The First Husband

“If you’re waiting to be clear on that, you may be waiting forever.”

“Gee. That’s comforting.”

He squeezed my hand.

“Why not just give it another chance? I’ve always liked Nick.”

I gave Peter a look, surprised somehow—and not—for that to be what came out of his mouth.

“Peter, you’ve never met Nick.”

“That’s why I like him.”

“That makes no sense.”

He scrunched up his nose. “Since you married Griffin, you’ve been so preoccupied. You haven’t even wanted to travel,” he said. “With Nick, you had freedom.”

Freedom. There was that word again. I had organized my life to hold on to it, hadn’t I? Everyone seemed to think so. Everyone—myself included—seemed to think I needed the possibility of going anywhere at any time, of infinite openness. But I was starting to wonder if maybe I had missed what freedom really looked like. Maybe it had less to do with always having a way out. Maybe it had something more to do with finding the way deeper in.

“So this is about you?” I said. “What you want for me?”

“No, it’s about what you want for you.” He paused. “I’m only saying that he’s just your first husband. He certainly doesn’t have to be your last!”

With that, Peter turned to look out the taxi window, apparently done with this conversation.

“That’s a lovely exit line,” I said, sarcastically.

“Look, love, sue me if you must, but that’s how I feel. I just think that you and Griffin . . . the whole thing just seems complicated.”

“Define complicated.” I said.

“ ‘Confusing, messy. A lot to take on,’ ” he said. “ ‘Often difficult to analyze, understand, or explain.’ ”

I felt my chest constrict, start to close down, just discussing Griffin. Maybe because I couldn’t make sense of all of it yet. When I had been in Massachusetts, I had felt overwhelmed and unsettled. So why, all the way across the world, was I feeling something else so intensely? A feeling I didn’t even know before that moment, not in just that way. I was, undeniably, homesick.

“And, really,” Peter continued, “no need to be angry with me just because you want to see him.”

I drilled him with a look. “I don’t want to see him,” I said. “Wait . . . which one are you talking about?”

“You know which one I’m talking about,” Peter said.

“Not really.”

He squeezed my hand. “It’s obvious,” he said.

33

After the play that night, I couldn’t fall asleep. This was what I was up against: one job firing, one botched restaurant opening, a marriage proposal from someone else. No trips to speak of, no big birthdays, one awkward meeting each with the other’s parents. A cold, windy, small town. Where I had no obvious job prospects. No obvious future. Where I had a crazy brother-in-law and a full house of mothermissing twin boys and five hundred ruined photographs. Where it was too cold to walk outside after 5:00 P.M., where it was too noisy to be inside anytime before that. Where my husband (if he still thought of himself that way) had a beautiful, homespun ex-girlfriend, a mother who didn’t like me in the least, and a new, nameless restaurant in the middle of our lives, locking us in there. Locking us into the immeasurable quiet, where I could hear all of my fears that I’d chosen a life on impulse. All of my fears that I’d forever remember the one guy I’d always thought would be my answer. That one love now offering me everything. For the first time.

And this. And this too. A growing sense that maybe just once in this life someone loves us for the us we don’t even know how to be yet. And if we lose him too early—in the name of all the promises in the world: a new job, a new city, an old love offering us happily ever after—we may just lose that chance to be our best self.

34

The next Sunday, the night before Nick was scheduled to leave London for good, I went for a late-night walk around my neighborhood, dressed in a pair of sweatpants that didn’t belong outside the house. My Massachusetts coat with the rhinestone hearts keeping me warm against the rain. Despite the wet, I ended up walking for so long that I left my neighborhood altogether, heading east—not admitting to myself that I was walking in the direction of Victoria station, closer to where I might run into Nick, closer to where he was living. I walked until I actually wound up in Pimlico, in front of a popular gastropub called the Orange.

I wasn’t planning on going in anywhere—on my flashy hearts making a public appearance—but even though the Orange was crowded, I went inside, and found a seat at the end of the bar, right near the piano, an older couple miraculously getting up to go just as I was getting there.

As I swept into the man’s seat before I lost it, the barkeep walked over and wiped down the counter in front of me, trying a little too hard not to take in my ensemble, not to stare at my rhinestone hearts.