“Why would you stay in L.A.? I mean, if you didn’t go to London. Would it be for your job? I only ask because I hated being a lawyer. I really hated it.” He paused. “The five minutes I was one.”
“I thought you said you didn’t practice,” I said.
“No, I practiced. After I left Cornell, I moved to New York and joined a law firm in the corporate restructuring division. But it was literally five minutes. I quit before lunch.”
I nodded. I had friends from law school who felt like Jacob did, who absolutely hated the law. I didn’t. That wasn’t the same as saying I loved it. Suzannah loved it. She loved it because she loved confrontation and she loved being right—and law allowed her both of those things on a daily basis.
I didn’t love it, but it had always felt like the right path. And when I doubted it, I thought of my law school graduation. My parents had driven to L.A., proudly treating my then boyfriend, Griffin Winfield, to dinner after. At dinner, my father made a toast saying that he was glad I was going to have an easy life. Griffin had given him a look, as if deciding how rude he wanted to be. Then he decided he wanted to be very rude. He told my father that climbing the legal ladder was hardly easy. Though he hadn’t understood what my father meant. My father meant that law provided a path. If you worked hard, you’d be rewarded. You’d have a career you could count on.
Griffin didn’t agree with that either. He thought it was talent that separated out the most successful lawyers. Though that was the main thing he didn’t understand. My father never measured success the way he did—reaching the tip-top of something, as if there was an objective tip-top. My father measured it by how well you figured out what you wanted for your life—what you needed to be happy.
And this was where my mixed feelings came in. Recently, I had to admit I didn’t feel happy. Maybe I was distracted by the wedding planning, or our move to Europe. All I knew was that I needed a change. And I was hoping London was going to provide it.
“So you want to stay in L.A.? For your work?” Jacob said.
“There may be a world in which I do that,” I said.
“The world in which you tell me what made you walk out on your dress fitting?”
We reached the main strip of Graton, which wasn’t really a strip at all, just two restaurants across the street from each other. But they were great restaurants, farm-fresh food from the gardens behind them. Spaghetti nights on Monday. With all the great food in Los Angeles, I still missed spaghetti on Monday.
“You tell me first,” I said.
“About my botched wedding?” He shrugged. “My fiancé would say that she felt like I prioritized my work over her. We were getting married at City Hall, the week before we headed out here. Just a couple of friends and family at this restaurant in Tribeca afterward. Then, the morning of the wedding, she said that she didn’t want to get married the way we were getting married. That she wanted a wedding that counted more, with a fancy dress and a ten-piece band and an expensive cake.”
“You don’t buy it?”
“She hates cake.”
We passed through the entire town and were heading up the hill in the direction of my parents’ house.
He paused. “We weren’t in a good place,” he said. “And it’s hard to get married when you’re not in a good place. It feels fake.”
That I could relate to. It was what made me sad about finding out about Maddie the way I had. It would be locked in with the wedding, what I knew about Ben, what Ben had left out about himself.
“Do you guys still talk?” I said.
He pointed back in the direction of town, pointing out a house over on State Street, a barn to the side. “We live there,” he said.
“You guys are still together?”
He nodded. “Yep. We are still together. Very much so.”
I started doing the math in my head. He had a girlfriend he’d referred to at the bar: a free-spirited, vegan type.
“She’s the one who loves chia?”
“She’s the one who loves chia.”
It was blocking me up, reconciling the two things about her that Jacob had shared. “The one who wants a big, fancy wedding?”
He nodded. “We are all complicated people,” he said.
There was that word again, used as an excuse, used to justify something that felt like love.
He smiled. “As are you, I’m guessing.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know Ms. L.A. Law, but you seem pretty connected to Sonoma County. Unless that’s your thing, storming into people’s offices and demanding they not steal your home?”