I tried so hard to keep it private. To look only when he wasn’t around. But it got out of control, as all obsessions do.
It got to the point that even when Jack was lying in bed next to me asleep, when I was most at risk of discovery, I would have my phone out, screen fully dimmed, sound down, searching. Honestly, I would feel less guilty if I was looking at porn and satisfying myself rather than waking Jack to tend to my desires.
I can see why he was attracted to her. She is a dynamic presence on the screen. Flaming red hair. Heart-shaped face. Pillowy lips. A sharp jaw. Elegantly arched brows, exactly the right thickness, two shades darker than her hair. I go back time and again to a shot of her laughing, mouth open wide enough that I can see her bottom teeth aren’t perfectly straight. Such a tiny flaw. Was she self-conscious about it? She doesn’t seem self-conscious about anything. She seems like the kind of woman I always wanted to be—confident as hell and disdainful of those mere mortals who gave a damn about the way others perceive them.
And the way Jack looks at her...
I have a private Pinterest board where I save all her photos, capturing all of her many moods, her looks, her style. Every single thing I was able to find of the two of them, or her alone. From her pictures in high school, the vague gaze off to the side of the camera, to the one with the smudge of dirt on her chin, to the one from Stanford, with her in some electrical suit, a gadget with wires and lenses on the table in front of her. I have shots of her smiling shyly. Giving Jack coquettish glances. Staring frankly into the camera as if to say Yes? What do you want?
Their wedding photos—most from magazines, taken by drone paparazzi. From above, she looks so austere and elegant in her gown, but I can’t see her face, or the details. Just Jack’s arm around her waist.
Don’t get me wrong. Jack loves me. I don’t doubt his affection for a moment. He loves me in a way that is impossible to fake. He’s in love with me. He does look at me like he looked at her; I’m sure others can see it in our photos.
But does he touch me like he touched her?
When we make love, and he does the things he knows I like, things I didn’t know I liked until he taught them to me, I can’t help but wonder, did he teach them to her, too? Did she teach him?
The idea of her writhing in pleasure in his arms drives me mad.
It would stand to reason that I’d start painting her.
Even in abstract, she became a part of my work. Her hair, a swirl of cinnabar in the center of the canvas. Her eyes, the base of my sky. Any flash of creamy skin or strawberry hair or a cardinal in a branch reminds me of her.
But I can’t share this with anyone. Morgan is my darkest secret. My enduring obsession.
It would be so much easier if he’d just talk about her every once in a while. I mean, it’s natural, right? When someone was a part of your life, weird little things remind you of them, and it’s perfectly normal to remark on these things.
Oh, Morgan liked apples.
Oh, Morgan enjoyed foreign films.
Oh, Morgan was great at trivia.
Oh, Morgan struggled with split ends.
Anything, anything, to give me a better sense of why he loved her enough to marry her. Why he chose her to spend his life with.
I know my fiancé. He’s not a shallow man. He wouldn’t marry someone just because she was smart, or beautiful. There was something about her that he connected with on a visceral level, something that made him tingle with desire at the thought of her. Despite what Ana has just shared, I know it wasn’t just a business transaction—yes, I already knew that Compton bought Morgan’s burgeoning company soon after she and Jack met.
I know it was something more.
I know she had something more.
If she hadn’t died, would he still be with her?
He won’t speak of her. It’s as if she never existed. As if there aren’t a thousand photos of them together on my computer, hidden away, a humiliating treasure trove that I revisit night after night, day after day, adding to it whenever something I haven’t run across before captures my attention.
Was that what Ana was trying to do? As I follow her back to the Villa, I wonder if she was trying to set me at ease, trying to make me think the ghost of Morgan doesn’t live in the small, liminal space between Jackson and myself. Though I feel her there, as distinct as a plate of glass.
Does Ana know he holds that part of himself separate from me? From our life together?
Jack can never find out about this. It makes me look weak, and childish, to spend so much time on a dead woman. But the truth has kept me up at night for months. Despite Ana’s strange reassurances, I know the truth about my soon-to-be husband.
I am his second choice.
20
Women Become
The week after Claire met Jack, she made an appointment to start laser surgery to remove the ill-advised tattoos on her ankle, shoulders, and lower back—especially focused on the tramp stamp she’d gotten to defy her mother and cover her surgery scars. That tattoo wasn’t the best artwork money could buy anyway.
A month after they began dating, Claire took out all her extra piercings—her nose, her septum, her belly button, her left nipple—leaving just the two main earring holes and a double piercing on the left.
Three months in, she dyed her didn’t-pay-for-it ombré hair back to her normal dusky blond and had it properly highlighted, with sun-kissed bits bright around her face. The money piece, the hairdresser called it. How very appropriate. The woman also trimmed Claire’s shaggy Medusa mop into a sleek bob that she straightened to swing below her chin. The keratin treatment cost a fortune, but it was worth it, for the time it lasted.
Jack came home from an exceptionally long trip to Africa and she was changed. Altered. He was traveling a lot those first several months, so whenever he made it home, and she was a slightly fresher, sterilized version of her old self, he simply kissed her and told her she was beautiful no matter what and took her to bed.
He pretended not to mind her transformation, but I could tell he hated it. The way his jaw tightened when he saw her as a regular girl was a dead giveaway. I never thought he’d go for that kind of thing—the external evidence of internal pain and punishment—but with her, he lapped it up. She was his little artist girl, his artiste, his dark and broody girl, spending her days with the oils and adulations and her nights with his cock in her mouth. And here she was, his dirty little girl, scrubbing herself clean for him.
Claire’s mother, Trisha, enjoyed the changes. She came for tea, nodding approvingly at the state of the house’s renovation, love love loving the paint colors, the exposed beams, the gray kitchen cabinets, the Carrara marble single-sheet backsplash and the champagne brass finishes. She approved of the woman Claire was turning into, becoming such a grown-up. She approved of Jack. Approved of his family, especially. Who doesn’t want their kid marrying into wealth and privilege?