Strangers: A Memoir of Marriage — Part III

Part III

Osprey couples mate within days of meeting, producing two to four eggs. The female “broods” the eggs, warming them, caring for them. The male continues to gather material for the nest, delivering it back to the female. He hunts to sustain them, always fresh fish—trout, bluefish, menhaden.

Osprey eggs incubate for four to five weeks and hatch in the late spring.

The chicks grow rapidly, reaching their full size and weight within forty days. They leave the nest (“fledge”) in midsummer. Before flying for the first time, they practice, flapping their wings while holding on to the nest with their talons. Eventually, they let go, first hovering over the nest like a helicopter, then taking short, cautious flights. Soon they learn to fish for themselves. At this stage, the offspring are called “juveniles.” They are distinguishable from their parents because their eyes are orange (rather than yellow) and their wing feathers have white, scalloped edges.

The juveniles hone their skills for the remainder of the summer, fishing with more accuracy, venturing farther from the nest, until the cooler air and shorter days of September signal that it is time to leave the island.

—

After James left on the seaplane, after the girls and I ate our takeout dinner, I sat at our card table in the corner of the living room, drinking lemon ginger tea and doing a New Yorker jigsaw puzzle of Central Park. Puzzles were one of the only ways I could pass time—reading, or even television, felt too hard.

The card table, now cleared of James’s papers and laptop, was filled with hundreds of puzzle pieces. I had completed the edges and was working

on the trees in the middle of the picture, a mix of green, red, and brown leaves. I tried to focus on one piece at a time, joining two and then three, starting on another pair, another set, plodding through it. The image on the box—a lake in the center of the park, a couple in a rowboat—made me long for New York, for home.

Carrie came into the living room, her step always surprisingly heavy for such a small girl, and said, “I don’t know about this other lady.” She said a name I didn’t recognize, something that sounded like fruit.

I looked up from the table, “Who?”

She said, “The one Daddy cheated on you with.” I gripped the puzzle piece I was holding.

Carrie said that before James had left, sometime after Evie’s slingshot lesson and before his basement searching, while I was making the turkey sandwich, she had asked him, “Did you cheat on Mommy?”

He said, “Yes.”

She asked, “What is her name?”

He gave Carrie the name she had just given me. It was not the alliterative one I knew, the name that had tormented me since he left, the one I googled multiple times a day, staring at her face on the screen, trying to understand why he had chosen her over me. In addition to having a profile on LinkedIn, she had posted three photos on Facebook—a vacation photo on a boat (her dark hair pushed back with sunglasses), a photograph of a tropical drink (served in a coconut and decorated with an orchid), and her profile photo (another vacation shot, this one at a zoo). She was fifteen years younger than me, but not a younger version of me. We looked like the opposite of each other, in height, coloring, style. I thought, He wants something different.

I also found her husband’s photograph and work history online. He was as accomplished as she was, with an impressive title at a well-known technology company. He had close-cropped hair, pale skin, and looked young too—so young, they could have been our children. I learned, by paying a fee on an address-search site, that they lived in a neighborhood

adjacent to ours, in a high-rise I would be able to see from the window of my bedroom when I returned to New York.

I had not reached out to the woman or her husband since the night of the voicemail and the ambulance. Her husband didn’t text or call me again either. An older friend, a lawyer, advised me against any contact. He said, “It will become messy very quickly, and it will only lead to more misery. It could also, possibly, make you look bad in front of a judge when you divorce.” His advice felt like a clear, defined path, one that felt dignified. I vowed that I would never contact the husband again; I would never have words with the woman who was sleeping with my husband. But still they haunted me, these phantom figures, the supporting actors in the story of my marriage ending.

I picked up my phone from the table and texted James.

“What is this name you gave Carrie? Are there two women?”

He replied immediately, “No. She has two names.” He spelled out the name she had been given at birth, and the alliterative one she used at work.

His tone, even in text, felt scolding, like I should have known this basic fact. His loyalty was with her now, not us.

When James made his speech to the girls in the living room, to Finn on the phone, he didn’t mention the affair. We discussed it beforehand, the decision to leave it out. He didn’t want to tell them, and I agreed. It felt sordid, talking about their father sleeping with someone else, and I thought, If we hide it, they will be more likely to forgive him. I was protecting him.

But he had told Carrie. He had changed course without telling me.

I was too stunned to feel angry. And too worried about Carrie trying to absorb this new name in our family story. Carrie looked almost exactly like me as a kid, but we were different. She had the courage to ask her father those questions, demanding the truth. I would never have asked.

I stood up from the table and said, “I’m so sorry. I should have told you earlier.” She was sitting upside down in an upholstered chair near the fireplace, her head hanging off the seat, her small bare feet bouncing in the air. I said, “Let’s go talk to Evie.”

She said, “She already knows. She said she knew for a long time.”

I learned later that Evie had known since she’d read a text on my iPad, in the first days after James left, before I learned to turn off notifications.

She had carried that knowledge, that load, while I was pretending everything was fine, while she did her schoolwork and played her cello, while she cooked for me and her sister, trying to keep us afloat. She had tried to tell me in her own way, sending that late-night text. But I had not understood.

—

I struggled to get out of bed each morning. It was like a weighted blanket was on me, preventing me from moving, from standing up. I kept the television on, letting it run for hours, from early local news to Good Morning America to daytime talk shows. The girls made their own breakfasts, usually cereal that they brought to their computers, eating it during their first remote class, leaving the milk on the kitchen counter to grow warm. By late morning, I knew they would start looking for me. I had to get up, open the shades, make my bed, change out of my pajamas, unload the dishwasher, put the milk back in the fridge. It all felt hard, like I was moving through mud.

At some point in late April, at my friend Anna’s urging, I made myself get up before the talk shows started, promising her I would try a short walk through the woods, down our dirt road to a small public beach. I still felt heavy and slow, but the cold air felt good, moving my legs felt good. I went a little farther the next day, out to the asphalt road, to our mailbox. Then a mile to the pharmacy in town. Then two miles, down Franklin Street, up Main Street. I logged my steps on my phone, the numbers increasing, bars turning from red to green.

Within a couple of weeks, I was doing a wide loop around Vineyard Haven and West Chop, totaling nearly eight miles every day, religiously, in sunshine, rain, and, once, hail. I alternated the direction of the loop, one day clockwise, heading to the water, the next counterclockwise, toward town.

My new Blundstone boots started to wear in, showing the miles, the ground

I was covering, dusted white from saltwater. I always included a stretch of beach in the walk, looking for sea glass in the width of wet sand.

Susan and I had collected sea glass together since I was a little girl. I had a tall jar filled with it, on a table to the left of the front door, with a silver plaque Susan had inscribed with every person who had contributed to the collection—me, Susan, her mother, my father, my brother, James, Finn, Evie, Carrie. On my walks, I had a high bar for what I would keep—the glass had to be completely smooth, no slick or sharp edges, and bigger than a quarter. I found a piece almost every time, the common dark green and brown glass, and the rarer colors—aqua, sky blue, pale pink. I dropped each piece in the jar when I returned home, a bounty, a purpose to my journey.

Most of the time, I didn’t see anyone else on my walks. If I did see someone, usually going the other direction, one of us would cross the street or dirt road to create distance between us, lifting our masks to cover our mouths as we passed. I always walked up or down William Street. It was the prettiest street in town, with big white clapboard houses, picket fences, porches, and wide lawns. A small Episcopal church stood at the top of the street. In the summer, it was the site of the Friday lobster roll sale, a wildly popular event. The church was quiet during the pandemic, its doors locked, but I stopped in front of it whenever I passed, looking up at the cross on the pitched roof.

I was an obedient Catholic for many years after Rose left my mother’s house. Lynn and I went to Mass every Sunday at the Catholic church in our boarding-school town. We took Communion, put money in the collection basket, kneeled in the confession booth. I prayed every night, reciting the Lord’s Prayer, and believed in a kind but censorious God. This religiousness was strange—my Catholic father didn’t go to church as an adult; my mother, an Episcopalian who converted to Catholicism in the wake of her second divorce, never imposed it on me. My strict devotion had come from Rose, her admonitions still in my head.

My first year in college, I took a class about the New Testament and discovered that so much of what Jesus taught in the Bible—compassion, inclusion, and spirituality—conflicted with the punishing, rote rules of my

childhood in the Catholic Church, my life with Rose. I shed my religious devotion abruptly and completely. In my adult life, I have only attended church for baptisms, weddings, and funerals.

Standing on William Street, looking up at the cross atop the Episcopal church, I didn’t pray, but I thought about the people I worried about—my mother alone at her house in Bellport on Long Island, Finn in Sag Harbor, the girls, sometimes even James. I thought about the friends checking on me every day. My thought loop, moving through these tender connections, became its own kind of prayer. As I walked away, the Catholic girl in me emerged for a moment: I made the sign of the cross, my fingers on my forehead, my heart, each shoulder.

I started to depend on the walks, like they were fuel. I’d read that the best way to handle a heartbreak of any kind was to move through it, rather than around it. This made sense to me. I think I moved around my father’s death, unable to understand or face it completely. But in my long, solitary loops, I felt like I was literally walking through my sadness, the muck of it, day after day. I got to know it. I screamed in the woods. I cried openly on the deserted sidewalks of Vineyard Haven. I lay down on the cold sand of the beach, midwalk, in anguish. The pandemic allowed this, in the cancellation of regular life, in the absence of noise, in the quiet.

—

I went to the local grocery store every Thursday. I put Evie’s list and mine in the pocket of my jeans, her list always longer, her sweet teenage print filling the page. Before I left, I cleaned the kitchen thoroughly—throwing out old food, wiping the refrigerator shelves, scrubbing the range. I had replaced my natural cleaning products with Clorox, Lysol, S.O.S., Dawn, still believing that the virus lived on objects, that I could kill it with chemicals. I hated cleaning, but I liked the order and ritual of the task, doing it on the same day at the same time, starting fresh when I returned with my grocery bags, placing eggs and vegetables and yogurt onto clean shelves—each step giving me a sense of control.

