenly, I imagined my wedding, with me walking down the aisle under a moonlit sky, surrounded by the people I loved most in the world, who I’d finally found a home with after years of feeling marginalized.
I imagined looking into Wlad’s eyes, holding his hands as he promised to love and protect me for the rest of my life.
I thought of his family, who he’d welcomed me into after mine was destroyed.
I remembered Natalia and Vitali and their children, and how they’d accepted me despite the fact we were from different worlds.
Then I felt the pain settle into my heart, and I closed my eyes as all the beauty and joy in my life disappeared right then and there.
“Okay,” I answered, opening my eyes and shrugging.
I didn’t have anything else to say, nor did I have an ounce of fight in me.
Wlad’s words had ruined everything, and accepting my fate with a straight face was the only way I knew how to hold on to whatever shred of dignity I had left.
I didn’t even ask why he’d put our wedding on hold.
The who, what, and why didn’t matter because they were buried under too much pain.
There was nothing Wlad could do or say that would pick up the pieces of my life and put them back together.
Later that day, Wlad took me to the airport so I could fly back to Nashville. As we entered the terminal and headed toward security, Wlad stopped, then turned to me.
“Let’s do it,” he said emphatically.
I stared at him, dumbfounded. “Do what?”
“Get married.”
Once again, I felt my chest tighten, then pain radiate through every nerve in my body.
My skin felt raw and itchy, and my hands began to quiver.
I thought I couldn’t feel more humiliated than I had at lunch, but here I was, swimming in shame.
First Wlad had uninvited me from his family, and now he wanted me to forget he’d ever crushed my hopes and dreams.
“No,” I answered. “That’s not going to happen.”
Then I turned around, walked away from him, and entered security so I could get on my plane and leave my broken life behind.