“Don’t forget the hours—or years rather—you’ve spent fixing your family. Maybe if you didn’t spend every waking minute on the phone with your sisters and your dad, counseling them through every single crisis that comes up, there would be more time left for us.”
I wanted to slap him. Tell him he had no business judging what I’d been through with my family, and the way I’d chosen to handle it.
But there was truth to what he was saying. And I couldn’t deny it any longer.
“I’m sorry for the way I’ve let their drama overflow into my life . . . into our lives. It’s all I knew how to do though, after losing my mom.”
“Chloe, your mom died like twenty years ago. Don’t you think your dad and your sisters should be able to manage their own lives by now?”
“It’ll be eighteen years tomorrow. And yes, they should be able to run their own lives without my constant help, and that’s something I need to work on. I know that. But I love them, Paul. They’re my family. They’re the most important people in my life. And if we’re going to get married, they’re going to be your family too. I guess I always thought you’d warm up to them. Maybe even become excited at having a big, crazy family since you grew up as an only child. But I see now that that’s not the case.”
“Whatever,” Paul mumbled, his tone like a pouty little five-year-old.
“My crazy family isn’t going anywhere, Paul. And I’m not going to distance myself from them just because things get a little chaotic sometimes.”
Paul huffed out another angry breath and crossed his arms over his chest. The disdain he harbored for my dad and my sisters was yet one more glaring red flag which I’d chosen to ignore for years now.
“Just answer my original question,” I snapped, unable to skirt around the issue at hand for another second. “Are you happy with us? With this life?”
“Why do you think I took the Pennsylvania job?”
“You think moving to the suburbs and popping out kids is going to fix this? Fix us?”
“I didn’t realize we were so broken,” he said coolly. “But I’m seeing pretty clearly now, after this week, that apparently there were a lot of things I didn’t know about you.”
I hugged my legs to my chest and felt cold drops of water slipping off the ends of my hair and sliding down my back. “I’m sorry, Paul. I’m truly sorry for everything that happened this week. I should have never lied to you. I should’ve told you the truth right from the beginning instead of always trying to handle everything on my own.”
Paul leaned back in his chair, his mouth drawn shut, his eyes tired.
“But I need you to be honest with me,” I continued. “If I had told you what really happened, right from the start, do you think you would feel any differently than you do now?”
When Paul’s cool gaze leveled with mine, I finally recognized the look I’d been seeing in those dark black eyes for months, years even. And I’d just been so good at ignoring it, so skilled in seeing only what I wanted to see, that it was as if I was seeing it for the first time.
He wasn’t in love with me either.
“What do you expect me to say, Chloe? That if you’d called me right away and said, ‘Hey, listen honey, I let some French guy get me drunk last night, then I voluntarily brought him up to my room and passed out while he stole my things. Can you help me?’ that I would’ve been on the first plane to France? Is that what you want me to say?”
A cold tear stung the back of my eyelid. “I told you, Paul. I was drugged. I never would’ve taken him to my room unless I had no idea what I was doing.” But as the words flew out of my mouth, a vision of Julien’s lips pressed up against mine flashed through my mind. I’d known what I was doing then, and I’d done it anyway.
“It’s all too far-fetched. Ever since this happened, I just don’t feel like I know you anymore,” Paul said, staring past me out the window.
When my mind refused to stop thinking of Julien, I looked to the ground. “Maybe you don’t.”
An excruciating silence hovered over us in the small office, until, a few moments later, Paul broke it. “Is that where this is coming from? Your sudden concern with the apparent lack of romance in our relationship? Did your stint running from the cops with that ex-con make you realize you needed more passion in your life? More excitement?”
Paul’s dry, sarcastic tone stung me to the core. But, if I was honest with myself, and with him, that was exactly what had happened.
“Don’t you ever wonder if we were headed down the wrong path? If we were just working and saving and working and saving for a life that we weren’t really living?” I asked.
“No, that’s not how I feel, Chloe, or how I’ve ever felt. I wanted to go to law school, so I did. I wanted to become a lawyer, so I did. I wanted to get that job at the firm in Pennsylvania and move to a smaller town, so that’s what I’m doing.”
I could almost hear Julien’s voice in my head. Boring, boring. Where’s the passion?
And now, thousands of miles away from Julien, from all of those conversations where he’d accused me of not really being in love, of having no passion, I realized I agreed with him. Where was the passion?
“Paul, think back to when we first started dating, back in college. Do you remember feeling like you just had to be with me? Like you couldn’t live without me?”
Paul’s eyebrows knitted together in confusion.
“Was there even a spark?” I asked.
“Not all relationships have to be like that, Chloe. Some relationships are stable.”
There it was again. Stability. My life vest.
But I didn’t want it anymore. I didn’t need it.
“But to sustain a marriage, there needs to be more than just stability,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter anymore anyway. After this past week, whatever stability we had is gone now.”
“So, your mind is made up? You’re moving to Pennsylvania.”