My trips to the grocery store felt like weekly ventures into battle. The island was still sparsely populated, there were no lines outside the door, but the atmosphere inside the store was tense. The aisles were marked with one- way arrows, and there were lists of rules about where to stand at checkout, when to unload our carts. We gave one another space, politely waiting to select our bunch of bananas until the person ahead of us had moved on. But it did not feel like camaraderie. There was an air of suspicion, of needing to protect ourselves against one another.

At checkout, before starting to scan my items, the clerk always asked, “Do you have an island number?” Full-time island residents were given a special number to get a discount on their groceries, a practice that existed before and after the pandemic. It seemed fair, given the high cost of living on the island. But when the clerk asked the question, I knew the energy around me was about to shift. I was about to identify myself as an outsider, a threat, someone who could have brought the virus with them to the island.

I said “no” as quietly as I could, or just shook my head.

During one visit to the store, as I stood in the baking aisle near the flours and sugars, I saw a woman walking toward me the wrong way, against the arrows. I felt immediately threatened by her breaking the rule, by her proximity. I looked at her, at her light blue eyes between her mask and baseball cap, and realized I knew her. She was not a part of our club; her house was in Aquinnah, the beachy town on the tip of the island, but we’d been friends when our kids were little, before she moved to Boston. I said her name and she stopped next to me.

She said, “Oh my God! You’re here! How are you?”

Gripping my cart, I said, “I’m not good.” I paused and took a breath through my mask. “James left me. He is having an affair.” It was the first

time I’d told someone in person.

Her eyes widened.

I continued, “I had no idea. I thought I was happily married.”

Her eyes started to water, like she was going to cry. She said, “That fucking asshole.” It was exactly the right thing to say.

We talked about our kids and the pandemic, about living on the island.

We moved to the side of the aisle when someone wanted to pass us. She told me she was volunteering at an island food bank every Friday. She asked if I wanted to come. I said yes. I didn’t feel altruistic; at that moment, in April, I could not access the instinct to help anyone. I just liked the idea of busy, straightforward work. Something that would fill a few hours, with someone I knew.

I met her at the food bank every Friday through the spring and summer.

It operated out of a church basement in Vineyard Haven. Side by side with other volunteers, I filled bags with cereal boxes, loaves of bread, jars of soup. I counted cucumbers, oranges, bananas, heads of broccoli. I reached into freezers for bags of frozen meatballs, packs of icy salmon. The room was nearly silent as we moved around one another, all intent on finishing our tasks before the end of the shift. It felt, almost immediately, like relief, a pause in my reality, a moment when my brain could rest.

—

In the evenings, after the sun set, once I cleaned up dinner and the girls disappeared to their rooms, I had another expanse of time to fill. If I got in bed before 10 p.m., the night was unbearably long. I continued to rely on jigsaw puzzles, returning to the card table in the living room with a cup of tea, always in the same seat, methodically putting the pieces into place until the clock showed me some mercy, turning to the hour when I could end the day.

As I sat working, I often felt the presence of several of my “deads,” as Susan called them—my grandmother, my father, and Lynn, all sitting at the table with me. My grandmother, Babe, was to my left, my father across from me, and Lynn to my right. The feeling was strange; I have never believed in ghosts. But their presence was comforting. It felt like they were standing guard, protecting me.

Next to me, my grandmother’s presence was warm, caretaking. Despite (or maybe because of) her failings as a mother, she had been a wonderful

grandmother. She loved having me, my brother, and my older cousins at Kiluna Farm. She let us run wild, delighting in our presence, giving us her rapt attention. She insisted we join the adults at cocktails in the library, lunches in her garden, dinners in the dining room. To entertain us, she would arrange a large piece of lettuce or spinach in her teeth, smiling, pretending it wasn’t there. We would dissolve into laughter, squealing, “Baba!,” the name we called her, the name my children call my mother now. She cheered when my older cousin directed us in elaborate skits, performed for her guests after dinner.

She was tactile and affectionate. She always pulled me onto her lap, kissed the nape of my neck, and told me what flavor she tasted—honey, marmalade, lavender. We played pattycake and backgammon. At bedtime, she used her long, red manicured nails to compose imaginary paintings on my face. She let me try on her jewelry, the two of us in front of her mirror, her graceful hands clasping necklaces around my neck, bracelets on my small wrists. She had fake versions of my favorite pieces made for me for Christmas, all perfectly arranged in a red lacquer box.

My grandmother was, and is, famous for her beauty and style. She was widely photographed, first as a model, then as a young woman in New York, then as a wife, first to my grandfather, Stanley Mortimer, then to Bill Paley. Images of her have become iconic—her face in profile by Richard Avedon; a Horst portrait of her wearing a color-blocked dress, her wrists wrapped in pearls; a series by Slim Aarons at her house in Jamaica, casual in pants and a straw hat. She was meticulous in crafting her image, in how she presented herself to the world—her clothing, her hair and makeup, her jewelry, her homes, how she entertained. She cared about every detail. But her style was also natural, instinctual. It came easily. She set trends by the simplest action, like, famously, tying her scarf to the handle of her pocketbook. She was first named to the International Best Dressed List in 1945, and photographs of her are still printed, posted, and exchanged eighty years later, as new generations adopt her as a fashion icon.

But my grandmother was more than her famous image. She was brilliant, able to lead a conversation on any topic. She was funny. She read

constantly. She was rarely at rest. She was an artist, drawing in pencil and sculpting in clay, skills she kept hidden from most of the world. Her father, Harvey Cushing, was a brain surgeon, and I think she inherited her intellect from him, along with her long, elegant hands. Her style was born from the same things—intelligence and artistry.

In a more modern era, she might have claimed her talents publicly, as an editor, a designer, an artist. But she was raised to be a wife, to support her husband, to be the perfect hostess, not to forge an identity apart from those tasks. Within these restrictions, she expressed herself in surfaces.

She died of lung cancer in 1978, the day after her sixty-third birthday, when I was nine. I had not thought of her often in my adult life, usually only if I saw a photograph of her on Instagram, or when my brother and I reminisced about our time at Kiluna Farm. But she was very present in the days, weeks, and months after James left. I often woke up thinking about her, as though she’d been whispering in my ear as I slept.

There were, and are, persistent rumors that her husband, Bill Paley, was a philanderer, rumors fictionalized and retold, in print and on television, like a game of telephone, the facts becoming murkier in each retelling. The rumors are now tied closely with the writer Truman Capote, who was, for a time, my grandmother’s close friend and confidant. In 1975, he published a short story in which a man, closely resembling Bill, has an affair with a governor’s wife. My grandmother was devastated by the publication of the story, presumably because Truman had betrayed her trust and her privacy, which she guarded fiercely, and co-opted her life for his own purposes. She never spoke to Capote again.

While my mother knew nothing of her stepfather’s affairs, she grew to accept that he was unfaithful. It was a common phenomenon among rich and powerful men of the era, part of the package. My mother loved him anyway, as did I. We saw him often in the years after my grandmother’s death, at his house at Lyford Cay in the Bahamas or in his apartment on Fifth Avenue. He often expressed deep grief over losing my grandmother, and regret for not appreciating her enough.

My mother also had a pattern of loving unfaithful men, including both of her husbands and her beau of three decades, a journalist. She broke up with the journalist several times because of his infidelity, for the final time in 2018.

Without being conscious of it, as a child and a young adult, I absorbed this legacy of infidelity. I heard my grandfather described as “naughty,” my mother’s boyfriend as a “flirt,” the betrayals chalked up to unavoidable temptation, a natural accessory to success. I saw that my grandmother and mother had forgiven these men, that they’d quietly cleaned up the mess, never saying a word about it. I felt, in my bones, an acceptance of men behaving badly, a value in not calling them out, in protecting a man’s belief in his own importance, and a premium placed on keeping such things private.

I thought I had ended this legacy by marrying someone so steady, so unassuming, someone who didn’t have a public presence, someone who didn’t flirt with other women, at least not in front of me. But I had repeated it in a spectacular fashion. Unlike my grandfather and my mother’s boyfriend, James seemed to have no regret, and he didn’t want me back.

The similarity was that he felt entitled to do it, and he expected me to stay quiet about it.

In the living room each night, as I worked on my puzzle, with my grandmother’s ghost sitting calmly beside me, I’d wonder, What is it about the women in my family that attracts this kind of betrayal? Will the same thing happen to my girls?

Did James have his own legacy of men behaving badly, walking out without explanation, of women stoically enduring it?

Did we both have another legacy—of adults remaining silent, never explaining what had happened, pushing it underground, into the subconscious lives of the next generations, creating a destiny where the bad thing could be, and would be, repeated?

Lynn, sitting to my right at the card table, looked as she did before she became sick—beautiful with dark, curly hair, a spark in her blue eyes. She could be very blunt and told me once, early in my marriage, that she didn’t

understand James, she couldn’t connect with him, which I took to mean that she didn’t like him. I was defensive. But I asked myself now, Had she identified something I didn’t want to see—a coldness, an unknowability?

Now, in my distress, she wasn’t gloating. She seemed to be reminding me of what we’d discussed many times, Everyone has something. This is yours. Each life has a defining crisis. This was, of course, an easy one, relative to many, relative to hers.

My father’s presence, across from me, was intense. He was upset. It felt like he was saying, I trusted him too. I trusted him with you.

—

During the long days of April, while I was falling apart, I had to turn my attention to an immigration case. My law partner and I had a virtual hearing in Queens Family Court scheduled for April 28. Our client, age fourteen, was applying for status as “special immigrant juvenile,” a designation that would give her standing to apply for a green card and eventually citizenship. She would need to prove a set of facts, including that her father had abandoned her at birth, that she’d arrived in the United States alone, joining her mother, and that returning to her home country would not be in her best interest. A family court judge would rule on her status; if it was denied, she could face deportation. We were assigned a judge who was, by reputation, the toughest in the building.

