“There has to be.”
“No. There doesn’t.”
The bathroom was white-tiled, empty, the beige stall doors all partially or completely open. There was no comfort in this room. No easy way to say what she needed to say.
The problem, Dan, is that you don’t know what you said wrong. You can’t know, because I’ve only ever shown you one version of me, and it’s the wrong one.
The problem is that he sees me—the person I truly am—and you don’t. Because I let him see. I never let you.
And even if he leaves for good, I have to learn to be that person he sees. I have to decide whether I’m going to be her all the time, or whether I’m going to settle for less, even knowing I could have had more.
That’s the lesson of New York. That I get to choose. Not whether to walk off the cliff, but whether to fall. Whether to believe I can hold myself up.
“I met someone,” she said, and it felt terrible to say it. Scary in a way that nothing had ever been. “Someone important.”
“What do you mean? Who?”
“His name is Ben.”
“How’d this—what are you saying?”
“I met him at a bar. After I left the apartment. I got mugged, and he bought me a drink.”
“You got mugged? You’re serious?”
“Yes.”
“Jeez, May, are you okay?”
“Yeah. That’s not important. But Ben and I—actually, I’m not sure what we are, to be honest. The thing is, Dan …”
The thing was, it was hard, telling someone how you really felt. Hurting someone who cared about you.
The thing was, she’d been unfair to him when he proposed. Maybe understandably, because the words he’d said reflected back all the truths she hadn’t been admitting to herself—every fear about how he saw her and what she had made herself become in order to keep him.
He’d put his heart on his sleeve for her in a room full of people, and she’d stabbed him in it.
Sometimes, she fell into the habit of thinking Dan wasn’t smart, when, in fact, he just wasn’t particularly good at people. Emotions confused him, but he could memorize all the endless variations in a playbook without apparent effort.
Even if his proposal had sucked, he’d given her four years of his free time, his confidence, his hopes, his body. He’d patiently waited a year while she dithered about moving away from Wisconsin, then paid off her mortgage so she’d always have a place to go home to. He’d rented an apartment in Manhattan so they could have a getaway of their own, separate from the team.
Dan had deserved more from her than a three-sentence note. He’d deserved an explanation. A phone call. Ten phone calls, if that was what it took.
She didn’t understand how she could have thought otherwise, even temporarily.
“The thing is, I wasn’t happy,” she said softly.
He sighed. “I guess I knew that.”
“You did?”
“Well, you didn’t seem like you were in a big hurry to move with me.”
“You told me to wait a year.”
“But that was because I could tell you weren’t excited about it. And then when you got to Jersey, you didn’t seem all that psyched, either.”
May hadn’t thought he’d noticed. She’d thought she was doing a good job of keeping her spirits up, protecting him from the knowledge that her adjustment to their new life wasn’t going according to plan.