“Yes, I took the job because I want to go there!” he shouted, the veins in his forehead popping out. “I thought we wanted the same things. I thought you would realize what a great opportunity this could be for us. I thought you would want a bigger home and a family, just like I did. I mean, isn’t that what you do after you’ve been together eight years?”
“I might want all of those things . . . one day. But I’m not ready yet. And I told you that. I’ve been telling you that all along.”
“Or maybe you’re just not ready for those things with me,” Paul said, his face hanging, his eyes weary and beaten down.
One lone tear rolled down my cheek. And I knew that he was right.
“I’m sorry, Paul. I’m so sorry.”
He rubbed his fingers along his brow line, hiding his eyes from view for a few seconds before lifting them up to meet mine.
“So this is it then? All these years, and this is what it comes down to?”
I couldn’t answer. I couldn’t even look him in the eye. I felt like I was breaking in half, and once I let him go, I wasn’t sure who would be there, if anyone, to sweep up the pieces.
“What should we do then, about the wedding?” he asked, his voice deflated.
“I’ll take care of it,” I said. I’d cancelled weddings before in my event planning career . . . just never my own.
He nodded and stood to his feet. “I’ll stay with my parents for the weekend, then I’ll be back next week to move my things out.” His voice had switched into the same formal tone I’d heard him use with his clients over the phone.
“Okay,” I said as I watched him head toward the door, feeling the urge to say something else, to keep apologizing, but knowing in my heart that I’d said enough for one night.
He turned, gave me one last tired look, then left the office. Two minutes later, the front door slammed shut, its echo sounding through the empty house.
Paul was gone, and with him, all of the stability I’d stored up for the past eight years.
I sank back int
o the couch, wrapped the blanket tighter around my shaking arms and hoped with every fiber in my body that I’d made the right decision, and that somehow, after this rain had finished pouring down on me, I would find the strength to pick myself back up and move on to sunnier skies.
Twenty-five
Hushed whispers filled my ears. Was I dreaming?
I rolled to the side and peeked through the unwelcome slit in my eyelids. All three of my sisters stood over me shooting worried glances at each other.
I shut my eyes again.
“Chloe, why are you sleeping in the office? And why are you all damp?”
Sophie knelt down beside me, removing a strand of hair that had been matted to my cheek. “We couldn’t find Paul anywhere,” she said softly. “Did you guys talk about things last night?”
Oh, God. Last night. How was I going to tell them that the one relationship they’d been able to count on for the past eight years was officially over? That their older sister had completely lost control of her life.
Had it all really happened?
But as I remembered watching Paul’s thin frame walk out of the office door and hearing the front door slam shut, I knew it was real.
I pushed myself up, the lack of food in my stomach making me dizzy. And I turned to face my sisters. There was no avoiding it. No running away.
“Paul’s gone. The wedding’s off,” I said, unable to believe the words even as they walked, mechanically, right out of my own mouth.
“The wedding’s off?” Lily screeched from behind Sophie.
“Lily,” Sophie hissed. “Get it together.”
“Sorry,” she mumbled.
I braced myself for Sophie’s typical hundred and one questions as she sat down next to me.
But instead, she wrapped her arms around me and pulled me into her chest. “I’m sorry, Chloe,” she said, stroking the back of my head. “I’m so sorry.”
And while my first instinct was to pull away and tell her I was fine, that I could handle this, I found myself collapsing in her arms, grateful for the strength they provided on a morning when mine had been zapped.
“It’s going to be okay,” she said in the most soothing voice I’d ever heard come from her lips.
I laid my cheek on her shoulder and sighed. “How? How is it going to be okay? The wedding was supposed to be in two days. My life is a mess.”
Sophie laid her hands on my shoulders and squared her face in front of mine. “That’s why you have us. You’ve cleaned up our messes our whole lives. Now it’s our turn.”
“But you can’t possibly—”
“Chloe, just stop. We’ll handle everything. All we need is the list of people to call, and it’s done. You’re not getting on that phone today.”
“Really? But what about Dad? He’s going to flip out. All that money he paid, there’s no way we’re going to be able to get it all back.”
“He’ll live,” Lily said, taking a step toward me. “And we’ll deal with him and his anxiety. It’s not your job today.”
“Okay,” I said, wondering how my sisters had grown up so much without me noticing.
“Now, come on,” Sophie said, grabbing my hand and pulling me up from the couch. “You need to take a shower because you stink. What were you doing last night? Rolling around in the mud?”
Well, maybe they hadn’t grown up quite that much.
***
After showering and eating a big plate of fluffy pancakes drowned in maple syrup that Sophie had made for me, I gave the girls the guest list and phone numbers of all one hundred and eighty-four people, the contact information for the photographer, the videographer, the florist, the DJ, and so on, and so on, and they closed themselves in the office with their cell phones without so much as a peep.
I tossed and turned in my huge, lonely bed for about a half an hour, unable to think of anything but the fact that, at that very moment, per my request, my sisters were dismantling my wedding, promising friends and family members that their gifts would be returned, saying things like, “They just weren’t meant to be, you know?”