We had complicated documents to prepare and file in advance of the hearing—affidavits, a memorandum of law, stipulations, and affirmations.

We would need to schedule several Zoom calls with our client and her mother to gather enough information for the affidavits, and to make the case for special immigrant status. We had to get their signatures by mail and enlist a virtual notary.

I would have been able to manage all of this with ease before James’s departure, but now, in my ruptured state, it felt impossible. I was unable to read, to write the simplest email, to have a conversation with someone without bursting into tears. I wasn’t eating or sleeping much and it showed

—every nerve ending felt raw, hypersensitive. I made many mistakes in the affidavits, which my partner caught and fixed. I had a breakdown over scanning and inserting signature pages into documents, a task that felt like the most difficult thing ever required of a person. I was so emotional during one call, my voice catching several times, tears threatening, I had to hang up.

Our client’s mother texted me on WhatsApp, “Are you okay, Belle?”

I wrote back, “I’m so sorry, I have a personal issue, something going on in my family.”

She responded, “I could tell. I recognize your pain because I have experienced it myself. I am sorry you are suffering. I am praying for you.”

Our stories were not comparable; my challenges were mild compared to what she had survived. I felt ridiculous. But she didn’t seem to see it this way. She offered me empathy. Sitting at my desk, reading her text, I felt overcome with gratitude, for the kindness extended by a woman I barely knew.

As my partner and I pieced things together, slowly revising drafts, rescanning pages, tweaking language, I became more stable and started to rely on the work as I had my walks. It gave form to my day: an hour early in the morning, a few hours after lunch, sitting at my desk, at my computer, refilling the paper tray in the printer. I had a small sense of accomplishment when we finished something, and it oriented me, placing my feet somewhere solid, where I knew what the rules were.

—

In the first weeks after James left, I parked my worry about what would happen to me financially in a corner of my mind. He said we would continue the “status quo,” meaning our regular system of funding our accounts, paying bills. He had contributed his standard amount to our checking account on April 1. I thought, At least I don’t have to worry about this. He will not abandon me financially.

But the signed prenup glowed like a burning ember in my inbox. Before James’s lawyer found it in document storage, I had started to believe it was lost. I thought, Maybe we never signed it? Or maybe we signed it but failed to deliver it back to our lawyers and lost it in the move to Broadway? Or, in my new mystical moments, Maybe my father had somehow, from beyond the grave, gotten rid of it?

The prenup would entitle James to an equal share of everything we had put in joint name, including the house and the apartment. It would allow him to keep everything he earned during the marriage and kept in his own name, a number I did not yet know. This was the change we had made to the prenup in the days before we got married, the change James had requested.

When I found James searching the basement, I knew he wouldn’t find the prenup. I had already opened every box, both the ones on the shelves and a bigger set in the crawl space—boxes marked with James’s initials, sealed shut with packing tape. I used a box cutter to open each one and pulled out piles of papers, going through every page as I sat cross-legged on the cold concrete floor, the space lit by a single hanging lightbulb. I placed the papers back in their folders, back in the boxes, carefully, neatly, and resealed them with tape so he wouldn’t know I’d opened them. After six hours, I came out of the basement covered in dirt, dust, and sweat.

I didn’t find it. If I had, I would have burned it.

—

In late April, another friend appeared on the island. She and her husband arrived from overseas. He was an official in the State Department; she worked with refugees. They had lived all over the world and returned to the Vineyard every summer. We didn’t know each other well, but our sons were close friends. Her son often slept on our trundle bed, Finn on her sunporch.

After they’d quarantined and tested, she asked me if I wanted to go for a walk. I said, “Yes. I have a story to tell you.”

We met in front of her house and started walking up Main Street. It was still cold, with a raw wind, so we were bundled up in puffy coats and hats, our hands in our pockets. I told her what had happened, for the first time unspooling it as a story—the roast chicken, the missed voicemail, the suicide attempt, the exit at dawn. At every dramatic moment, she stopped walking, stunned. She said, “I never would have expected this of James. He seemed so straitlaced. He seemed so devoted to you.”

She brought her husband over one day, at his request. We knew each other, having chatted once on a ferry from the Vineyard to Hyannis, but we were not friends. I wasn’t sure what to expect. We sat in the living room, separated by the wide coffee table, husband and wife sitting side by side.

We removed our masks. The husband was wearing wire-rimmed glasses, a green sweater, jeans. He took a sip of the tea I’d given him and put it down on the table. He cleared his throat.

He said, “I see you walking. I can see how you are suffering. I can see how you are losing weight. You are in ‘fight or flight’ mode. Your mind is looking for danger, ready to flee. This is a trauma response.” He was speaking slowly, like he was choosing each word carefully. I started to cry.

He told me how he had descended into a depression the year before. He spoke about what that felt like. He talked about what had helped him— medication, therapy, exercise.

He leaned forward and raised both his hands, his palms facing me. He said, “I want you to understand that what James is doing is wrong. The way he left you without explanation is wrong. Walking out on his family during a global pandemic is wrong. The way he is treating you now is wrong. If he tells you it isn’t, if anyone tells you it isn’t, don’t believe them.”

He pointed to the driveway behind him. “And if he tries to come back here, you need to padlock the gate.”

I slumped in my chair, relieved, for a moment, of what I’d been carrying. This man held it for me as he sat across from me, saying the truth.

—

In the evenings, I taught Evie to drive. It was illegal, she was too young for a learner’s permit, but it felt safe on the empty roads. She was determined to master it, to become as competent in driving as she had in cooking, a quest for self-sufficiency in the quiet of those days, when her parents stopped being reliable caretakers. I embraced her growing confidence. It made me feel safe, like everything would be okay, even though she was only fifteen.

We’d get in the car after dinner, Carrie in the back seat, me in front.

Evie would drive up and down Franklin Street, passing the house where I’d lived with my six friends during college, down the golf club’s dirt road, around the loop of the empty club, and sometimes, when we were feeling brave, through town. We’d often see the sun set over the water as she drove, a few minutes later each night. The girls would play their Spotify mixes on the car stereo. Sometimes we would pass the couple from overseas in their car, going the opposite direction, their son in the driver’s seat, doing the same thing.

—

On April 24, my law partner and I filed our client’s petition and supporting documents for special immigrant juvenile status. Four days later, we received an email from the judge granting the petition “on submission,” meaning that she was ruling on the papers we’d filed; we didn’t need to present testimony or appear virtually. The pandemic may have helped us— the court’s dockets were overwhelmed. With the order in hand, we could submit our client’s paperwork to US Citizenship and Immigration Services for a green card and work permit.

I credit our client, her mother, and my partner for the result, not myself, given the mess that I was then. But I saw that the work—the intense detail of our tasks, the concreteness of writing legal arguments, the creativity required to tell our client’s story effectively, the preparation for testimony in court—could be a way forward for me. When I worked, I didn’t think about James at all.

—

As the calendar turned to May, the island remained chilly, with temperatures in the fifties, but it also turned green—a crazy, bright kelly green. Trees and lawns all transformed into the vibrant hue. Flowers finally started to bloom. Lily of the valley, my birth flower, sprouted in bunches along Main Street and on the edge of our lawn. Magnolia trees exploded with blossoms in yards on the way to town.

I watched the ospreys carefully. If I stood on the deck outside our kitchen, I could see the nest from above, but it was several hundred yards away; I couldn’t see what was inside. James had multiple binoculars for just this purpose, but I had packed them up, along with his clothes from our shared closet, and put it all in boxes in our garage. It hurt to encounter even a single item that belonged to him.

Every day, I leaned over the deck outside our kitchen, squinted, and tried to see if there were any changes in the nest. Soon I noticed that the female was sitting upright throughout the day, her figure low in the nest.

The male carried twigs and long pieces of string in his claws, sailing above us, landing on the nest to deliver his treasure. Both the female’s posture and the male’s activity indicated the very thing I’d hoped for: eggs.

This time I did not think, I need to tell James. I thought, He’s going to miss this. He’s going to miss everything.

—

On my birthday, May 6, the girls made me dinner: spaghetti carbonara, arugula salad with pine nuts and parmesan, devil’s food cake with white icing. They served it on my grandparents’ flowered china, at the table on our screened porch, with votive candles and vases of flowers—perfect pink peonies that arrived in a box from my mother and wild island flowers from Susan, delivered that morning by our beloved former babysitter. She had worked for us for ten years, starting when she was sixteen and Evie was two. She was now married and had three kids of her own. When she

dropped off the flowers, she and her daughter stood ten feet from our door, blowing us kisses. She had been rattled by the news of James leaving. She said that during the summers she spent in our house, she had thought of us as a perfect family.

We wore our nicest dresses that night, our fanciest sandals. It was the first time I’d felt hungry. I ate everything they gave me. I ached, though, as I sat there, blowing out my birthday candles, carefully placed by the girls in the cake, five on one side, one on the other, for fifty-one. It was the first marking of time without James. He had sent a text in the morning, the first I’d received in weeks. It said, “Happy Birthday!” The casualness of the exclamation mark, the enthusiasm, felt worse than saying nothing at all.

I got the same text from James’s sister and mother, individually: “Happy Birthday!” Two words, after almost two months of silence. His brother’s text was a little bit longer, “No matter what happens, we love you!” An exclamation mark again. No acknowledgment of having cut me off, of their brother’s continued absence, of my children’s heartbreak.

Is this how they did things? Pretend nothing happened, let enough time go by, be cheerful, and all will be well? Were they afraid too many words would awaken my upset, would call out their abandonment, would become

too much?

I didn’t reply.

