Sometimes he didn’t reply at all.
I’d shown up with lunch yesterday to surprise him and found him in the conference room with a dozen other people, already eating sandwiches. He’d smiled up at me almost professionally. Like I was a client.
He kissed me swiftly, promised to eat what I brought for dinner, and apologized for needing to go back to work. Then he led me out with a hand on my lower back, and I found myself in the lobby outside the elevators wondering what had just happened.
I kept telling myself it was temporary. He was slammed with a big case—he’d gotten behind the last few weeks.
But another part of me knew it wasn’t.
I felt like he was trying to distance himself from me. It was like I was watching his life after I’d died. Like he was working himself to the bone to fill the void, mourning me, and I wasn’t even gone yet.
I understood why he was struggling with my decision. He was pragmatic, a man of action. When presented with a problem, he researched it, looked at all the angles, and then argued his way out of it—and he wasn’t used to losing.
He wanted to exhaust every avenue. Take me to every specialist, read about every case study, and enroll me in every clinical trial. But none of it would save me. None of it. The sooner he understood that, the sooner we could get back to living our lives—because right now we weren’t.
I missed him. I missed him so much.
Something had fractured between us, and I didn’t know how to fix it because I couldn’t give him what he wanted. So I just spent the days wandering around his apartment like a ghost, hoping he’d come back to me.
Brent had thrown himself headfirst into BoobStick production, so he was busy. Dad got the job he interviewed for and was gone during the days now, which meant I couldn’t take Grace over there for lunch. Dinner was out of the question because I wanted to be here if Adrian came home at a decent hour. So I was alone. All the time.
Just me and Grace.
I was lying on the bed with her yesterday, her little hand wrapped around my finger. I wondered if she would remember me when I was gone, some tiny, internalized recollection of a brown-eyed woman who loved her once. I felt myself willing her to look at my face and keep it somewhere safe inside her. Then I realized that she’d have to put it the same place she’d put Adrian—because she’d be losing him too.
I’d always thought of Adrian as a sentinel. A lighthouse in a storm. Safe and grounding and orienting. Constant. But he was crumbling under the weight of this. And I had the sad realization that if Grace was ours and he lost me like Dad lost Mom, Adrian would have disappeared on Grace too, back into his work, to cope with my loss.
Dad, even with all his faults, had kept us all together after Mom’s death. We’d lost her, but we never lost each other.
It was funny to think that Dad was stronger in this way than Adrian. Dad.
Dad’s coping mechanism hadn’t been much healthier. But at least he was there.
I needed something to do, so I completed my end-of-life checklist. Today I went to the funeral home and made my arrangements.
I didn’t want an urn. I didn’t want to be part of the hoarded clutter in Dad’s house if he went back to it, but I fully rejected spending $7,000 on a casket and a burial plot when that money could go to ALS research.
So I bought a cremation and opted for the cardboard box for my remains. I didn’t trust that Dad would spread them someplace meaningful, even if I spelled out exactly where I wanted to be laid to rest. I’d probably end up in the pantry next to the cans of expired corned beef hash and fruit cocktail. My guess was that Adrian would be too upset to carry this out. So I entrusted this final task to Drake and told him to sprinkle my ashes in the ocean.
Instead of an end-of-life celebration, I put money down with my travel agent to book Dad, Annabel, Brent, Joel, and Grace on a round-the-world cruise. They could celebrate my life while celebrating the beauty that living has to offer.
And then I was done.
I’d planned it all. Set everything up. The only thing left was to make sure I had a plan for Grace.
Annabel still wouldn’t take my calls at the rehab center. But at least she was at rehab.
It was New Year’s Eve and I’d booked a room for Adrian and me at a bed-and-breakfast in Stillwater for the weekend. When I’d surprised him with it two days ago, he’d seemed excited—well, as excited as he could be at 1:15 in the morning after a nineteen-hour day at the office.
I had high hopes for this weekend.
Maybe he needed the space over the last week to process what had happened. Maybe by now the initial shock had worn off and he’d be ready to move forward. This weekend we’d relax, get some sleep. Get some time without the baby, reconnect.
I’d made us dinner reservations at Ladeyra, my favorite wine bar. My plan was for us to ring in the New Year naked with a bottle of Dom Pérignon I’d brought, in the king-size bed in our room.
I dropped off Grace with Dad and checked in at 4:00.
Adrian said he’d leave the office around 5:00 to meet me here, but he hadn’t texted me yet for the address. I hadn’t told him where we were going because I didn’t want him to google it. I wanted him to be surprised when he saw this place.
I’d booked us into the Agatha Christie suite at the Rivertown Inn in Stillwater. I’d stayed at bed-and-breakfasts all over the world, and none paralleled this one. Our room was decked out like an old-fashioned first-class train car inspired by the novel Murder on the Orient Express. There was a King Tut sarcophagus in the bathroom next to a huge hot tub for two. It had a private steam room and a rainfall shower. It was opulent and gorgeous and totally the escape we needed.
There was a quote on the wall that I especially liked.
I like living. I have sometimes been wildly, despairingly, acutely miserable, racked with sorrow, but through it all, I still know quite certainly, that just to be alive, is a grand thing.
Agatha Christie, 1890–1976
It seemed very fitting.
At 6:00 Adrian still hadn’t texted. He didn’t answer my call either. I went to the inn’s cocktail hour without him.
When I got back to our room at 6:45, he hadn’t called me back. But dinner wasn’t until 9:00, and I knew he had a jury trial starting on Monday and he was probably trying to wrap things up so he could relax this weekend. I decided to take a bath while I waited for him.
A half hour passed.
Then a full hour. I added more hot water to the tub.
When he finally called, I could hear the wind in his car.
“Hey, you on your way?” I asked, putting my toe into the dripping faucet. “You missed the cocktail hour. There’s a golf pro staying here with this girl. They’re married, but I don’t think to each other—”
“Vanessa, something’s come up.”
I dropped my foot away from the faucet. “What do you mean?”
“I’m on my way to La Crosse.”
My stomach plummeted.
“Wisconsin? Why?”
“Garcia got arrested. I have to go down there.”
I sat up in the tub. “Wh—what?”
“I’m sorry. I’m not going to make it tonight.”
The disappointment lingered for only a moment before it turned into hot, boiling anger. Something inside me snapped.