Page 78 of The Heartbreak Hotel
All of it hits me at the exact same time, disparate pieces ofinformation clustering up at the front of my skull to jockey for my attention:
The headline:Estes Home with Heartbreaking History Becomes a Haven for the Brokenhearted.
The lede:For the last few months, the Comeback Inn—a bed-and-breakfast in Estes Park’s Ponderosa Ranch neighborhood—has welcomed heartbroken out-of-staters and Coloradans alike into its warm embrace. It’s a heartwarming turn of events for a home with a painful past.
The photograph: My house from the sidewalk. A head-on shot of the front porch, the wide wooden door. Unfamiliar flowerpots lining the steps. A family of three clustered at the top: Henry, a small girl on his lap. His arm around a woman.
The woman: Joss.
My gardener, my friend. The person who sat in my kitchen just a couple days ago, drinking my tea.
And, apparently, Henry’s ex-wife.
Thirty-One
The photograph is sweet poison.I’m frozen in the entryway, clutching it two-handed. Henry’s hair is so dark, no silver at his temples, shorter than I’ve ever seen it. His smile is broad and open-mouthed, like he’s coming down from a laugh. One hand holds Molly against him, fingers splayed over her belly, her legs tucked over his own. She’s tiny: smaller than Quinn, in a velvet dress and ruffly socks. I imagine Henry putting them on her and it traps the breath in my throat.
“It’s a lovely profile,” Pauline says. She bends over to unzip her boots. “Some of your past guests are even quoted! They just rave about you.”
But her words meet me like water, beading up and evaporating. I can hardly hear her over the ringing in my ears. Over the wail of details pelting me, relentless, one after another after another.
Henry’s fingers bracketed around Joss’s shoulder. The angle of her head, tipped toward him. The palm of her hand on his knee. I can feel it in my own hand, like a burn: the memory oftouching him. Joss is smiling straight into the camera and it’s like she’s looking directly at me.You idiot, I hear. From Joss or from Goldie or from myself, I’m not sure.You absolute fool.
“Is everything all right?” Pauline asks. Distantly, I’m aware of Nan coming down the stairs. “You look a bit pale.”
“Everything’s fine,” I say, in a voice that sounds nothing like my own. It’s breathless and wavering. “Let me show you to your room.”
Nan takes the paper from my hands without a word, scanning it in the entryway while I bring Pauline’s bags up the stairs. While I show her the activities card. While I point out her bathroom, where just a couple months ago Henry was spread flat on his back to fix the shower. While I move on autopilot, the truth spreading through me like a virus.Henry and Joss. Henry and Joss, here, in your house. Henry and Joss in love, Henry and Joss with a child, Henry and Joss fighting in the garden. Henry and Joss with an entire life you could never understand.
“The gardener,” Nan says, when I come back down the stairs. She points to Joss’s face before looking up at mine. “She and Henry were married?”
I nod, and Nan’s eyes cloud with understanding. “You didn’t know,” she says.
“I need to—” I don’t know where the sentence is going when I start it.Crawl into a hole, maybe. I reach for my phone, my car keys. Think of Joss sitting in my living room this fall, talking about her heartbreak. Of Henry, right there, walking in on it. “If Pauline needs anything, can you help her? I’m sorry. I’ll be back.”
“Of course,” Nan says. Her hand rests on my forearm for just a brief moment, grounding me. “We’ll be here.”
“Thank you.” I toe on my sneakers and pull open the frontdoor. I trip on my way to the car—my eyes glued to my phone instead of the ground. Snow fills one of my shoes, soaking my sock through to the skin.
I text Mei first:Joss is Henry’s ex-wife.Then Henry himself:There’s an article about your family in the paper. You could have told me about Joss.When I drop behind the wheel I have no idea where I’m planning to go; I just know I need to be away from the house. Away from the front steps where Joss and Henry sat with their daughter. Away from that patch of wallpaper in the Lupine Room.
Mei calls me at the exact same time Henry’s text comes through:Where are you?I send her to voicemail and turn the car on. It’s frigid today—the first week of December. My breath condenses like smoke, obscures the house through my windshield.
I put the car in reverse and back out of the driveway, churning up frozen gravel. Where am I? WhereamI? I start driving toward the lake, directionless, letting the green lights determine my path. I shouldn’t be driving, probably—my chest is shaking, breaths coming rickety and forced. The road is slick with patches of ice, everyone taking it slow and careful.
The betrayal feels bottomless. All the times Joss could have told me. All the times Henry should have. I feel like the stupidest woman to ever set foot on earth. I hate both of them for making a fool of me.
I’m at a red light near the turnoff for Rocky Mountain National Park when someone honks at me, pointed and prolonged. It jolts me into the present: I clutch the wheel and look up at the rearview mirror, where Henry’s black SUV looms immediately behind my bumper. There’s snow clustered at the bottom of hiswindshield. He points left, saying something that I can’t hear. I want to drive away and never show him my face again; I want to crawl through his window and cling to him like a koala bear; I want to throttle him for keeping something like this from me.
The light turns green, and when I don’t move, the car behind Henry honks at us both. Henry waves left again, more dramatically this time. I clench the steering wheel and flip on my signal.
I wind through a residential neighborhood, Henry right behind me. I think about driving home, or to his place, or to the highway. I wonder how long he’d follow me, wonder what he could possibly have to say when I finally run out of gas. But after we’ve looped through the neighborhood twice and I still haven’t figured out what I want to do, Henry lays on his horn again. I watch him reach for his phone, his car slowing, and then my phone lights up in the cup holder:Pull over.
The neighborhood opens up to undeveloped land, fields of winter-crisp reeds cut by a trickling ravine that winds all the way to Lake Estes. It’s frozen today: a floe of ice through the grass. I pull onto the shoulder and put my car in park. The field is ringed in mountains, Longs Peak snowy and commanding in the distance. Before I’ve even had a chance to take a deep breath, Henry’s body fills my window.
“Are you stalking me?” I demand, looking up at him through the glass. It sounds bratty and unhinged, which is exactly how I feel.
“I was driving to the house and I saw your car,” Henry says. He tries to open my door, but it’s locked. “Can you open this, please?”