James had never cared much about birthdays. In his family, they exchanged only small items, usually a book, perhaps because they could not afford more than that. My family was the opposite. My mother said it was the only day her own mother paid attention to her, so birthdays—hers in January, mine in May, my brother’s in August—were days we really celebrated. My father and Susan were the same way. At both houses, we were given breakfast in bed, a pile of presents, a celebratory dinner. I did this for my kids too, serving them pancakes or Fruity Pebbles or Dunkin’ Donuts on the same raised tray every year, a pyramid of presents next to them, usually one big surprise—an electric piano when Evie turned ten, cell phones when they turned twelve, a coveted jersey, or the newest American Girl doll. They had parties with themes, cakes shaped like a Candy Land

board, a pirate ship, Dora the Explorer. James didn’t understand our enthusiasm for birthdays and didn’t know how to do it for me. He usually bought me a gift card, at my request, and I had to remind him to make a reservation for dinner, to get me my favorite chocolate cake from William Greenberg. Over the years, I stopped asking him to make plans; I orchestrated the day for myself, I went to the movies, I made dinner reservations, Susan bought me the cake. It didn’t really bother me. I saw it as a difference in how we grew up, not a reflection of how he felt about me.

In 2016, he surprised me. The morning of my forty-seventh birthday, with the kids around us, he handed me a small box wrapped with a ribbon.

Inside was a single key. On the Vineyard, most beaches are private, and access to them is a form of real estate. Families pass beach keys down over generations, and others sell them on the open market for great sums. The key in the box was to Black Point, one of the most beautiful beaches on the island. We’d been renting a key from an owner for a few years. I took the kids as often as I could, even on cloudy days. It took us half an hour to get there—twenty minutes to Chilmark, then ten minutes on a dirt road marked only by a long row of mailboxes. We’d carry our bags and our boogie boards, our chairs, our paper bags of sandwiches, down the boardwalk, over the dunes to the big reveal—the Atlantic Ocean, miles of beach, all of it quiet and peaceful. When they were little, the kids often fell asleep in the car on the way home, leaning like dominoes against one another in their sandy bathing suits. Or we sang with the radio and picked up flatbread pizzas from a restaurant near the airport, eating slices in the car, grease dripping on our bare thighs. James was never a fan of beaches, but the kids and I loved it. Owning a key seemed like an impossibility, but there it was, on my birthday, gleaming in my hand.

—

My neighbor in New York texted me in mid-May: “I’m worried. James is throwing away so much stuff.” She had found at least a dozen black garbage bags in our floor’s shared refuse room, all filled and tied.

My neighbor and I had known each other for almost eighteen years, having moved onto the twenty-fifth floor at the same time, when the building first opened. She was older than I was, with three grown children.

She was kind and warm and I often sought her out for advice, especially about parenting. She and her husband had never complained during the many years my kids ran up and down our shared hallway, screaming, kicking hard soccer balls against their door.

I had told her about James’s affair, about him leaving. She groaned and said, “He thinks he’s original, but he’s not.” She said she’d seen it many times before, the exit of a middle-aged man for a younger woman. She noted that he’d left me the year I turned fifty, the ultimate cliché.

When I pictured the garbage bags, I thought of James’s apartment on White Street, the one he’d shared with Mark, the spareness, the lack of things on his side. I thought, He’s returning to that person, the guy without stuff. As he took flight from us, he was getting rid of everything that weighed him down.

I’d discovered he’d taken his collection of Rolex watches from the Vineyard the day of the turkey sandwich, probably filling the duffel bag at the last moment so I wouldn’t see it. There had been a dozen of them, in light green boxes, stacked in a drawer in our bedroom. I learned later that he sold all but one, the Daytona I had given him as a wedding present. It was engraved with the date, 6/5/99. I don’t know if he kept it out of sentiment or if the engraving made it less marketable. I hoped it was the former but suspected the latter.

Eventually, he also gave away his motorcycles. He sold his vintage boat. When he came to collect his boxes in the garage, he threw most of his clothes away. He told me he didn’t want any of our wine, even the bottles he’d bought.

He had accumulated these things over twenty years—adding, building, creating a life with all of it. They were the spoils of his success, markers of how far he had come, from the boy whose parents had lost everything, who couldn’t buy anything. And now he was dismantling it, like he was

dismantling our family, taking off the costume of husband, father, owner as quickly as he’d put it on. He was shedding.

But what was he becoming? The teenage rebel he’d been, the spirit of Mark, willing to burn it all down? A hedge fund bachelor? A husband to a younger wife, starting again? I didn’t know.

I wrote to my neighbor, “Don’t worry, it’s not my stuff. It’s his.”

—

I had never been in regular therapy. I tried a few times, once during college and once after my father died, but I hated it, the pressure to talk, to analyze myself, especially when the therapist was mostly silent. To me, as a shy person, therapy felt like torture.

After James left, during the weeks I couldn’t move from bed, my mother and Susan insisted I talk to someone. Susan found a psychiatrist who made room for me. We talked on the phone twice a week. I closed my door to take her calls in the late afternoon, always on the phone for some reason, never on Zoom. I could picture her any way I wanted to, so I imagined Nora Ephron.

She asked questions, she reacted. I didn’t have silences to fill. She was blunt and, like the husband from overseas, she offered clear opinions.

It was wrong to leave a marriage with no warning and no explanation.

It was highly unusual not to want custody of kids who were as young as twelve.

It wasn’t normal to search the basement for a prenup after telling children about a divorce.

While James failed to acknowledge what was happening, the psychiatrist made my reality clear. I could tell myself, at least until it became fuzzy again, This is not okay.

—

The third week in May, I decided to take the girls back to New York for a few days. They had orthodontist appointments that, to Evie, felt urgent—

missing an appointment would delay her most fervent wish, the removal of her braces. And we needed to pick up our dog—our eight-year-old Goldendoodle. The boarder had picked him up from our apartment in mid- March, when we thought we were going on vacation for spring break. We all missed him.

I also wanted the girls to see James. I was determined to keep a tether between them, even as he was walking away. And maybe I would discover something, a clue about why he had left, about what he was doing now.

Massachusetts and New York were still in lockdown, and COVID cases were raging in Manhattan, but it didn’t dissuade me. I put the girls in the Toyota and we boarded the ferry.

During that time in the pandemic, I-95 was an eerily open road; we made the trip in less than four hours. When we pulled up in front of our building on Broadway, James was standing outside. I’d asked him to be there, to greet the girls and spend time with them. The sight of him still made my heart leap. I thought, There’s my husband. And then, quickly, No, this man is not him.

As he welcomed the girls, with the same blue mask and excited energy we’d seen in April, I thought, Will he notice that my clothes are hanging off me? Will he be worried? But he didn’t look at me at all.

He took the girls up to the apartment, and I went for a walk to give them time alone. I headed west to the Hudson River. When I got to the esplanade, I stopped, trying to decide whether to walk north or south. It was disorienting to be back there, with so many people, after two months on our quiet island. I turned north and started walking, passing familiar landmarks, the playground at North Moore Street, the kayaks at Pier 26, the I WANT TO THANK YOU mural on Pier 40.

I worried for the girls, now in the apartment with James. His visible happiness was so incongruous with what he had left behind, with what I thought of as emotional wreckage, like the aftermath of a hurricane. I didn’t know how he would act with them now, a month after he’d broken the news. Would he apologize to them for leaving, for breaking up our family, for the affair? Or would he continue to act like nothing was wrong?

Once I reached Houston Street, I turned around and retraced my steps, south on the West Side Highway, east on Chambers Street, walking slowly to give them more time, but fast enough to meet the boarder’s van, arriving soon. As I crossed Church Street, I saw James walking in the opposite direction, toward me. I stopped and stood at the edge of the sidewalk as he approached, not sure of what he would say, what we would say to each other. It was the first time we’d been alone together since the scene in the basement. He looked in my direction, but his gaze was aimed somewhere above my head.

He kept walking, not pausing, and smiled broadly. As he passed, he said, “They are great! Everything is great!”

I stood there for several minutes, watching him cross the street. I almost yelled, “What the fuck are you talking about?” but I knew he would make me feel like I was crazy to be upset, crazy to think the girls weren’t fine, that anything about the scenario was wrong. I couldn’t bear that conversation. So I said nothing.

I met the boarder’s van on Broadway. James was allergic to pugs, so we’d looked for a more hypoallergenic breed. He also wanted a bigger dog; he said he would feel silly walking anything small. On a friend’s recommendation, we picked a Goldendoodle and named him Charlie Blue.

When I walked our new puppy around our neighborhood, people stopped me and said, “Look at those paws! He’s going to be huge!”

I protested, “No, no, the breeder said he will only be thirty pounds, fifty at most.”

And then, like Clifford the Big Red Dog, Charlie grew before our eyes to almost a hundred pounds, with a thick fluffy coat. He looked more like a horse than a dog. When he turned one, he suddenly became reactive to other dogs. On walks, he barked, snarled, lunged, trying to protect us. At our boarder’s urging, I took him to the veterinary hospital at the University of Pennsylvania for an evaluation. He was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder and put on a high dose of fluoxetine (Prozac). But it didn’t help; he was still reactive. He could go outside only early in the morning and late at night, when it was less crowded, and even then it was a terrifying game of

avoiding other dogs, scanning the street to find a safe path. I found it so scary, I begged James to walk him after he got home from work, while I washed dishes and put the kids to bed. He did it, but he always complained about it, having to go out after dinner, into the cold.

As Charlie jumped down from the van, his tail wagging, I thought, Maybe this is why James left? Because he hated walking the dog?

Charlie pulled me into the building, racing down the lobby floor to the elevator, slipping side to side on the polished marble. When I let him into the apartment, the girls screamed in delight. They threw themselves on the floor to hug him. They kissed his nose and fed him stale biscuits from the kitchen cabinet. It felt like the first time I’d seen them smile in weeks. We ended up on Carrie’s bed, the dog stretched between the girls, each of them cuddling the length of him, rubbing his pink stomach. I lay at his feet, resting my head on his thigh, taking in his dog smell, the warmth of him.

I asked, “How did it go with Dad?”

They answered, almost in unison, “Weird.”

