Lost Along the Way(13)

“He is cute, isn’t he?” Cara said, feeling somehow proud that she’d been fortunate enough to grab someone as good-looking as Reed. It almost validated her own vanity, reaffirmed that she was a beautiful person, too. Looking back on it, it was clear that she was already starting to define herself by him. That trend only worsened over time, and she learned the hard way that being good on paper didn’t actually mean anything.

She’d been telling the truth when she said that the money had never been something she thought about. Jane was the one who was interested in meeting a guy who could buy her Chanel purses and a prewar apartment in Manhattan. All Cara ever wanted was someone to make her coffee in the morning in one of those old-school French presses and go to the movies or to brunch with her on Saturdays. She suspected that Reed’s name was worth more than he was, anyway. She was pretty sure that the family’s old money, allegedly stored in old vaults, had been spent by old men on young women along the way. Still, that was a subject she never dared broach. It was ironic that she had worried that he was faking his finances when she should have been worried that he was faking being something else: a normal human who didn’t think that women should be silent and obedient, and not necessarily in that order.

She’d heard stories of women who got married and then claimed that their husband’s entire personalities changed after the honeymoon ended, but she’d never thought she’d be one of them. When they were first married, life with Reed was more than she ever could’ve imagined. He was never overly sentimental or affectionate, but he was a WASP and wasn’t exactly in touch with his emotions, so that was never a big deal to her. He was thoughtful in his own way: buying her jewelry or new clothes. Once he even bought her a designer bag that all the women in town were carrying, but which she’d found to be way too big of a splurge to ever buy for herself. He worked as a business manager, spending most of his time monitoring finances for his family and his boarding school buddies. His friends were constantly calling him to ask questions about their investments, or their trusts, or how to write off the expensive gifts they bought for their wives and their girlfriends. He loved his job, and at the end of the day he’d come home and they’d spend their nights having quiet dinners in restaurants in Brookville. Slowly, they settled into a routine. Wasn’t that what married life was supposed to be like? Wasn’t an end to chaos and the emergence of a routine one of the benefits? After about two years of marriage, though, she began to see the jewelry and the purses not as thoughtful gifts from a loving husband, but as something else entirely. She felt like he was trying to change her, to mold her into the type of woman he wanted her to be, instead of accepting her for the woman she actually was. It was a gradual shift, so subtle she didn’t even realize it at first, but eventually he developed an obsessive need to control everything in her life, including her.

He began to obsess over their own finances the way he monitored his clients’, always keeping some kind of mental tabulation of payables and receivables down to the last cent. The man she lived with was not the man she’d thought she was marrying twelve years ago. She wished she’d paid more attention to the warning signs. She wished she’d paid attention to Jane and to her mother when they voiced their concerns. But she hadn’t, and unfortunately, it was too late to go back and redo the past, and divorce simply wasn’t an option. Even as a child, Cara had never been willing to admit that she’d made a mistake. She was thoughtful, thorough, cautious, and old-fashioned in a lot of ways. She believed in her vows and refused to advertise to people that she couldn’t find a way to make her relationship work. She didn’t like the thought of ditching her marriage when things got hard—she wasn’t a quitter. Her father had quit her mother, and by default, her, when things got hard in her parents’ marriage, and she’d sworn she’d never be like him. She wasn’t a coward like he was. She’d figure out a way to make it work or die trying. There simply was no other option.

Still, she hated that she’d allowed it to go this far. Jane had seen it from the very beginning. Why didn’t I? Why didn’t anyone else? Why didn’t I listen to her?, she asked herself when she lay in bed awake at night, but she hated the answer. Because she’d assumed Jane was pissed she was still single when Cara was on her way to being married. She’d thought everything Jane did back then stemmed from her being jealous, but now things looked different—how Reed had really treated her, what Jane had really seen, and how she’d responded to both of them in return. She spent a lot of time lately thinking back to the first time that the crack in Reed’s perfect image showed, the first time his inner control freak surfaced and silenced her, the first time she lashed out at Jane for voicing her concerns. Ironically, it was at their engagement party.





six


November 2000

“Where is she?” Cara asked Meg as she looked at her watch and wondered for the millionth time why Jane was late. Reed’s uncle had been nice enough to throw them an intimate party at his apartment, and instead of enjoying the night with her family and friends, Cara was completely distracted. “The party started at seven o’clock and it’s almost nine. What, is my engagement party not important enough for her to show up?”

“She’ll be here! I’m sure she’s stuck in traffic or something,” Meg said, trying to calm her. “Don’t get upset. It’s your engagement party. Go mingle and I will make sure she comes right over when she gets here, I promise.”