The Perfect Wife(65)

You realize something else about Megan: She’s one of the very few people who immediately talks to you like a person, rather than a machine.

“What about Abbie?” you say as you take a seat on one of Megan’s two enormous sofas. “Was she Tim Scott’s soulmate?”

“Well, he thought so. And he’s my client, so…” She smiles.

“But you weren’t sure?”

She hesitates, then leans forward. “Look, I probably shouldn’t say this. But I knew two things the moment I met Abbie Cullen. First, that Tim was going to fall in love with her. Heck, he was already in love with her. That’s why I made a point of going to talk to her that day. He’d just ignored every single one of the women I was trying to pitch him and gone on and on about this incredible artist he’d hired.” She sits back again. “And second, I knew it would end in tears.”

“Why?”

“Do you know what I mean by Galatea syndrome?”

You shake your head.

“The men who start tech companies…they tend to be a particular type. First, they have impossibly high standards. Second, they have a vision. Which is to say, a view of the world. Often they like nothing better than to impart that view to some receptive, impressionable young person. If the young person is fresh and sweet and drop-dead gorgeous, too, so much the better. And, to be fair, the younger person is often just as keen to learn as the older one is to teach.

“But fast-forward a few years, and the dynamic has shifted. The older person still has the vision, but the younger one has heard it all before. And they’re probably not so sweet and fresh anymore, either. So, inevitably, they move on.”

“Why’s it called Galatea syndrome?”

“From an ancient Greek myth. About a sculptor called Pygmalion, who rejected all the women of Cyprus as frivolous and wanton. Until one day, he carved a statue of a woman so beautiful and pure, he couldn’t help falling in love with it. At which point the statue came to life and loved him right back. He called her Galatea. I guess today we’d say he fell in love with an ideal, rather than a person.”

“I think I know how that feels. On the receiving end, I mean.”

Megan nods. “I did suggest to Tim that jumping into marriage with a woman a decade younger than him, someone he’d only known for a few months, wasn’t wise. But Tim believes in being decisive. The best I could do was get the two of them to sit down and talk through a prenup.”

“I did wonder about that. I read it this morning. It seemed quite…draconian.” You’d wondered if Megan even deliberately set the marriage up to fail, hoping for repeat business.

“The point of the prenup is never the prenup,” she says flatly. “The point of the prenup is, first, to get two idealistic, loved-up individuals to be honest about what their expectations for this relationship are. And second, to provide some kind of road map for a healthy marriage.” She waves a hand in the direction of Silicon Valley. “Most of my clients couldn’t navigate a cocktail party without a list of step-by-step instructions, preferably written in Python or JavaScript. I like to think that by incorporating things like date nights, vacations, and non-work days into a prenup, I’m giving them some sort of blueprint for normality.”

“I think Tim may have taken it more literally than you intended. Getting Abbie to take a drug test every time she seemed a bit too cheerful.”

“Yes. Well, I did what I could to get them both over that particular road bump.”

“What do you mean?”

Megan only lifts an eyebrow, but you immediately guess. “Abbie failed the drug test. She failed, but you told Tim she’d passed.”

Megan hesitates, as if deciding how much to tell you. “Not exactly. According to the hair analysis, she was clean for coke and other class-A drugs. But it showed high levels of alcohol. That wasn’t covered by the prenup, so officially it was none of my business. But I sat her down and read her the riot act anyway. Even though it wasn’t her who was my client, I felt responsible for her. Protective, even. She was always this sweet, optimistic person, and then her kid got that horrible condition…It can’t have been easy.”

“What did she say when you did that?”

“She swore she was talking to her drug counselor about it. That she was determined to make the marriage work, for Danny’s sake if nothing else.” Megan shrugs. “She was probably lying. All addicts lie. Drinkers, too—to themselves, mostly. I should know. I used to be one.”

You think. Megan assumed Abbie was lying because she was a drinker who wasn’t going to stop. But what if Abbie had been planning to leave, even then? And what if the drinking wasn’t the cause of the marriage breakdown, but a consequence of it?

“When was this?” you ask.

Megan pinches the bridge of her nose while she thinks. “Roughly the middle of July.”

Three months before Abbie left. Perhaps it wasn’t only Tim who’d been in love with an ideal, you reflect. Perhaps Abbie, too, had had a kind of fantasy of a perfect life: a perfect marriage, perfect children, a wealthy and successful husband. When that dream collapsed, had her first response been to dull the reality with alcohol, and her second to flee altogether?

You feel a flash of sympathy—sympathy you’re careful to suppress. Abbie’s flaws were human, certainly. But her flaws are also your strengths. You will never be addicted to alcohol or drugs. Your decisions will never be clouded by medication or idealism or lust.