I knew I had to abide by the most sacred rule of divorce: do not badmouth the other parent. I’d hated it when my parents spoke meanly about each other; even the slightest unkindness upset me. But, as I looked at the girls, I knew they needed some acknowledgment of what was happening, of how strange it was. Being fake with them, or lying, felt unbearable.

I groped for the right words, speaking slowly: “You’re right, this is weird. Your dad is going through something. I don’t know what it is. But you aren’t wrong to feel like it’s strange.”

They were quiet for a minute. Evie said, “Yeah, it’s like he’s a different person.”

Carrie asked, “Does he still have that girlfriend?” She said the fruit

name.

I answered, “I don’t know.” I didn’t.

Evie asked, “Is he having a midlife crisis?”

What was happening seemed stranger than a midlife crisis—something more than buying a sports car or having an affair—but it was an explanation

my girls could hang on to, one that was about him, not them.

I said, “I think so, something like that.”

They were quiet again.

I said, “He loves you guys so much. I know that for sure.” It felt important to say this. His love for them was an uncomplicated fact. It was something else that was missing—care, worry, heartache.

Carrie looked at the dog. “He loves you too, Chuckie. He’s going to be so happy to see you.”

I wondered, for a moment, Maybe the dog will be the thing that wakes him up? Maybe the dog will make him miss us? But at the same time, I knew, He’s not going to care. He’s going to leave me with this responsibility too. I will have to walk the dog every day until he dies.

The girls slept in my bed that night, the dog on the floor next to us, all of them snoring softly.

—

I barely slept while we were in the city. I lay between the girls in my marital bed, wide awake. James had bought the mattress four months earlier, in January 2020. It was a wildly expensive Sleep Number bed. He was elated about it. He preferred a bed that was pillow soft; I preferred hard as a rock.

The Sleep Number allowed each of us to pick our desired firmness using a remote control. James enlisted four men who worked in the building to help install the mattress in the frame of our upholstered bed, a task that took several hours. We laughed that night as we played with the numbers, as we lifted and lowered the head and foot of the mattress, like a hospital bed, as if we were suddenly eighty.

What was he thinking then, as we laughed together? Was he already having the affair? Did he know he was going to leave me two months later?

Why would he buy such an expensive bed, one clearly designed for two people to share?

I got up, climbing over Evie in the dark, feeling frantic, suddenly, to find something, anything to explain his exit, his betrayal, evidence of a

gathering storm, clouds I hadn’t seen, a puzzle piece. What had I missed?

I looked through our bedside tables, opening the drawers slowly, softly, so I wouldn’t wake the girls, using the light on my phone to see inside. I found only phone chargers and socks in his drawers, loose change and hair elastics in mine. I looked through his desk, which sat between our closets. It was nearly bare—only a stapler, black binder clips, a few unused gift cards, his favorite black mechanical pencils from Davis Polk, the kids’ passports placed neatly in the corner of one drawer. The stacks of papers he usually kept on top of his desk and on the windowsills were gone. He must have thrown them away, in the black garbage bags my neighbor had found.

I looked in our shared closets and shelves, at his suits and shirts packaged by the dry cleaner. I loved his clothes, the way he dressed for work—a navy or charcoal-gray suit, a crisp shirt, a tie with some color— what he’d worn when we met, the attire of a responsible and trustworthy man, leaving each day to make a living for his family. I longed for the way it felt to hug him in his suit, how it felt only two months before, when he left for the office, his hair still wet from the shower, his cheek still cold and soft from shaving, kissing me goodbye.

His wardrobe looked lighter, culled. There were fewer sweaters, fewer T-shirts, fewer suits.

I continued my search in our bathroom. We had separate sinks on either side of a square, glass shower. I opened his drawers and saw his razors, his shaving cream, the black drugstore combs he used to part his hair, several boxes of Nicorette. He’d quit smoking when Evie was born, giving up the two cigarettes he had every evening, and he used the gum to curb nicotine cravings. I’d often found his chewed pieces around the apartment, the gum placed back in its wrapper, left on windowsills and countertops.

I opened his medicine cabinet. It was full, brimming with the things he used regularly: Band-Aids, Tums, aspirin, deodorant, and a row of bottles from our local drugstore. I took down each vial of pills, looking at the dates.

There were old antibiotics, newer prescriptions, dates ranging from ten years ago to the prior month.

My heart raced, thinking, somehow, the pills would provide an answer, a story that made sense. One that did not involve a wholesale rejection of me. One that probably felt familiar to me—the big reveal of my father’s amber bottles. I counted the pills, trying to calculate if he had stopped taking something, or started something new. But there was nothing I could hang my hat on, no clear explanation, only my face in the mirror, loose pills

in my hand.

I thought, What am I doing?

Being a detective, searching for answers, was seductive—the thrill of the hunt, the discovery of a smoking gun, the mystery solved. But it also felt awful, the desperation of it, the ultimate lack of answers, like getting mired in a swamp, one that was going to pull me under. I had to get out of this place—a place that was all about him, all about the woman he was seeing, all about trying to understand how or why this had happened.

Susan had given me a trick she used with her patients in therapy. She said, “Imagine yourself on a theater stage with James. Whenever the spotlight is on him, move it to you, so that you are lit, and he is in the dark.”

It often worked, for a moment. I was able to pause the obsessive thoughts, about him, about the affair, about why he had left me.

Feeling gutted and exhausted, I closed the medicine cabinet and went back to the bedroom, groping my way in the dark. I climbed into bed with the girls, gently rolling Carrie to the middle of the mattress.

—

James told me he was splitting his time between our apartment and the Beekman Street apartment he’d bought for his mother and stepfather in 2018. A second apartment should have been a clear sign of infidelity—it would have been easy for him to meet other women there when his mother and stepfather were away. But I didn’t think it was the site of his betrayal. I had keys to the apartment, and it was filled with his parents’ things—their flannel sheets, their books by the bed, their vanilla yogurt in the fridge—the unsexy belongings of a couple in their eighties. I think he was more likely

to go to hotels, including the new, chic Beekman Hotel next door. This is what I imagined when I pictured James and the woman together, the awful images of their coupling.

He also told me, by text, that he’d signed a contract to buy a two- bedroom apartment in a building on Park Row, one of the new high-rises that had replaced J&R Music World. The news was startling. The apartment wasn’t a rental; he was buying it. He was committing to a life away from us.

I looked at the sales website for the building, at the model two-bedroom floor plan and photos. It looked modern and expensive. But a two- bedroom? Would he be able to fit all three kids in one bedroom? I still thought he would want to make a home for them, that he wouldn’t follow through with his decision to have no custody, no overnights. Even if he refused formal custody, I thought the kids would stay with him now and then, that Carrie would go there after school when she chose to, that she would have a room to sleep in, that he would give her a key.

—

Our second night in New York, James brought sushi for the girls for dinner.

We sat in our usual places at our kitchen table, James next to Evie, me next to Carrie, Finn’s chair empty. The girls were silent as they ate their favorite popcorn shrimp and spicy tuna rolls.

James seemed jubilant. He said, “Evie, how are the geese? Have you

kept them away?”

“Yes,” she said with certainty.

There were dozens of geese on the lawn every day. It was covered in goose shit.

James turned to Carrie. “How is your tennis game? You are so good at

tennis!”

Carrie answered quietly, “It’s okay.”

I felt unable to help the conversation along. My body was like lead again, as it had been in the first weeks. It was hard to even raise my arm.

We were sitting at the table where we’d had so many family meals. Where we’d sat as recently as March, unaware that everything was about to change, in the world and in our family. I could almost see the dark cloud hovering over us. But it was as though the cloud, the darkness, was only over me and the girls; James sat under a sunny sky.

—

The next day, when I brought the girls back from the orthodontist, we found James in the living room, lying on a mat on the floor, doing crunches. He was fully clothed, in corduroys and a button-down shirt, wearing sneakers.

His trainer was on an iPad, the screen leaning against the back of one of my grandparents’ wooden hall chairs. I’d never seen James work out with a trainer before. He looked energized, sweating with the effort. He had always been slim, but he looked much fitter, more muscular, his shoulders and biceps visible beneath his shirt. I felt a familiar tug of desire for him, for his body. I scolded myself, Stop. He’s naked with someone else now.

I stood over him and said, “What are you doing?”

He answered, mid-crunch, “I’m working out. I can’t go to the gym.” He sounded irritated.

He could have done the session at his mother’s apartment, where he’d spent the night. He could have chosen a time when we weren’t there. I think he wanted us to see it. He wanted an audience to his transformation.

The girls and I went to our rooms and shut our doors. I could still hear his trainer directing him. I could still hear him panting.

—

We left for the Hamptons the next day. I was anxious to see Finn. He had moved in with Susan and her quarantine pod—a friend, her nephew (my cousin), and his wife—in Sagaponack. We had decided that we could risk being together since we didn’t have any COVID symptoms.

I couldn’t take that risk with my mother. Her lungs were prone to infection and any kind of cold took her down for weeks. I worried about her

a lot, alone in her house in Bellport. We texted often and FaceTimed once a week during dinner. I’d lean my phone against a vase on our kitchen table so she could chat with us as we ate our meal and she ate hers. In our conversations without the girls, she continued to be fierce in her support of me, in how she felt about James leaving, in her faith that I would survive it.

We walked into Susan’s house and collapsed into her, the three of us in her arms. Finn came down the stairs and we jumped on him, clutching his shoulders, his waist. He seemed to have grown several inches since March.

His short hair, thick like mine, had grown out over his ears.

On the phone and over FaceTime, Finn had been reluctant to talk to me about the divorce. And I struggled with what to say to him. I didn’t want to force a conversation he wasn’t ready for. And I didn’t want him to worry about me. Since he was little, he’d been hypersensitive to other people’s feelings and moods, especially mine. Whenever I felt any shift in emotion, he would ask, “Are you okay, Mommy?” So, when we spoke that spring, I tried to be cheerful, to stay on happy topics—the dog, cooking, his friends.

