Good at Being Alive(93)

No one brings up my outburst on the way home, but they’re on eggshells, discussing anything but Theo and the trip, which is almost worse.

Why the hell did I say that about Bronwyn? Did I think admitting what I’d taken from her would somehow set things right? That it would magically make Theo call? Because he hasn’t. He must have arrived in London hours ago, but there’s nothing from him even after we’ve reached the house.

I climb into the shower and press my face to the wall as Lars’s final question rings in my head.

Do you feel like Theo left you?

“Yes,” I whisper aloud. “And I don’t know what more I could have done.”

There’s never been a time when I wasn’t left behind somehow, and despite my apparent IQ, I’m not smart enough to make it stop happening.

I was too young to do much about it when my mother was deciding to leave. No three-year-old has the wherewithal to make herself slightly more lovable.

But after that? I did everything I could. I failed tests and classes on purpose, gave up travel soccer, never voiced a word of complaint about anything, and it still wasn’t enough. Jessie still didn’t invite me to family dinners and bad-mouthed me whenever she got the chance.

Every fucked-up family needs an anchor. That way, you can blame the anchor for what’s gone wrong and ignore the fact that your boat was never all that seaworthy in the first place. I became that anchor, but they all still left me behind, and I asked nothing of Theo, not a single thing, and that wasn’t enough either.

I never asked him what he wanted. I never asked what would happen after the show ended, if I was at all different from the hordes of women who came before me, why he never suggested I come back to London with him. I never demanded a single whisper of assurance, hoping that, for once in my life, someone would just choose me.

It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. And I’ve been knocked to the ground at many points over the past year, but this is the first time I haven’t been sure I can pick myself back up.



* * *



? ? ?

In the evening I join the crew on the patio for our final meal together until the marathon.

“You’re quiet,” says Katrina.

I smile. “It’s just kind of sad, having it end.”

She raises a brow. “Really? I thought you hated filming.”

I don’t know what to say because yeah…I don’t like filming. I don’t like having pretend conversations with my pretend husband about places I’m mostly pretending to visit. But I liked having Theo by my side. I liked it enough to put up with almost anything, even the pain of loving him when I suspected he wouldn’t love me back.

Lars appears just as the sun is setting to announce he’s taken a crack at the show’s first trailer if we want to watch. We follow him into the living room. Everyone is enthusiastic as he connects his laptop to the TV. I would be, too, under other circumstances.

The lights lower, and the chatter stops as the first images appear.

There’s some handheld video of our wedding, the two of us kissing at the Eiffel Tower. It’s sort of amazing how much a few seconds of footage can tell a piece of a story—each of them is a chapter.

I’m in a bikini at Sky Lagoon and Theo walking behind me—with something in his face I’d never guessed was there at the time. He liked me. Even when I was generally awful to him. So why the hell is he rushing off to London and treating me like an afterthought now?

He’s carrying me over the rocks on the way to the boat in Sorrento, growling, “Not everything is a performance,” then laughing in bed with me in Capri. He asks me in Amsterdam about kids, and I tell him I hadn’t even thought about it. In Norway we’re arguing about where we’ll live while I look up at him with starry eyes, so ridiculously besotted a child could have seen it. And then there’s a glimpse of the fight—Theo lunging at Caden, though you can’t quite make out who he was lunging at, and then me today, telling them to stop filming as I walk away in tears.

It gives the impression that our marriage is imploding, and it ends with Theo’s interview, the one he just did yesterday, after what I’d thought was a perfect afternoon together.

“Most marriages don’t last,” he says to the camera. “I suppose it was stupid to hope ours would. We have nothing in common.”

My stomach drops to the floor.

He said those words after our run, after we’d floated beside each other in Porto Moniz. He said those words and then came back here and fucked me like a man who hadn’t run twenty miles earlier in the day. Even I was surprised by how insatiable he was.

Insatiable, after telling Lars we have nothing in common. That our marriage won’t last.

Maybe he was so insatiable because he knew it was the final time.

I slip out the door while they’re all congratulating one another. I don’t even know where I’m headed until I discover myself at the beach, my feet sinking into the sand. I take a few steps forward and then just…crumple, face pressed to my knees. I’m not sure why, after everything I’ve been through in the past year, this is the thing that’s simply too much.

“What’s going on, Bex?” Katrina asks, appearing out of nowhere and dropping into the sand beside me. “Did you guys break up?”

I dig my toes into the sand. “We’d have to be together to have broken up.”