Amidst waiting for Malachi to make the arrangements for our divorce, and with numbness drowning me in the room I refuse to leave, I write.
My fingers fly over the keys, words pouring out of me; a story of a man and a woman who are united by fate and become the center of each other’s universe. Two people cocooned together in the safety of love that they fully believe will last forever. The man has wealth and power, and the woman is merely an average person, and the bridge between their differences is a love that can’t be broken.
At least… that’s what the woman believes.
But then, the woman wakes up one morning to find the man on the phone with someone, looking like a shell of the person he was only the night before. He’s learned of a devastating secret that causes everything he believed about his life to change, and he redirects his anger and devastation to the woman he would supposedly love forever and always, world without end.
He tells her to leave. He insists that she leave. He kicks her out of their cocoon of safety, and offers a meager token as a means for her to provide for herself, but she refuses it. She won’t take his petty offering to placate his guilt over doing what he knows is wrong on more levels than he can count. She complies with his wishes and leaves. She has nothing. She roams the streets of New York City with nothing but her coat and the change in her pocket while she vows to survive on her own and never think of him again.
Hate hardens her. Guilt causes him to lose himself in a bottle of scotch. Resolve causes her to pull herself up by her bootstraps and create a life in which she never has to depend on another person again. Remorse over the realization that he was wrong all those years ago causes his life to fall apart in spectacular fashion.
Fate reunites them years later, and he wants to reconcile. As if there is any way to fix the things he broke. As if there is a way to mend a glass dish that you’ve shattered against concrete by merely casting a long look at the dusty pile of broken pieces and saying, “Sorry.”
There is no fixing something like that.
Even if you manage to find every tiny shard and piece the dish back together, there will always be cracks. There will always be crevices where the glass was previously a single piece. The dish will always be weaker and more fragile than it was before. It will never be the same again.
The woman ultimately grants the man one night to speak candidly with her, and she speaks candidly with him, and they sleep together. He sleeps believing all is well again. She doesn’t sleep.
She leaves him again before morning, and he wakes up to an empty bed, a note, and a heart as broken as the one he left her with ten years earlier.
I MANAGE TO FINISH the novel in record time. Only a week after returning from New York, I am typing the words The End just as my phone rings.
Mamá.
I almost don’t answer. She’s likely chipper and calling for an update on how the baby is doing. The baby that died in my womb three weeks ago as a result of Malachi’s crazed rage over something I never did. Searing pain slices across my chest, but I answer anyway.
“Hi, Mamá,” I answer, speaking in Spanish. “How are y—”
“You are divorcing?” Her obvious disbelief pinches her tone with urgency. “My little daughter, what is wrong with you? What have you done?”
I grit my teeth and restrain the urge to snap at her. “I have not done anything, Mamá. I assume you heard this from Papá, who I assume heard it from Malachi, who I assume downplayed everything wrong that he did.”
“I have heard it from your father, but he gave me no details.” She draws in a breath and sighs. “He is very angry, Isla. Whatever is going on, you must try to work things out.”
“There is nothing to work out, Mamá,” I retort, my voice flat.
“But… but… what of the child you’re exp—”
“There is no child, Mamá,” I snap. “That is also Malachi’s fault. Perhaps Papá might have a shred of anger about that.”
She gasps. “What? How did—”
“Malachi has turned into an evil man, Mamá,” I say, spitting the words out as if they’re laced with poison. “He has physically hurt me and mentally tormented me. I lost the baby because of things he did to me, and then he blamed me for it. And do you know why he has done these things?”
She is merely silent.
“Because years ago, cruel people thought it would be funny to play a disgusting prank on him, and they convinced him that I betrayed him.” I shake my head and blink rapidly at the mental picture of the filthy photo of the violent act I didn’t even know I had been subjected to. “He believed the prank instead of me. That is why he disappeared years ago. Not because of anything I did. He was gone before my ordeal even began. In fact, Mamá…”
I pause as a hundred thousand little puzzle pieces start to fall together in my mind.
“Mamá, I believe him disappearing the way he did after this awful prank is what caused me to spiral out of control. I think I can’t remember any of it because my mind was so devastated that it simply shut down. Terrible things happened to me, Mamá. Things that were so terrible that it’s no wonder I ran away and did every awful thing I did back then. All those things that I can’t even remember because my brain likely can’t even process how awful all of it was.”
A long silence stretches over the line. On the screen of my laptop, the cursor blinks after the words The End.
“What kind of things, my little daughter?”
I fight the tremble of my chin despite nobody being around to see it. “I refuse to speak of it. You’ll simply have to believe me. Even with as much of a challenge as that must be with the severe disappointment I have always been to you and Papá.”
“My dear little Isla.” There’s a different pinch in her voice now; one that is distinctly emotional, and I do not want to hear my mother break down on top of everything else. “It isn’t like all that. You know we love you. The things that happened before caused us to respond in a way any loving parent would. We were devastated that you made such awful choices and let yourself become something we knew you weren’t. But if you think…” She sighs again. “I do not know what happened to you. And you will not tell me.” She’s silent for several beats. “And Malachi understands now that there was a misunderstanding between—”
“It wasn’t a misunderstanding,” I snap. “Someone lied to him about me, and he believed them, not me. He used that belief to justify every awful thing he’s done to me since we married.”
“And what does he say now that he knows the truth?”
I skim my gaze over the conclusion to the story of the star-crossed lovers. “He is attempting to make amends by ending this marriage because he knows I would rather chew my own hand off than be chained to him any longer.”
“Is he remorseful?”
I hesitate. “Yes.”
“Then forgive him, daughter. Try to work this out with him. Do not throw away your marriage. Remember how much you both always loved each other. If it really was just a misunderstanding, surely you can—”
“It isn’t just a misunderstanding, Mamá. It is everything he did to me because he misunderstood.”