I hugged his long, lean frame. He had just turned eighteen. His birthday was two days before mine. For the first time in his life, I hadn’t been with him to celebrate. He was taller than me now, but still more boy than man, his cheeks round, his skin soft.

I looked up at him. “I missed you so much,” I said.

“Me too, Mama,” he replied.

I thought, How will I do this? How will I guide him to adulthood, to college and employment and life, if James is absent? How will I be kind about his father and, at the same time, teach him that his father’s actions— infidelity, silence, absence—are not okay? It felt impossible.

My cousin, a chef, cooked dinner for all of us and I slept in Susan’s king-size bed, the only available spot. She brought me tea and put her cool hand on my forehead, as she had when I was a child.

She said, “I don’t know how you are in one piece.”

“I’m not sure I am,” I answered.

She pulled the covers up around me, tucking me in. “This is harder than being widowed.”

Two years after losing my father, Susan met a successful screenwriter.

They never married but they were together for twenty years, until his death from cancer in 2018. I thought of her as twice widowed.

I said, “No, it’s not. Not at all. I saw what you went through. And my kids still have a father.”

She answered, “I know, it is different. But I would not choose this. The hurt, the betrayal, the wondering what was real and what wasn’t. The fact that he is still out there, wanting a different life.”

I sighed. “I guess it’s apples and oranges. Different forms of hell.”

It seemed funny in that moment, the way life had turned out for us. We both laughed.

And then I felt the ache again, thinking of James and my father, of both men I had lost.

—

We went back to the Vineyard two days later, failing to convince Finn to come with us. He wanted to stay with his friends, including two of the boys he’d lived with during lockdown. The three of them were working for my cousin’s underground catering business, run from Susan’s kitchen. They chopped vegetables, packed containers, labeled bags, and loaded them in the car for Susan and her friend to deliver, house to house, all over the Hamptons.

The girls and I took the Cross Sound Ferry from Orient Point on Long Island to New London, Connecticut, then the bigger ferry from Woods Hole to the Vineyard. The dog spent the five-hour trip trying to get into Carrie’s lap in the back seat. He panted on her for so long, the front of her T-shirt was completely wet. She alternated between laughing and asking me for help—he weighed more than she did. I stopped several times, on the shoulder of the highway, to push him to the other side of the seat.

—

As June started, the air warmed, the days lengthened. The lake became more active. Boats appeared on moorings. Clammers waded in the shallow water. Kayaks and canoes glided past our house at sunset.

Early one morning, standing on the boardwalk, I saw a different shape in the osprey nest, a small, huddled mass. The mass moved, separating, revealing three tiny heads. I gasped. The eggs had hatched.

After the chicks appeared, the couple became more protective of the nest, squawking loudly if we came too close, circling the perimeter, warning us away. The male became more active in his search for food; it seemed like he was fishing all day long. He flew above us before he dove into the lake; a fast, vertical dive, shifting at the last moment with his legs and head forward. He emerged from the water carrying a small fish, an unmistakable silhouette in the sky. He delivered it to the nest, a gift to the female and their babies, and then flew out again. Hunting and gathering.

I brought the girls to the boardwalk to show them the chicks. As we stood there, their arms around my waist, I thought they might mention their father. But they didn’t say anything at all. I took a photo of the nest, the little heads, the two parents guarding them, and texted it to James. I was aware of the not-so-subtle subtext—here was an intact family, here was a father providing for, and protecting, his three offspring and their mother.

James wrote back, “Wow!”

—

As summer started, club members returned to the island, moving into their homes and rentals. They quarantined for two weeks, tested, and then joined the social life, sometimes masked, sometimes not. We considered it a large, safe bubble, and it turned out to be so—there were very few cases of COVID at the club in the summer of 2020. There was no official camp, Sunday barbecue, or weekly lecture series, but groups still gathered, for cocktails and dinners outside, for tennis on the club’s courts, for an afternoon swim on the pier.

I dreaded running into people. The pandemic had suspended real life for three months, allowing me to hide, to be cocooned during my most raw weeks, spared the encounters that would have been so difficult, at school pickup, birthday parties, meetings. This was the flip side of my experience —I’d endured James’s exit alone, without my family and friends, but also without the daily exposures, without the need to pull myself together, without an audience to witness my falling apart.

I knew that news of James leaving me was already spreading at the club, as juicy gossip does. In my mind, it was the only thing people were talking about, even though we were in the middle of a pandemic, even though every family was stressed. And I felt a deep sense of embarrassment about it. James was the one who had an affair, who walked out, but the shame had become mine. I had made it mine. I was an abandoned wife, a woman rejected by her husband, a woman who had failed to keep her family together. I would be the outsider among all the married people, all the intact families, all the women who were wanted by their husbands.

I had several friends in New York who were divorced, including two high-school classmates whose husbands had affairs and left them. These friends were warm and compassionate, calling often, understanding my anguish in a way others couldn’t. There was no one like that on the Vineyard that summer. Everyone in my circle, and almost everyone at the club, was married.

I didn’t expect anyone to mention the dissolution of my marriage to me directly. The club was a place where most things appeared perfect, and people rarely shared anything difficult about their lives. This was a summer escape, a vacation, and it was meant to be light. There was also a propriety, a formality to the club, which was different from New York or the Hamptons, different from any place I’d ever been.

I forced myself to do my normal walk, the loop taking me through the club, now populated with members—tennis players, children on the playground, young mothers pushing strollers. I don’t know why I made myself do this; it would have been easy to cut through the woods, missing the club entirely. But I told myself I had to face it.

As the temperatures climbed into the seventies, I swapped my jeans and boots for shorts and sneakers, but I always wore a long-sleeved shirt to feel some measure of protection, some armor. I set out in one direction or the other, but always passed through the club’s main drag.

When I saw someone I knew, we’d stop to say hello and I’d tell them, “James left me. I’m devastated,” or something similar. It didn’t matter who it was—a contemporary I knew well or the most formal grandparent. I’m amazed by this now, by my candor, given my embarrassment, given my shyness, but it felt like my only choice. I had an open wound and needed to say, This is why I am bleeding. And maybe, even then, I wanted some control over the story. I wanted the truth of what happened to come from my mouth.

When I spoke, people looked surprised, sometimes shocked. It was the story itself but also the fact that I was saying it, someone they thought of as quiet and private. It felt like I was crossing some kind of invisible line, of what they expected of me, of how they believed someone should act when they’ve been left by their husband of twenty years.

Some people moved toward me, literally closing the gap between us, putting their hands on me. A mother of four, someone I didn’t know well, grabbed me by the shoulders, shook her head, and said, definitively, “No.

No. That is not right. You are hanging out with me. I’m going to take care of you.” Another woman came to find me as I stood awkwardly near the club’s inn, waiting to drive the girls home from tennis. She faced me, a few feet apart, her dog on a leash, and said, “I am so sorry. I am so disappointed in James.” She shook her head. It felt good, these women looking me straight in the eye, saying what had happened, being clear in how they felt about it.

Others moved away from me, often literally, a few slow steps away from the heat of me. It was the equivalent of New York friends who responded to my news with texts like, “I’ll be thinking of you,” or “Sending love to you and the kids.” These responses, though kind, felt distancing, a turning away when I had flung my doors wide open. I had never thought about this before—how a closed-ended response, no matter how well-

intentioned, can feel like an ending—the declining of an invitation to engage.

Still, I asked myself, Would I have wanted to hear about someone’s divorce? Would I have moved toward them? Or would I have assumed it was too private to talk about, or that they were a bit unhinged, and moved away? I hope I would have chosen the former, but I’m not sure.

And, even then, I knew it was possible that I was responsible for the distance: In my reserve, my quiet, as a married person, did I fail to plant the seeds, to invest in friendships, to earn the kind of embrace I am looking for now?

I couldn’t predict how people would react, who would move toward me, who would move away. One morning, as I passed the club’s inn, I saw a man I knew well, someone I considered a friend. I was about to say hello, smiling and lifting my hand to wave, his name on my tongue, but he turned suddenly and walked in the opposite direction. This happened again at a cocktail party; two men I knew well turned from me as I approached.

I tried to make sense of it with Susan. She urged me to look at it generously: Maybe they were proving their loyalty to their wives by not speaking to a newly single woman? Or they had an unconscious fear of contagion, one divorce leading to another? Or, most likely, they just didn’t know what to say?

Susan said, “I think people have a language for death; they know what to do, what to say. But there is no script for divorce, especially one as dramatic as yours.”

I tried to hold on to this, fighting against a less generous explanation: Now that I was no longer a wife, now that I had lost my status, I was no longer worth the effort. These men would save their energy, their loyalty, for the man, the tennis player, the hedge fund guy, whenever he decided to return.

Another day, on the wide two-way street between town and the club, I saw a man biking in the opposite direction. I waved and expected him to keep going. I didn’t know him well; he was married with three kids and famous in the world of professional sports. But he stopped, got off his bike,

and walked over to my side of the street, holding the bike by the handlebars. He said, “I want you to know how sorry I am that this happened to you.” He asked how I was doing, how the kids were doing. He said, “I don’t understand a man leaving his family like that.”

I felt each interaction in my body, a joyful lift when someone was warm, when someone acknowledged me and what had happened; a crash when they didn’t, when they avoided me. I was inviting all of it, the roller coaster of emotion, almost like I was asking people to declare themselves, in one camp or the other—not between me and James, but between connecting with me or not. As I put on my sneakers each morning, I braced myself, not knowing what would come next.

—

The mother of four invited me over for a glass of wine on her porch, following through with her promise to take care of me. Two women joined us, one I knew well, one I didn’t know at all. The latter was tall, brunette.

When she sat down, she said, “God, when you don’t have a husband here, no one invites you to anything!” Her husband was at home in Connecticut, soon to arrive.

Once seated, she told us how difficult her sister’s divorce was. It was a similar fact pattern, the husband leaving for someone else. She said, “I still miss my brother-in-law. He was so much fun.” She looked at me, narrowed her eyes, and said, “I love James. He’s the best.”

