Page 82 of A Billion Dollar Romance
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The next morning, I got up early, made coffee, sat down at the desk, and opened up my laptop. I stared at the first page of a coming-of-age novel I hadn’t touched in years. I closed my laptop.
I took my coffee–and my blanket–outside with me instead, onto the back porch, itself bigger than my apartment. The view was incredible: an unobstructed vista, mountains from edge to edge like a panoramic postcard. Had James sat here, perhaps with his own mug of coffee? His laptop, more like.He’dbeen able to be productive. I took a photo with my phone, but it wasn’t particularly good. I braved the cold for a little bit, a mug of coffee in hand to warm me, but eventually succumbed to the pull of the warm interior.
I made my way down the hallway, clumsily attempting to prevent the blanket from dragging on the spotlessly clean wood floors. I succeeded, but also managed to knock over a framed picture on a hall table. I stopped to right it.
This James was much younger even than I was, smiling into the camera beside an older man, their backs against the railing of a boat, the sun casting them both in golden tones. The two of them were dressed similarly in polo shirts and khaki shorts, although where his grandfather wore boat shoes, James himself was barefoot. When had this been taken, I wondered? Had James been in college even, or high school? His face was unlined and smooth, and though he showed the promise of the man he would become, he looked sodifferent.I looked at the pictures around this one: young James on the steps of the Met in a private school blazer, his tie rakishly loose around his unbuttoned uniform shirt collar. Young james in France, standing on a staircase overlooking the Eiffel Tower with a woman that had to be his grandmother, though she looked vastly different than what I would have expected, had I thought to expect anything at all: elegant, almost severe-looking, with none of the grandmotherly softness of popular imagination. Her clothes were sharp and tailored. Expensive. A colorful scarf flew around her neck as she smiled into the camera, lips closed.
I laughed.
I had to.
He’d told me, hadn’t he?
He’d told me it was about who you knew. Your connections. His grandfather hadstarted a publishing house, of course he’d gotten a book deal.
And still, I’d maintained the fantasy of James–no, ofProfessor Martin–toiling away in a one-room cabin, scratching out his novel like some kind of tortured artist. I looked around myself, at the elegantly cozy furnishings of the cabin with a wine cellar as big as my studio apartment, the family photos on the wall. The romance novels upstairs suddenly made sense–they had to have been his grandmother Vera’s, the woman in the pictures. I’d been imagining a rustic writing retreat, but this was his family’svacation home.
The magazine was right: Iwasnaïve. I’d imagined James into who I wanted him to be: my professor, the man who looked thoughtfully at me in class and read my work with a careful eye, and all the time, he’d been there as a punishment from his rich grandfather, who probably threatened to cut him out of the will.
He’d told me as much, or tried to. But I hadn’t wanted to hear it.
I realized I was fidgeting with the back of my engagement ring, my thumb smoothing over where it lay snug at the base of my ring finger. I hadn’t taken it off, telling myself it was too expensive to lose track of, even for a moment, and the safest place for it was on my hand. The diamond glittered, unchanged.
But James’s affection? How long would it be until he found someone else?
With me out of the city, cloistered here at the cabin, how long until he realized the run of good behavior hadn’t accomplished anything, and went back to his old ways?
My cheeks were damp: I put my fingers up to my eyes to find them wet, and wiped away tears. I wasn’t sure what had caused them.
Was it losing James?
Or was it just theideaof him that I was mourning, the professor of my daydreams, before I’d known who he really was? Or–
Was it the fantasy of writing that I’d lost? The fantasy that I would disappear into the woods and emerge with a work of art?
I took a deep, shuddering breath, forcing my lungs to expand.
I’d lost James. I’d lost my Professor Martin.
The cabin, the season of isolation, maybe it was a lie. A naïve delusion.
I let it out in a sigh.
But it was the only thing I had.
I opened my laptop again.
Two hours later, I had accomplished nothing but a dozen haphazard line edits, scattered throughout several documents, and I snapped my laptop shut with a frustrated sigh, rolling my head on my neck to work out the tension.
Tomorrow, I promised myself.Tomorrow.
CHAPTER40
James
She’d gone.
