Page 79 of Happy After All

I try to imagine him whispering words of love to a woman, saying vows to her.

Then cheating on her.

This man who exhibited so much heroism the night of the fire. Just a bog-standard cheating husband. It’s so not how I think of him that I feel like someone has taken a massive rock and thrown a hole through the fabric of my reality.

I feel torn.

It makes my bruised chest feel raw. No longer an old wound, but something new.

I look at his sculpted face, his green eyes. There is a woman who loves that face. There is a woman who has experienced those green eyes lighting up when they look at her.

My guilt is paralyzing for a moment. Then I feel horrendously jealous. Horrendously, horribly jealous.

“You’re . . . you’re . . .”

“My wife is dead.”

The words are flat. Final.

Like death, I guess.

He had a wife. She loved him. He loved her. She’s dead.

These are the new things about him that I know, and I hate them. I saw it on his face at the diner. This deep loss. The kind that leaves you blank, forces you to start over, but I didn’t imagine a loss like this.

I feel hollow. I already know there’s nothing insightful or deep to say to something like this. I already know that the void grief leaves is so vast and empty there are no incantations you can fling down into the pit that will begin to fill it.

“I’m sorry,” I say, because there is nothing good enough, so I might as well say that.

There were so many times I wished people would say something that simple, that easy to me.

That instead of trying to make me feel better they could just saysorry.

That instead of telling me I could try again, that there was probably a reason it had happened, they would have just said sorry.

Because they don’t have to be sorry, and it doesn’t fix anything. But neither do platitudes.

Neither does silence.

When your own pain makes other people so uncomfortable they can’t even look at you, it’s unbearable. And I don’t want to do that to him.

He nods. He doesn’t say it’sokay.

It isn’t okay. Of course it’s not.

He’s grieving. That’s why he’s like a wall of bricks sometimes, and why he’s emotional and raw at others.

“When?” I ask, the word a whisper.

He says nothing again. Like he’s helpless to find words.

I’m devastated to see how sharp it is still.

He is better than he was three years ago. I’ve seen it.

I also know that grief goes in waves. That sometimes the tide rolls out and you can see all these beautiful things left behind. Sea glass and seashells on the seashore. That sometimes the waves come back in hard and leave you breathless, drowning.

That sometimes you’re blindsided by the realization of just how far away you are from the life you were supposed to have.

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