I don’t think she had ever had a conversation with James, at least not a substantive one.

She went on for a long time, praising her brother-in-law and James in equal measure. I felt so pummeled, so weak, I couldn’t get myself to say anything in response, or to stand up and leave. I sat through it all, frozen.

The hostess and my other friend didn’t say anything either. They told me afterward they didn’t know how to stop her.

The next day, I felt like I had taken a bullet in my chest. I could not understand why this woman had framed my story with sympathy toward

James and not me, especially so soon after he had left, when I was clearly so fragile.

Again, Susan and I tried to look at it kindly: She was speaking about her own experience, her own family’s experience with a difficult divorce.

My story brought up her complicated feelings about it. She felt it was important to defend the person who was absent, whose reputation was being trampled, to remind everyone, including me, of his humanity.

But to me, in my raw state, it felt like she was offering a blueprint for how the community should think about what happened to me: James is the injured party, not Belle. He is the prize. He is the one we should keep.

—

In the heat of late July, the osprey chicks, now juveniles, learned to fly.

They were tentative at first, venturing only a yard from the nest, and then, as they gained confidence, soaring farther over the water, over our lawn, their big wings flapping slowly, steadily.

One afternoon, a juvenile landed on our chimney. I thought it was the male parent at first, leaving the nest to give his offspring room to spread their wings. But after five hours, it was clear it was one of the juveniles, successful in its outbound flight but now unable to lift off again. I felt an intense anxiety for the bird, lost and stuck, its tender talons on the hot tiles.

I called the osprey experts, asking for a rescue, but they said not to interfere, that the bird would leave once it had burned enough calories to make it easier to fly again. The next morning, the juvenile was gone from the chimney. I counted five heads in the nest. The bird had made it home.

—

I continued to walk, now with company. It was more comfortable for me to talk with friends when we were in motion, side by side, rather than face-to- face. On one walk, through the dirt roads of a neighboring golf club, a friend told me she had gone to a dinner party with a group of couples I knew well. I hadn’t been invited. I felt a slight prick of pain from this—

Would I be excluded from these dinners now that I was single? But I let it go. I sensed she was about to tell me something that would be more painful.

She said that a man at the dinner, someone who was charming and well- liked, had said to the table, “James leaving Belle could be a good thing. My father left my mother for another woman, and she was the love of his life.

They were so happy together.”

I stopped walking, stunned by her words. This was a good thing? This was a love story? What about MY love story with James?

I turned to her. “Why would he say that?”

She said, “I don’t think he meant to be unkind. I think he was trying to find the silver lining to all this.”

All this. My story. The end of my marriage.

For the second time, my experience had been rewritten, the characters recast, the ending changed. In this man’s telling, I was the casualty of someone else’s destiny. My despair was their happy ending.

I doubled over, seized with a desperate, wild hurt. I said, “I’m sorry, I have to go.”

I turned and ran from my friend, sprinting down the dirt road, a mile to my house, to safety.

—

The club had a rule for the rare divorces—only one spouse could remain a member; the other had to reapply, starting the three-year process from scratch. I wasn’t aware of anyone who had reapplied. I assumed that after James and I divorced, I would be the one to stay, acquiring the membership “share” we were given when we joined the club. He would transfer the share to me. It was what made sense: I was taking care of the kids; I had bought our house; I was there.

But in the tender days of July, a friend told me this wasn’t clear to everyone. She had heard other members talking about it, discussing whether James or I would—or should—be the surviving member.

We were on my porch, drinking tea in the late afternoon. I was stunned

when she reported this.

I asked, “Why?”

She looked down. “What I’ve heard is that it’s not a straightforward situation since you and James arrived at the club together. Usually, it’s clear who should stay since the husband or wife grew up here.”

It felt like my heart was seizing again, as it had on the dirt road. I could be cast out?

I said, “I don’t understand. He’s in New York. He’s having an affair. I’m here with the kids. Why wouldn’t it be me?”

I was sure that if the situations were reversed, if I had walked out on my family during a pandemic, if I was having an affair, there would be no conversation about who would remain a member.

My friend nodded. “I agree with you, believe me. I just thought I should tell you. I’m worried.”

I wasn’t upset with her. I needed to know what I was facing. But it brought me to my knees. It put me back on the bathroom floor, literally. It was only a club, a microcosm of life, but at that moment, during the pandemic, it was my whole world.

I decided that I would never go back to the club. I would hide in my house until I could return to New York. The possibility that I could be rejected because of James’s rejection of me did not seem survivable.

But I had a competing feeling, another voice in my head saying, They expect you to disappear. And if you disappear from here, you might disappear completely.

I also knew it mattered to the girls that I keep appearing at the club.

They were managing the gossip too. One girl had said to Evie, “I heard your dad’s girlfriend has little kids.” She said it casually, but each word— girlfriend, little, kids—was wounding. I don’t know where this teenager had heard these details; they were not part of the story I told.

If the girls saw me going to dinner parties, if they saw me standing on a lawn having a cocktail with the other parents, it would all feel less grim, less dire. It would be a clear sign to them that their world wasn’t falling

apart, at least not this part of their world. So, even in my despair, even knowing that some people didn’t expect me to stay, I kept showing up.

Often, when I showed up, when I moved toward people, I was stunned by how kind they could be, how much they opened up in response to my being open, how new friendships formed, how old ones deepened. A new friend invited me over every morning, in the middle of my walk, to drink shots of vitamin C and talk about what I was feeling that day. Another friend cooked for me every week, welcoming me to her table again and again, keeping things light and cheerful. The couple from overseas dropped off my favorite ham and cheese croissants on Saturday mornings. Other friends arrived at night with bags of hot doughnuts from a bakery in Oak Bluffs. Several women walked with me, one always remembering to pause with me at the church on William Street, joining me in my silent prayer. The community looked out for my girls, waving to them as they passed on their bikes. I soaked up each gesture, each connection, as if it were oxygen.

But, at the same time, I learned quickly not to say too much, to censor myself. Several times, when I described what was happening to me, adding detail, I could feel the other person withdraw, looking down. As the words came from my mouth, trying to offer evidence (“He never told me he was unhappy,” “I’m taking care of the kids alone”), I felt like I was drowning again, grasping for a life rope they were never going to throw me. With only a few sentences, I could step over an invisible line, becoming a stereotype: the bitter, discarded wife ranting about her villainous husband.

I told myself to be graceful, easy. I told myself not to say too much. I put on my summer dresses. I went to cocktail parties. I did “tide rides” in Vineyard Sound and group walks in Chilmark. I bought hostess gifts. I smiled at my dinner partners. I made small talk on the pier, about the weather, about the kids, as I stood there, in my bathing suit, alone among the married couples, wanting to die.

—

James returned to the Vineyard in July. I knew he was coming. I had begged him to rent a house so the girls could see him, but I was still shocked when a friend texted me that he had been spotted in his tennis whites, circling the courts, looking for a game. She said that some people turned away as he approached. Others acted like everything was normal, and stood with him, chatting. One couple invited him over for a drink. When someone told him they were sorry to hear about our split, he replied, “Life is funny sometimes.”

I had suggested he rent a house near the club, so the girls could bike to him with ease. It would be fun for them to be closer to their friends. I sent him multiple listings. But he said the houses were too expensive. He chose a rental deep in the woods of a neighboring development, half of a house still occupied by the owners. He did not bring his jeep or rent a car, instead using Finn’s electric bike to get around. He planned to come on weekends, arriving Friday evening and leaving Sunday afternoon.

The rental had three bedrooms, but he told me he couldn’t have the girls there for meals or overnights. I offered to leave our house on Friday evenings so they could have dinner at home. I timed my absence carefully, leaving just before he arrived, returning just after he promised to depart, by 8 p.m.

The first time, when I returned at 8:15 p.m., I found him on our deck. It was a beautiful night, the sun was nearly at the horizon, casting a golden glow over the water and our lawn, the magic hour when we used to watch the kids play soccer. James put his left hand on the chair next to him. His ring finger was bare. He said, cheerfully, “Flo! Come watch the sunset with me.”

It felt like an arrow, him using that tender name, the name of my childhood, the name Lynn had used in our most wrenching conversations.

James had called me “Flo” throughout our marriage, but it felt awful now to hear it on his lips, like he still had access to that part of me. The casualness, like the exclamation mark on my birthday, felt intolerable.

I stood on the deck, several feet from him. I did not sit down. He grinned, looking at the lake, at the descending sun, not at me. He asked,

“Other than that other thing, are you having a great time here?”

I said, “You cannot call me that anymore.”

I walked to my bedroom, closed the door, and waited for him to leave. I thought, I should have padlocked the gate.

He came up two more weekends but abandoned the rental by early August. He said, “I don’t like how I feel here.”

—

Taylor Swift’s album folklore was released on July 24, Susan’s birthday. I had never been an avid fan, but it felt like the album was written especially for me. There were songs about illicit affairs, the end of a relationship (“you never gave a warning sign”), heartbreak, mad women. It became the soundtrack of my summer. I abandoned books and podcasts. I pressed play, again and again.

Susan came to visit us for her birthday, as she did every year. We always greeted her with a themed party—Western, Hawaiian, basketball, dogs—decorating the table with props, wearing costumes. The theme always related to something that had happened that year, a trip or new interest. In 2020, I picked a beach theme, in part because of our love of sea glass and the ocean. But it was really because Susan had given me another helpful metaphor, one she reminded me of in almost every call. I was in the surf, and giant waves, delivered by James or someone else, kept hitting me.

I had to let them take me down, find my footing again, and stand up before the next one arrived.

Finn did not come with Susan. He was stubborn in his desire to stay in Sagaponack with his friends and my cousin. It was as if coming to the Vineyard, touching down on the island, would thrust him into the reality of the divorce. He didn’t say any of this, but I felt it—his fear, his avoidance.

