Page 35 of Dear Ripley

I held my chin up. “I don’t even know what you’re talking about.”

Her head fell backwards in frustration. “Right. Because you’re always feeling fine when we’ve just run into Alicia in the grocery store, Harlow pressed you about that letter—that you’ve still not opened, by the way, and I’m sure is burning a hole in your life—and you’re ordering ricotta ravioli.”

For one, wild moment, it felt as though my heart stopped. It wasn’t that I hadn’t expected her to bring it up. I’d been expecting it when I’d told her what I was ordering, but hearing the words made it somehow real and loaded.

“You don’t live here,” I said in a thinly veiled attempt at avoiding the subject, “you have no idea how often I order ravioli. Maybe it’s my Sunday go-to.”

She stared at me. “It’s not Sunday.”

Oh. Right. Well… that was awkward.

“I know that.” My lie was transparent, but I carried on regardless. “I’m just saying, maybe it’s something I do every week. On a Sunday, for instance.”

She laughed. “If you did this every week, I’d one hundred percent already know about it. Nice try, though. You’re working very hard to act like you’re entirely unbothered by Alicia being here, writing you letters, and running into her in the store.”

I thought about arguing, but what would be the point? We both knew I wasn’t handling the Alicia situation particularly well. We probably both knew that I’d never really gotten over her, or what happened between us—I’d just gotten really good at pretending and trying not to think about it. And, the fact was, if you tried to convince yourself you were fine with something for long enough, it just became a habit. Maybe you weren’t actually okay with it, but you practiced seeming like you were for so long, you started to believe the lie.

Our food wouldn’t take too long and I wanted to be done with this conversation by the time it arrived, so I could enjoy it in peace.

I huffed. “Fine. Her being here is hard and weird. Of course it is. It’s been eight years and we haven’t spoken to each other once. We haven’t seen each other once, even in passing. But now, she’s here. She’s in town. She’s in my store. She’s in the next aisle when I go shopping. How am I supposed to… I don’t know,feelabout that? About suddenly seeing so much of her when we weren’t even…”

I trailed off, unwilling to finish the thought out loud. In my head, it filled the entire space, every bit of thought I had, but, out loud, I didn’t want to deal with it.

Back when Alicia and I had been going through our divorce, Morgan had sat with me frequently. She’d been my rock, my best friend. She’d made me food and checked in. She ensured I didn’t spend too much time alone. She sat with me, pretending not to notice how hard I was sobbing as we watched something on TV and I tried not to miss Alicia, tried not to feel like a failure who was filled with grief and loss.

And, once—only once—she’d asked me when I’d fallen out of love with Alicia.

I’d looked at her through swimming eyes, a sharp pain cracking my heart in two, and whispered, “I haven’t.”

She’d looked at me, debating whether to ask me to elaborate. I’d simply shook my head and told her, “We’re not breaking up because we fell out of love. We’re breaking up because we’re more like roommates these days.”

I’d wondered when I’d said it—and when we’d sat in court, waiting for our hearing—why we’d let things get like that. We’d changed as people, sure. But we’d met young, we’d been changing the entire time we’d known each other. We usually changed together.

We still cared for each other. We’d often eat dinner at the same time. We’d watch shows and movies together. But we’d stopped really trying. A wall had gone up between us that we couldn’t seem to cross.

Our friendship circles drifted further and further apart. We went to more and more events alone. We talked in ways that seemed deep, but that lacked any real connection. We’d become ships passing in the night, two entirely different paths ahead of us, and, the longer we didn’t admit it, the more the losses built up pain and resentment. And the harder it was to overcome those.

It was easy to want it back when the pain of breaking up hit, but we’d had the time and the chances to fix it, and we hadn’t. We’d seen the problems and walked around them. Put them in neat little boxes we’d never look inside.

And the damage was done.

We still loved each other—and nothing drove that home harder than getting divorced—but we weren’t equipped to handle all the ways we’d let our relationship get away from us. We didn’t know how.

In many ways, we were still kids. Divorce made you feel ancient sometimes—this dark, scary, grief-filled experience that was unlike anything else I’d gone through. And other times, it helped you feel lighter, free, renewed—all of the struggles that had been weighing you down and terrifying you were gone, and there was freedom in that. But there was loss too.

So perhaps, in my mind, I could admit that I still loved Alicia, and that it was never going away, but I didn’t need to say that out loud. Morgan knew how I’d felt back then. She knew how I felt now, I had no doubt, but it didn’t need saying. It wasn’t really real now. The person I loved was eight years ago. I knew nothing of Alicia now. I wasn’t in love with the current version of her, just some rose-tinted, nostalgia-filled version of who she had been when she’d been my world. And that wasn’t fair to her. To either of us. I couldn’t weigh the world down by proclaiming still to love her if I didn’t even know her.

But that didn’t mean the emotions were easy to handle. I’d found the ones that hurt the most were the ones that made no sense at all.

Morgan reached over to squeeze my hand, and I knew she understood almost every thought I’d just had. Best friends were like that. And I was happy to buy her all the focaccia and tiramisu she wanted to keep her around.

“Are you thinking about opening the letter?” she asked, almost at the exact moment that it popped into my head.

I shrugged. “I wish I knew. I want to, of course, but she didn’t write it for me. She wrote it assuming that I’d never see it. What she’d say in that situation is very different. And, if she wanted to say things to me, she’d write a letter she planned on sending.”

Morgan chewed her lip, thinking it through. She didn’t need to say it for me to know she wanted me to open the letter. She wanted to know what was inside of it, to know what Alicia’s reaction to me sending her a yellow carnation was.

I couldn’t blame her. I wanted to know, too. Though, of course, I was the one who sent it, so perhaps that made more sense. Morgan was just in it for the drama.

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