The Villa(5)

It wasn’t about money, it seemed. It was about ownership. Because I’d talked out my plots with Matt, because he’d made some suggestions when I was stuck and because, stupidly, I’d once said in an interview with Mystery and Suspense that “the Petal Bloom books wouldn’t exist without my husband, Matt,” he now argued that he was entitled to a lot more than a couple of dedications and a mention in the acknowledgments. He wanted a cut of my earnings—not only of what I’d already made, but anything else I might make in the future from Petal. Apparently, I only had a career because of him.

I probably shouldn’t have been so surprised he felt this way, though. I’d written the first few Petal Bloom books before we’d gotten married, so they were under my maiden name, Emily McCrae. I’d planned on keeping that name for professional use even as I took Matt’s last name, Sheridan, personally, but apparently it hadn’t even occurred to Matt that I wouldn’t use Sheridan on my books. It had bothered him enough that I’d relented, insisting on the change even though my publisher had been less than thrilled about it.

So yeah, I probably should have seen this coming, but I’d thought it was just a ridiculous money grab, that any judge would laugh it out of court.

So far, no one is laughing.

Just last week, I had to turn over the past five years of contracts, check stubs, and royalty statements to his attorneys, and at night, I lie awake wondering what it will feel like if he actually wins.

If every time I sit down to write, for the rest of my life, I’ll be putting money in the pocket of a man who left me the second that things got hard.

I’m so busy feeling sorry for myself that I realize I’ve missed two texts from Chess.

HELLO!!

SERIOUSLY EM I HAVE A—PLAN—

That makes me smile in spite of myself.

Chess was always big on plans, only about a third of which actually came to fruition, and that’s me being generous. There was the costume party she wanted to make our entire dorm participate in (she dropped it after she couldn’t find a costume she liked). The scavenger hunt senior year (she forgot to actually make a list of things to find). A trip to Cabo for my bachelorette party (straight up never happened).

And of course, there was always the Book.

That’s how we used to talk about it, the Book that we were going to write together, the searing exposé of girlhood and sex and academia that was going to make us both literary darlings. That plan had almost gotten off the ground. I think we got about ten thousand words in before Chess lost interest. There had been a new guy, someone she’d met at some random bar, and with him had come an entirely new set of friends to hang out with and impress. I had gotten used to it by then, how when Chess dated someone new, she seemed to become an entirely new person. I’d just assumed she’d get tired of him and his crowd like she always did, and then we’d get back to the book.

The guy had eventually—inevitably—gone away, but she never mentioned working on the book again.

I sigh, getting up from my desk. Outside, it’s already getting dark, and I realize I’ve wasted another day, working and yet somehow getting nowhere. Across the street, the Millers have already turned on their porch light, and I can hear the sound of kids laughing, bicycle tires bumping from street to sidewalk and back again.

Matt and I bought this house six years ago, firmly ensconced in Family Territory, because we thought we’d be one of them soon enough. We were planning on having kids soon, living that suburban dream, but then I’d gotten busy with the books, and just as that had slowed down, I’d gotten sick, and now here I was, the one single lady stuck in a two-story, four-bedroom house that didn’t feel like mine at all.

I take my phone into the kitchen, opening the fridge and seeing if I have anything that isn’t completely depressing to heat up for dinner. There’s a pot of soup from the other night, so I grab that, sitting it on the stove before studying the few bottles of wine left in my wine rack, the reds that Matt didn’t bother taking.

I think about all those orange bottles still in my medicine cabinet.

Antibiotics. Those were the first things the doctor prescribed when I started getting sick, just over two years ago. I was nauseous all the time, prickly sweat beading my upper lip and the small of my back.

Matt had been sure I was pregnant, but the tests were always negative, and when I’d finally gone in to see my gynecologist, she suggested I might actually have gotten a really bad case of food poisoning, something my body couldn’t fight off on its own. I left with a prescription for these big horse pills that made my arms and feet break out in an itchy rash, but didn’t do a thing to curtail the nausea. If anything, it seemed to get worse, accompanied by a fuzzy feeling in my head, an inability to focus on anything.

That had led to CT scans, to ENTs, to a different kind of antibiotic and then, finally, when no one could find anything wrong with me, a prescription for intense motion sickness pills.

Those had at least kept me from throwing up, but the brain fog only worsened. My thoughts felt scattered and slow, and by afternoon, my eyes were drooping with drowsiness.

And then, a few weeks after Matt moved out, I woke up one morning and realized that I felt more like myself again. It’s still hard for me to trust this run of good health—even though some of the pills have technically expired, I’ve been reluctant to throw them away, afraid that I’ll need them again. But it’s been months since I’ve been nauseous, my brain foggy, thoughts thick, months since I’ve spent the day curled in a ball in front of the toilet.