Chapter 7 - Writing My Own Ending
Two years went by.
London stopped being the place I ran to and turned into the place I lived.
I was at the desk in my study one afternoon, glasses on, finishing the English translation of an Italian novel that had done very well back home. It started as something to do with my hands during those first quiet months. It turned into a career with my own name on it — not Preston's, not anyone's. Mine.
"Mom! Mason hid my cleats again!"
"Did not! You left them in the mudroom!"
I smiled and didn't look up. The house was loud and messy and completely alive.
Hands settled on my shoulders and worked at the knot in my neck. I leaned back into them and looked up at Oliver.
I'd met him at a translation seminar. He ran a small publishing house, and he was smart and calm and steady in a way that had taken me a while to trust. He didn't want to manage me. He just wanted to be in the room.
"You've been at that screen for three hours," he said, and kissed the top of my head. "There's a roast in the oven. Come down."
"One more page."
The doorbell rang.
"I've got it," Oliver said.
I saved the file and stretched. I heard low voices in the hall, then Oliver on the stairs. He leaned in the doorway looking puzzled.
"There's a woman at the door for you. Says you know her." A pause. "Bianca."
The name came up out of a life I didn't live in anymore. I went down with my heart beating completely normally.
She was on the step under an umbrella, out of the drizzle. The designer everything was gone — a worn trench coat instead, and a face that looked ten years older than it had any right to.
"What do you need, Bianca?"
She held her purse with both hands. "I know I've got no business being here. I moved back to Europe, I'm staying with my sister. After everything came apart." She looked at her shoes. "I just wanted to say it to your face. I'm sorry. For what I helped do. When Preston found out the baby wasn't his, he put me out with nothing. It was —" She stopped.
I looked at her and waited for the anger. It didn't come. Not even the satisfaction anymore. Just a kind of flat nothing.
"I hear you," I said. "But you didn't break anything, Bianca. You just showed me the cracks that were already there. I hope you find whatever it is you're looking for."
I closed the door, gently, and turned the lock.
In the kitchen Oliver was pulling the roast out. The kids were setting the table and arguing about who got the end cut. On the counter, in the stack of mail forwarded from my old box in New York, there was an envelope in Preston's handwriting. Shaky. Pressed hard into the paper.
I picked it up. I could feel how thick it was. All the apologies, all the pleading, the part where he finally understood what he threw away.
I held it for a second, wondering what a man writes when he's hit the very bottom.
Then I dropped it in the fire, still sealed.
I watched the corners curl and catch and go black and lift up the chimney into the cold London sky.
I didn't need to read how his story ended.
May you like
I was busy writing my own.
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