The Ex(26)

Law school graduation was a month away. We had a wedding date eleven weeks out. The plan was to keep it simple—vows in Central Park with a reception to follow at a French restaurant on the Upper West Side called La Mirabelle. The honeymoon was more of a splurge, a week at Lake Como. My signing bonus at the firm would barely cover it all.

You know how gamblers keep adding good money after bad, unable to walk away with a loss? That was me. Nearly a year had passed since my thing with Gregg ended, but I found more where that came from. Hours spent at the library. Late nights at bars. Unexplained phone calls. I was never home, and when I was, I would bark at Jack constantly, all in the hope that he would be the one to walk away. I needed him to walk away. What did I need to do to make him leave me?

In my head, there was no alternative. Not after all this time. I became reckless to the point of inevitability.

Until that night, I had never brought another man into our apartment. But I crossed that final line in the biggest possible way. I knew Jack would be home any minute; his writers’ workshop could have only so much to say about the dozen pages he’d managed since the last meeting. It was only his phone call from the corner that kept us from being caught in flagrante. Need anything from Duane Reade? If I don’t get some Q-tips, my ears might start to sprout.

My companion made it to the staircase before Jack stepped off the elevator, but I hadn’t even bothered to make the bed. If I had, I might have noticed the Seiko watch, unmistakably male, resting next to my pillow. I’m the one who’d slipped it from the wrist it belonged to.

Not even Jack could pretend to miss the clues. It was a cruel thing to do, I knew, but like Nick Lowe said, sometimes you’ve got to be cruel to be kind. Jack would finally see that he was too good for me.

I never stopped to think about what would happen next.


I HAD GOTTEN TO JACK’S slamming the apartment door behind him when Don interrupted. “I’ve got two ex-wives for a reason: I stepped out on the first for the second, and then the second stepped out on me for the friend of a cousin who she met at our Christmas party. I figure it was karma biting me in the butt, so we’re even. You’re not the first person to f*ck up. You were young, and you weren’t even married. Get over it.”

“Are you listening to me, Don? It’s not just that I cheated. I intentionally set it up so Jack found the evidence.”

What I had done was actually far worse, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell Don that part. I just couldn’t. I had never told anyone except Melissa.

“Not to be a lawyer about this, but does your mens rea really matter? As far as the harm to Jack, it’s all the same.”

“That’s my point, Don. The harm. Jack was absolutely devastated. It wasn’t until I saw his face that I realized that he really did think of us as forever. We were so young, and I was still in law school; being engaged just seemed like a word. But that’s how he thought of us—his entire future. He ran out of the apartment like it was filled with poisonous gas. I waited for him to come home, but he didn’t. I finally broke down and called Charlotte at three in the morning, and she told me that he had shown up at her apartment not much earlier than that, drunk and upset, with no explanation—or at least that’s what she told me at the time. She was smart enough to figure out we’d had some kind of fight, but didn’t press me for details. I was just relieved to know that he was okay and with a friend. I figured we’d talk the next day. I’d apologize. I’d say all the stupid things that people who cheat say when they get caught. And we’d do all the things that I had been dreading—figuring out who would keep the lease, dividing up the furniture and the CDs, all that messiness.”

“Been there, done that.”

Ramon, Melissa’s headwaiter, came by to check on us for orders, but I indicated that we weren’t ready. “But that’s not what happened. I spent the whole morning staring at the television, wondering when Jack would be ready to talk to me. And then the phone finally rang that night, and it was Charlotte. There’d been a car accident. Jack’s older brother, Owen, had died.”

I could tell from Don’s expression that Melissa had never told him any of this. Of course she hadn’t. Melissa was better than a vault. “I remember reading that in one of the profiles about Jack—his brother was a cop, right?”

“Yeah, NYPD, but he lived on Long Island, not far from where they grew up. Charlotte said they thought Owen fell asleep at the wheel on the LIE. Ran head-on into an embankment. He was DOA.”

“It’s a sad story, Olivia, but I’m still not sure why we’re talking about it.”

“Because I’m the reason Owen was in his car in the middle of the night, too exhausted to stay awake until he got home. He was in his car because when Jack found out I was cheating, he called his brother for support. Owen was in the city and met Jack at a bar. They stayed out because of me, because of what I did to Jack.”

“You can’t put that on yourself, Olivia.”

“There wasn’t even a funeral because there was no family left. For months, I had no idea where Jack even was.” How many times had I drunk myself to sleep, wondering where Jack had gone? “Eventually Charlotte came to the apartment to pack up Jack’s things. She told me that he’d had a psychotic break. Major depression, catatonic, wouldn’t move or speak or eat or drink kind of depression. He was in a psych ward.”