Without even looking up from her paperwork, she said, “Thanks, hon.”
I stopped on the street and took a deep breath, realizing that I was walking in the direction of a home that wasn’t mine anymore. I’d just check into the Breakers and luxuriate for a few breaths before I decided what to do. I stuck my thumb on my banking app. Nope. Maybe I’d check into the Colony instead. One of my friends, the marketing manager there, had promised me a too-good-to-be-true media rate if I ever wanted it.
I closed my eyes for just a moment, trying to make the swirling in my head—which had become so fast and furious I almost felt like I could see it—stop. All I could see was their names: Thaysden, Greer and Parker.
Hadn’t I already inserted myself way too far into their lives once before? I decided I had, as I began walking in the direction of my car, planning to go straight to the Colony. But walking away—from my life, my marriage, and even someone else’s problems—wasn’t something I was capable of.
I tried to tell myself again that I couldn’t, I wouldn’t. But I had no choice, really. I could never live with myself if I didn’t tell him.
“Hey, Siri,” I said, “call Parker Thaysden.”
Parker
INSTANTANEOUS NOTHING
PEOPLE TALK A LOT ABOUT widows, but you don’t hear that much about widowers. I couldn’t think of a single famous one. That morning, I tried to because Greer’s Us Weekly, the one that had autorenewed for the three years since she died, was sitting on top of the stack of mail. Same with her Southern Coast, a magazine her father teased her mercilessly for loving, since it was not owned by her family company, McCann Media.
Maybe it’s because men bounce back faster and move on with their lives. People kept telling me, “At least you don’t have kids. You can make a clean break.”
They didn’t get it. I wanted to be a father, and I would have given anything for a kid with Greer’s blond hair and fearlessness. My wife was born bold. She didn’t take any prisoners and took down anything that got in her way. Anything except for ovarian cancer, which proved to be her kryptonite.
I lifted my head from my cereal bowl and glanced over at the neat stack of large black Moleskine journals on the white quartz counter. Greer was a creature of habit, introspective. She was the kind of person life coaches would call “self-aware.” Those journals were part of her daily routine. Sometimes she wrote a lot. Sometimes a little. Every entry, from the mundane to the extraordinary, was a part of the woman who had been so steadfast and confident that I’d believed she was invincible. I never would have imagined that I would be sitting here alone at the table she’d picked out—like she had everything in this house—over a bowl of soggy cereal, in the small Palm Beach home we had purchased six years earlier. The view of the Intracoastal didn’t seem nearly as awe-inspiring now that she was gone.
As I raised the spoon to my mouth I could almost hear Greer saying, Cereal has no nutritional value. She would have been in the kitchen throwing all varieties of plant matter into the Vitamix, going over the day’s schedule, and making something that looked disgusting but somehow tasted amazing. Although she would have been doing that at six, not nearly eleven. Now I stayed at the office almost all night sometimes. I was in charge of Mergers and Acquisitions for McCann Media, which meant my days revolved around finding new publications to purchase and transitioning their teams into the world of McCann once I did. That often meant corporate restructuring, which wasn’t always savory. But someone had to do it.
After Greer died, I couldn’t sleep, so I had rearranged my schedule, grabbing a few hours of rest in the early morning before heading back to the office. If he didn’t approve, the boss—my father-in-law—never said so. Everyone was still treating me like I’d crumble if they looked at me wrong. I would.
This morning I crumbled at the thought of Greer in a fitted black work dress and shoes that cost more than my first car. She was petite and pretty, but that girl was powerful. She would have taken the time to sit on my lap, to kiss me, to make plans for the night. She ran her own Florida-based arm of her family’s national media conglomerate, the nonprofit she had created, and the world. But she always took the time to make sure people knew how much she loved them.
And me? She loved me a whole damn lot. But not a tenth as much as I loved her. I stood up straighter when she walked in the door. I loved to look at her across the room at a party and know that she would be leaving with me, to see her throw her head back in laughter and know that I could make her laugh like that. She had been mine to protect. And I had let her down.
Everyone told me I had to move on, that this pain and emptiness would ruin me if I didn’t get back out there. I was young. I could still have everything I wanted out of life. That was what they said. But she was what I wanted out of life.
It had gotten to the point that my mother—my own Southern, pearl-wearing, churchgoing, never-said-a-dirty-word-in-her-life mother—had said that maybe I should consider a one-night stand. That is a conversation one does not ever want to have with one’s mother.
My friends had suggested I move. This neighborhood was full of wealthy, retired snowbirds. It was too stuffy for me. But Greer had wanted to be near her family when we had children. This was her world. How could I leave it? Leaving would mean taking the clothes out of her closet, throwing the rows of shoes from their racks into boxes, removing the purses from their storage containers and giving them away. I couldn’t do it.
I looked over at the journals, debating which one I would pack to take with me on my trip home to Cape Carolina the next day. I let myself read one entry every day, chosen at random. It was my way of holding on to her. Every day, I fought the urge to sit down and read them all, all at once. I held myself back so that I could stretch out the joy of those fresh words. When I had read through them, I planned to start all over again, read them in order. But then they wouldn’t be new. Then they would be a memory.
And then I would have to admit that she wasn’t coming back.
My phone rang in the bathroom, finally tearing me away from my soggy cereal. I got up, barely even noticing the pink-and-green lattice wallpaper that Greer had said was “very Palm Beach,” glancing at my hair, which seemed darker since it was wet, in the shiny white mirror, running my hand across the three-day stubble that I needed to shave before work. I was deeply tanned, even though it was December. Winters were mild in Palm Beach, and solitary days on the boat were what kept me breathing—the sea, the sky, the wind. Every day the water outside my door held something new. I kept thinking that maybe it would bring me something new, too, erase the fact that Greer was gone. As of yet, no luck.
A familiar but confusing number lit up my black iPhone screen. “Amelia Saxton.” Her Facebook profile picture popped up too. Her exuberant face on the screen, the way her wavy dark blond hair fell over her shoulders and her blue eyes shone, so full of life even on camera, almost made me smile back at her happiness. Almost. I briefly considered sending it to voice mail, but I didn’t. Instead, I answered, thrusting myself onto the sword of whatever inconvenience was on the line.
Just seeing Amelia’s name brought back the memory of the day Greer told me she wanted to end her life—before the cancer could. It took my breath away.