Lonely. That I am. Not as bad as I was during the pandemic, when Josh was stranded in France for months on end and I couldn’t see anyone. The drinking had been heavy before that, but the loneliness and isolation sent my habits into overdrive.
Meadow and Rory are great, but neither of them understands what happened to me. They don’t realize that this wasn’t some bad choice I made and I’ll “get through it.” I think for a long time they both expected that I would quit drinking for a while and then be able to drink like other people. They’re terrified now that I’ll pick up. To be honest, I am, too. There’s something in me that’s just broken.
We’re all broken, says my therapist’s voice. I somehow have always felt more broken than most, but maybe that’s not actually true.
Keep your head where your feet are.
The sand is cold beneath my feet. I taste salt on my lips. Something eases down my spine.
Only Josh—and my dad, actually—really saw what was going on with me. Even though I refused to speak to Augustus, he was around on the periphery of my life, there when each of the girls was born, present at family parties. He mostly respected my boundaries, but I felt him watching me.
Seeing me. That was his gift, after all: seeing people. It’s why we all had our own nicknames, why he knew how to give gifts that were so perfect, how he managed to hire and keep staff long term in an industry rife with turnover.
Across the screen of my memory, I see him looking at me with concern at some gathering or another.
I shove the visual away. Josh rises in his place. Handsome and ordinary all at once, an all-American boy I met in college, both of us studying viticulture. It was tempestuous from the beginning, which I realized in daily therapy sessions at rehab was my MO: I was drawn to slightly aloof men, men who made me work hard at gaining their attention, relationships that would be intense, passionate, full of sex and fights and making up.
Josh met every single one of my requirements. He loved me, but sometimes he was hard to reach. He adored me, worshipped my body, and then couldn’t stand to talk. He drank way too much, which put my college drinking into perspective. My parents never really liked him. They thought him too privileged, too arrogant, too prone to fits of high emotion.
Our fights, starting near the beginning, were legendary. Not physical, unless it was fight sex, brutal and wildly satisfying but vicious. I was known to throw things. He was known to yell. Twice, we nearly got kicked out of the dorms or school.
But we also shared a genuine, deep passion for the art of wine, and that connection, that dream of having our own label, bound us together for a long time. After graduation we settled into our relationship, learned how to avoid setting each other off. Together we traveled the world, tasting wines and partying with all the other young, ambitious vintners we met. Through those years of exploration and travel, when we applied ourselves to learning our craft and plotting how to make our own wine, we were wildly happy. Even during the first few years of making our own wine, we were mostly good. We still broke into extreme fights followed by extreme sex, but I told myself that was just the DNA of a relationship between two intense people.
We were in trouble long before he left for Paris. Some of that was me. The more I drank, the more volatile I became, and although he drank as much as or more than I did, it never seemed to affect him the same way it did me. He didn’t want to fight the whole world. He didn’t want to burn things down and start again.
But he was not blameless. His rigidness, his focus on doing things exactly as they’d always been done, his powerful need for rules and order aggravated the hell out of me. It was constraining. Claustrophobic. It roused my battle instincts.
Looking back, I see that it’s possible we had outgrown our relationship. We got together in college, after all, and people don’t always stay together. We were bound by the big dream of making perfect wine, but what was underneath that? I didn’t know then. I don’t know now. Maybe I honestly don’t even care.
Still. Why did he have to cheat? He knew this was one of my hot buttons, that my father cheated on not only my mother but then my stepmother. I hadn’t spoken to Augustus in years because of the affair that broke his marriage with Meadow.
How could someone who said he loved me have done the very thing that would hurt me the most?
A derisive voice in my head says, Well, it wasn’t like you were exactly a great catch.
I bow my head, letting the wind toss my hair. It will be a mess to untangle, but the sudden heavy heat of shame weighs me down so much I just can’t worry about hair.