But then, after a little while, after I forced myself to stop worrying about my failed wedding, a new feeling crept into my chest.
I was free.
On the plane ride home, I’d told myself over and over again that I would feel relief when I saw Paul. That I would find comfort in the stability our relationship had always provided for me.
But I hadn’t felt relief or comfort. Instead, sitting at that dinner table with his uptight mother, his overbearing father, and Paul not caring that he’d just taken a job in a place I never wanted to live, I’d known that if I sat there for one more second, I would suffocate.
And now, like a storm cloud that passed through in the night and was gone by morning, that suffocating feeling had disappeared. And in its place, I found freedom.
I’d been with Paul for so long, and before this week, I’d never examined our relationship. I’d never stopped to think about the fact that at times, it was exhausting—he was exhausting. His incessant need to clean, his perfectionism, his predictability, his stability. These characteristics were originally the reasons I’d chosen to be with Paul, but now, as I lay alone in my bed, with the future a blur of the unknown, I knew that they were the last things in the world that I wanted.
Suddenly, I felt an opening in my chest, like I could breathe again. I could fill my life with whatever I wanted now. I didn’t have to be limited to the kind of life I was going to have with Paul.
Just as I began to ponder what I did want to include in this new, untouched future of mine which lay ahead of me like a blank page waiting to be filled up, my bedroom door creaked open. My big, burly dad filled up the doorway, the worry etched into his brow like a tattoo.
He let himself in and sat down on the edge of the bed near my feet. And just as I expected him to start in on his usual diatribe about how all of us girls were going to give him a heart attack, the wrinkles in his forehead dissipated, then he softened his brown bear eyes and smiled at me.
“I’m so proud of you, you know that?”
“Proud?” I asked, thinking my sisters must’ve drugged him because I’d never seen him this calm in the face of a crisis.
“Yes, proud. I never thought Paul was the right man for you. And I know your mother wouldn’t have either.”
“What do you mean?”
“He just didn’t make you glow.”
Okay, Sophie had definitely slipped Dad whatever she used to take in college. Where was my father?
“He didn’t make me glow?”
“Yes. Like your mother did, when we were together.
And then, before I had a chance to say anything, my dad pulled me into one of his rare embraces, the scruff on his cheek scratching against my face, his massive arms swallowing me up.
“So you’re not mad? About all the money? About telling the whole family that there isn’t going to be a wedding?”
My father placed his warm hands on my shoulders and smiled at me.
“Chloe, you are the most caring, responsible young woman I’ve ever known, and after your mother died, you sacrificed your teenage years and your young adulthood to take care of this family. When your friends were out meeting boys, having their first drink and getting into trouble, you were home with me, taking care of baby Magali, making sure I took my anxiety meds before bed every night, waiting up with me every time Lily was late for her curfew, and flushing Sophie’s pot stash down the toilet before I could find it.”
I chuckled at the memories, but also felt relieved that it was all over.
My dad’s voice grew softer. “But it wasn’t fair to you, Chloe. You grew up too fast. You missed out on all those years of being irresponsible. Of making mistakes. Of running around and getting into trouble. Instead you were at home, saving your family. And this . . . this is the first time something has happened that you couldn’t fix. So no, sweetie, I’m not angry with you. I’m angry with myself for not b
eing a better father. For not being there for you the way I should’ve been.”
“Dad, I—”
“No, Chloe. It’s true. I haven’t been the best father to you and your sisters. And you’ve stepped in every time I wasn’t pulling my weight. But you need to know now that we’re all okay. I’m okay. Your sisters are okay.” My dad reached up and tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, his eyes glazing over with tears. “And it’s all because of you. Your mother would be so proud of the woman you’ve become. But she would also want you to live your life. And as your father, that’s what I’m ordering you to do now. Live your life, sweetie, because God knows it goes by fast, and I don’t want you to spend the rest of it worrying about me. Besides, don’t you know your sisters at all?” A grin popped onto his big, burly face, causing a tear to bubble down his cheek. “They get everything they want. Getting most of the wedding money back will be no exception.”
I giggled and wiped a tear from my own eye as my dad pulled me into another warm embrace. “Thank you, Dad. Thank you so much.”
After the tightest bear hug ever, I asked, “Why didn’t you say anything to me earlier, about Paul?”
“It wasn’t my place.”
“But you’re my dad.”
“You know yourself, Chloe. You had to come to this realization on your own. I have no idea how in the hell it happened, but I’m just happy it wasn’t too late.”
I glanced past my father to the shopping bag I’d stuffed in the corner of the bedroom—the bag that still held my mother’s letters and her beautiful photo. And I realized that I hadn’t exactly come to this realization solely on my own.
“Dad, there’s something I want to show you. It might help all of this make a little more sense.”
“Oh?” He arched an eyebrow, reminding me of Julien.
I lifted my exhausted body from the bed, crossed the room and picked up the one bag I’d managed to bring back from France, hoping that maybe, just maybe, it held a glimpse of those sunnier days I was so desperately hoping were on the horizon.
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