The First Husband

I ignored him and kept picking up the shards, which made a lot of sense. Because cutting my finger open would really show him who was boss.

“Maybe we should go inside and get gloves or something?” he said. “It’s a lot of glass.”

“No thanks,” I said. “I’m fine.”

It was the first thing I said to him as though it hadn’t been—how long?—since we’d last spoken. The first thing on the other side of our breakup. The other side of my marriage.

Nick just nodded. “Fair enough,” he said.

Then he too got to work in the dark, also searching for the visible larger pieces, until he found one of the bottle’s necks, its orange wrapping still intact, holding it out to me, like a present.

This was when I looked at him—first at the bottle’s neck, then at him. He was dressed in a dumb Batman T-shirt beneath his blue button-down shirt. And back in his old wire-rim glasses again, like he’d never been a day without them. Looking unshaven and intent and exactly like himself. Which, is to say, absolutely perfect to me.

“I thought you were in London,” I said.

“I was,” he said. He pushed the wire-rims higher up on his nose. “I mean . . . I am.”

“Then what are you doing here?”

“I was in the neighborhood?” he said, trying to make a joke. But his eyes looked tired behind the glasses. They looked sad to me.

And we were still on the wine shack floor. There was that. We were on the floor, looking right at each other.

I moved back, farther away from him. “I need to go inside,” I said. “I’m sorry you came so far, Nick. I really am. But I need to go back inside. And you need to go. Right now.”

I started to stand up, but he reached out and took my arm, gently—like it was his right—keeping me there, on my knees.

“Wait,” he said. “I came a long way.”

I shook my head. “No one asked you to.”

“Fine. But will you just wait for one second?”

“For what?” I said.

But I knew for what. Even after so much time, I knew. It was all too familiar between us. Like we could just pick up right where we left off. This was what Nick was counting on. That love would do what it often threatened to do: remind you that it was timeless, as if that were its entire story.

Nick could ask his questions later. We could fight and talk and get nowhere later. We could figure out whether the details of the time since we parted were only details later. But if he kept me there, that close to him, his hand on my arm, his lips moving closer to my lips—if he kissed me there—he could decide that still meant something, maybe even everything.

So there I was, about to stand up, about to disengage, but not midmotion yet. I was about to be midmotion, but I wasn’t yet. I was still on my knees. Because there is always a moment, between the moment when you might, and the moment when you don’t.

And, in that moment, my husband walked in.

27

Griffin was standing in the entranceway to the wine shack—a large flashlight in his hands, his eyes fixed on Nick—as Nick and I jumped up, almost in sync, which somehow seemed like the worst possible place to start. The worst possible place for what was coming.

“Griffin . . .” I said.

“Hey there,” Griffin said.

He still wasn’t looking at me, though. He still wasn’t looking anywhere near me, his eyes tight on the one person who should never have been in his wine shack without an invitation.

I felt the need to fix the situation, fast, but I didn’t know how. This isn’t what it looks like, I wanted to say. But it was probably somewhat what it looked like: me on the floor of Griffin’s wine shack with the last person I should have been on the floor of his wine shack with—two bottles of broken wine between us, his lips making their way toward mine.

Besides, I’d heard those exact words in too many bad television shows, in too many B movies, where the exact opposite was far closer to the truth. I’d heard them from Griffin, himself, just the other day, hadn’t I? He and Gia talking over coffee—a large, cumbersome bar between them. It didn’t seem to be a good time to point that out, even though part of me wanted to. As if that would make us even.

So instead I dug deep to find the right thing to say.