Page 70 of The Hundred Loves of Juliet
“Merrick, you do realize that California law doesn’t require both parties to agree to divorce, right? I filed the papers. Our marriage will be over whether you acquiesce or not. How did you find me anyway?”
“Credit card bills,” he says. “You changed the email address they’d be sent to, but that doesn’t mean I can’t still log in to the credit card website to see what you’ve been buying. Once I realized that, it wasn’t hard to figure out where you’d gone.”
“You had no right to pry like that.”
“Come home, Hel,” Merrick says, suddenly softer, as if he can still sweet-talk me into doing what he wants. “You and I are great partners.”
“Are we?”
“Of course we are. Our life together is seamless. We work and live together but don’t get in each other’s way, our house is set up exactly the way we both like it, and—”
“A relationship should be more than two people being really good roommates but living separate lives, Merrick. You only think everything’s great because you do whatever you want, and I never challenged you about it. But I’m sick of it. I don’t want to be nice and quiet and ‘seamless’ anymore. I don’t want to be a sideshow to your life, I don’t want a career that’s going nowhere, and I don’t want to pretend that you’re not fucking your interns.”
“Helene, I told you that’s not what happened. And you have no proof.”
“Oh, so walking into your office and seeing Chrissy on her knees in front of you isn’t enough proof?”
Despite the composure of his tone, Merrick’s face is purple. But he takes several deep breaths, then deploys one of his trademark tactics: pivoting the conversation so he doesn’t have to address the topic of his own mistakes. Because Merrick hates making mistakes, even if the mistake was just getting caught.
“Look, Helene,” he says with a false veneer of reasonableness. “You’ve had time to blow off steam, and I’ve been patient. But this has gone on long enough, and it’s time for you to come home. I canceled the rest of your rental on this cottage and packed your things. Our flight leaves for LAX tonight.”
“You did what?” I shout.
The volume is alarming enough that Sebastien jumps out of his truck. I turn to look at him and shake my head. I can handle this.
Sebastien stays back, but he doesn’t get back into the truck.
Merrick keeps talking as if he were simply dealing with a logistical matter at the newspaper. “I temporarily shut off your access to our joint bank account and credit cards, too, since it’s obvious you can’t be trusted to think rationally right now. Oh, and I canceled your plane tickets to Europe. I tried to call Katy to give her a heads-up, because I know she’d lined up childcare for Trevor, but she didn’t answer her phone.”
“You are a piece of work, Merrick.” I want to rip his head off. Literally tear it off, like in one of those old arcade games like Mortal Kombat where the winner stands victorious with the loser’s skull and spine dangling from their fist. Where does Merrick get offacting like I’m an irresponsible child, and he’s only doing what’s best for me? And then to make it seem like he wasextramagnanimous for giving Katy “a heads-up”?
At the same time, I curse myself for not withdrawing half the contents of the joint bank account and opening up my own. It seems obvious now that I should have, but when your life is crumbling faster than you can catch the pieces, you don’t think about small details you’ve always taken for granted, like the money that’s rightfully yours being available to you. And then I was out of state, with no access to our regional California bank other than ATM machines.
I curse myself for not being smarter, for rushing out of the house without a fat envelope of cash, for underestimating the wrath of my ex-husband.
But then I recognize that I’m doing the Old Helene thing again, where I blame myself for the shitstorm that Merrick’s caused.
“I have a right to that money, Merrick. I own 50 percent of it.”
“I’m sorry it had to come to this, but you’ve been gone for several weeks. I’ve tried to approach this civilly but you don’t answer my calls. Therefore, the only way I can get through to you is by cutting off the funding to your Alaskan revenge vacation.”
“This isnota revenge vacation.”
Merrick glances at Sebastien, who’s moved from the street to the sidewalk.
“Can we go inside to discuss this?” Merrick asks.
“I think the porch is the perfect place to discuss this,” I say. “It’s unremorsefully frigid, like your heart.”
Merrick pretends he doesn’t hear that last part and sits down on the creaky rocking chair. I wonder how long he’d been here before I arrived; obviously long enough that he’d cleaned the snow off the chair. He rubs his temples. “Hel…I didn’t want to do any of this, but you left me no choice. Do you know how bad it looks that my wife ran off?”
“I’m not a damn puppy you tied too loosely to a pole.”
He exhales in that “why do you have to be so emotional” way. “You know what I mean. I graduated top in our class at Northwestern.” (He conveniently forgets that I graduated number two,right behind him.) “I’m the youngest ever bureau chief forThe Wall Street Journal.I’m going places. I need my wife beside me.”
I roll my eyes. What he means is he needs his wife beside him for photo ops and articles about how amazing he is. He wants me for optics. Not for who I actually am.
“Well maybe you should have thought of that before you cheated on me,” I say. “Beforeeverytime you cheated.”