On the night of Susan’s birthday, Evie made linguini with clams we had gathered from the lake. She stuffed the grape leaves we found on the edge of the lawn and grilled them. She made a yogurt dipping sauce with freshly

chopped parsley, dill, and mint from our garden. She said, “See, Mom, I can do this for us.”

I felt my heart drop when she said it, this beautiful girl, only fifteen, trying to fill in the space her father had left, trying to make it easier for me.

But I was relieved too, grateful that she was giving us the things we worried would be lost forever—the specific tastes of summer, of our life as a family, the love James had provided through food.

Susan overlapped with James for one day, on one of his weekend visits.

He came over to the house to set up his boat. Susan stayed in the guest room, the room with Fortnite, and watched him as he crossed the lawn in bare feet, carrying life jackets. She said seeing him filled her with a desperate sadness. In that moment, he did not look elated. He seemed older, slower. Like he was lost.

—

In August, the juvenile ospreys started to fish. They flew over the lake and plunged into the water, emerging vertically, often coming up with nothing, but occasionally with fish in their talons. Like their parents, they always carried the fish with the head facing forward.

They started flying higher in the sky, farther over the lake, sometimes disappearing into the expanse of Vineyard Sound, perhaps exploring other lakes on the island, or the waters of Cape Cod, returning to their nest after each journey. They swooped low too, through the trees, over the pool, whistling, convening with us as we swam. We looked up, waved, and yelled, “Hi, Ossey!” as James had taught us to do.

—

In the heat of early August, when the club was the most crowded, I encouraged the girls to have friends over. I bought bagels, Totino’s pizza rolls, Double Stuf Oreos, Doritos. I filled the fridge with juice pouches, sodas, chocolate milk. I baked cookies and cakes and placed them in stands

on the kitchen island. I put jars of gummy bears and malted milk balls on the counter of the bar near the front door.

They came in droves, sometimes as many as twenty of them, boys and girls, a range of ages, Carrie’s group of middle schoolers, Evie’s group of teenagers. They sat in the kitchen, eating, toasting things, watching TV.

They swam in the pool and lounged on floats—unicorns, swans, and flamingos. There was loud music and peals of laughter. They used our electric bikes to go back and forth to the club, two on each seat, their long hair flying behind them. Girls slept over almost every night, filling every available bed, every bunk. I locked up the wine and liquor, and I had to shut down what seemed like a real party developing in the garage one night, but generally, I didn’t scold or direct them. They liked that I wanted them there, that our house wasn’t ruled by a stern, unified, married couple. I washed their dishes, ordered new pool floats when they popped, placed their flip- flops and Birkenstocks by the front door so they could find them. They sat with me in the living room, chatting, our bare feet on the coffee table.

I didn’t do any of this when James was there, and I wouldn’t have done it if he hadn’t left. I was always wary of a crowd, of things getting out of control, of messes. I had been brittle. But in my new state, I loved it. It made me feel good, all that happiness and noise and chaos. Something in me had loosened. I thought, This is something I can do as a single person.

This is a silver lining.

—

At the end of August, there was a chill in the early-morning air. The sun set earlier each night, disappearing well before 8 p.m. We started wearing sweaters at night, jeans instead of dresses. The mood of the osprey family seemed to shift, as did ours. We knew we had to return to Manhattan, our other island, soon. The ospreys were also readying themselves to migrate south, flying at great heights, farther and farther away, like they were taking test runs for their long journey, one that would test their mettle.

—

We drove back to New York on Labor Day. I packed the Toyota with our suitcases, with the sweaters and boots, the textbooks and cellos we’d brought up in March. I felt anxious about having to face real life, a life without my husband, but I was also eager to go, to turn the next page, to move us all forward.

When we entered the apartment, I could tell James was gone. The air was different. I walked to his closet and opened the doors. It was empty except for one of my father’s pinstriped suits (my father’s custom suits fit James perfectly) and a light blue linen shirt belonging to Susan’s late boyfriend. The sight of them felt like another rejection, of both men who had been important to me. Of men James used to admire.

James’s desk was completely empty except for the kids’ passports, still placed neatly in the corner. He had always been responsible for their passports, for our travel. Seeing the tidy stack felt like a punch: This will not be his job anymore.

In the bathroom, his combs and gum were gone. The medicine cabinet was empty.

I walked around the living room, the kitchen, the TV area. It looked intact. There was no sign of anything missing. As I stood there, scanning the living room, I realized that everything else in the apartment had come from me—the furniture, the art, the books, the objects. There was no trace of him having ever been there or of his having left, even though we had lived there, together, for seventeen years. He had taken his things—his suits, his gold coins, his documents, Mark’s posthumous novel from the bookshelf—but those were small things, things that were unremarkable in their absence. I thought, Was he ever really here?

—

My first night back in New York, I met my Swedish friend, Maria, at an Italian restaurant on Spring Street. It was open only for outdoor seating, at

tables widely spaced on the uneven sidewalk. It was still hot and humid, nearly eighty degrees at 6 p.m.

Maria had texted with me during the bleakest hours of the spring and summer, the endless dark nights, never failing to answer. She and I had met in 2006 at our children’s school; her middle daughter was in Finn’s class, her youngest in Evie’s. We grew close when she lost a friend to cancer a year after Lynn died. As I approached the restaurant, I saw her sitting at a small table. I felt emotional seeing her for the first time since February.

We still had to wear masks, pulling them down to talk, back up when the waitress approached to take our orders. We ordered the restaurant’s house cocktail, something with tequila and lime served over a giant ice cube.

Maria and I never engaged in small talk. We always spoke honestly, immediately. As we sat with our drinks, I started to cry. I didn’t weep with abandon anymore, but tears appeared slowly, quietly, streaming down my face, often without me realizing it.

I said, “I still don’t understand. I thought he loved me.”

She said, “I know. He did. I saw it. Every time he came in a room.

Every time you looked at each other.” It was a relief to hear her say it. A confirmation. James leaving didn’t make sense to her either.

We sat in silence for a few minutes.

She asked, “How does it feel to be in the apartment?”

I answered, “Awful. I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to

stop missing him.”

She said, “It will take time.”

Our appetizers arrived. She placed a spoonful of salad, a slice of mozzarella, on my plate.

I said, “I’m so scared.” I wasn’t sure what I was referring to—being alone, taking care of the kids without James, COVID, what would happen in the divorce. It was all of it.

She took a sip of her drink. She said, “I don’t think you have to be afraid of the divorce. He will be fair to you.”

I said, “I’m not sure.”

She said, “You were partners for twenty years. He will make sure you’re okay.”

I exhaled, believing for a moment, that it would be easy, that it would be fair. Even with the prenup. He would be kind.

—

In September, the kids returned to school, mostly on Zoom. Evie was a sophomore at a boarding school in Delaware, but they were not allowed to return to campus until mid-October. Carrie and Finn’s school was hybrid, alternating each day between in-person and online. Carrie was in seventh grade, still wearing a uniform—pleated skirts, white polo shirts, cardigan sweaters. Finn was a senior and applying to college, a process I knew I would have to manage alone.

I mapped a new walk equal in length to my loop in the Vineyard, west to the river, south to the Battery, north to 14th Street, and, finally, down Broadway, the spine of lower Manhattan. I made dinner for the kids. I walked the dog early in the morning and late at night. The days went by very slowly.

Two weeks after our return, I received an envelope in the mail. It was slim and white, certified with a green post office form affixed to the back, mixed in with the catalogs and bills. I opened it in the kitchen in the early evening, leaning against the island. It contained two pages, stapled together.

On the first page, there was a legal caption. I was being summoned. James was asking the court to grant him a divorce. He was asking the court to enforce our prenup.

I knew he wanted a divorce, but I was still stunned by the speed of it, by the words, by the request to enforce the prenup. He had offered me the house and the apartment in the first days after his exit, but the filing meant that he would now claim his share of both properties.

His attorney’s name was listed. I didn’t recognize it; it was a man, not the female lawyer who had found the prenup in document storage.

I called James on his cell phone. I knew it wouldn’t be a good conversation. I knew he would give me nothing. But I couldn’t stop myself from calling. He answered on the second ring, like he was waiting for the

call.

I said, “Why are you doing this to me?”

He replied, “I’m not doing anything to you.”

I said, “You left us. You’ve never told me why.”

His voice was calm, cold. “I didn’t leave you. I changed residences.”

I felt myself spin, losing control. “You DID leave. You told me you were leaving me! You told me you were continuing your affair! You left me alone to take care of the girls. To deal with COVID by myself.” I sobbed through my words, as I did when he first left, when I begged for some explanation.

He said, in a singsong voice, like a taunting child, “Boo-hoo. Poor Belle. Always the victim.”

He had never spoken to me like this before; he had never mocked me.

Then, loud and pointed, “You were in a nice house on Martha’s Vineyard. You had everything you needed. I paid my share of the bills.

What was so hard about that?”

He was right. I had everything I needed, I was more privileged than ninety-nine percent of the world. The same set of facts had been recast in his hands, molded, again, into a different narrative. In his version, I was lucky. In his version, he hadn’t done anything wrong. In his version, he had never left.

Was he right? Had I made it all up? Had I spun a story that was false, that unfairly made me the victim and him the villain?

—

In late September, I drove back to the Vineyard to collect our forgotten belongings and to close down the house. Susan stayed with the girls at the apartment. As soon as I arrived, I went to look for the ospreys. The nest was empty. I looked up at the sky, hoping to see one of them flying above me. I

listened for their familiar squawk. I saw birds overhead, a similar silhouette, but they were crows, dark and menacing. I sat down in James’s chair, the one he used to watch the sunset, and waited. But they did not appear. They were gone.

In the still-warm September air, I felt the chill of what I’d lost—James, my marriage, my intact family, my understanding of who my husband had been, the layers of protection built up over twenty years, all the things that had made me feel safe, all the things that had placed me in the world. It was just me now—my bones and my brain, the cells of my skin, my breath, in and out. As I sat there, I could feel all of it, all of me.

I tried to reassure myself. The ospreys will come back. I will be here to see it.