Page 7 of I'm Not Done with You Yet

I’m not your reader, Thalia. I’m me. Jane. Your Jane.

I go back to the home page and scroll down, and aha! There’s a list of social media icons. I click on Instagram, because I need to see her first and foremost. So badly that my mouth is actually watering. As though I haven’t eaten in years and my body knows it’s about to be nourished.

This account is set to private. To follow, please send a follow request.

NO. WHAT?

Why even bother having an Insta account if you’re just going to set it to private?

The world is painted red for a moment. I’m gritting my teeth so hard that I hear the clack in my ears. I force my jaw to unclench. Take a deep inhale. Exhale. Another inhale.It’s okay, Jane. It’s fine.

Her profile picture is the same as the one on her About page. And she has—wow, she has over fifty thousand followers. Practically an influencer. I swallow, my cursor hovering over the Follow button.

But then I think of my Instagram page. I see it through her eyes. Fifty-six followers. Six posts, all of them mundane, all of them half-assed. Limp posts about my books at the behest of my publisher, who can’t be bothered to market the books themselves and gaslit me into doing my own promotion. My profile picture a painfully awkward shot that had taken Ted four seconds to take on my secondhand Oppo phone. He’d offered to take more, but he’d also said it in a faux generous way:I’m slammed with projects, babe, but I could pull an all-nighter if you want me to spend more time on your author photos?

Like I could accept after he put it that way. Not sure why taking ten minutes to properly photograph me meant that he’d then have to pull an all-nighter, but if I asked him that, he’d give that sigh. Ted has The Sigh mastered. It somehow conveys every emotion a sigh has ever managed to convey—disappointment (I expected you to understand, Jane), exhaustion (not this again, Jane), and resignation (okay, Jane, you win. AGAIN. Because this is my life, isn’t it? Yes dear, no dear, I’ll take the trash out, dear). The Sigh means that he’s won, because he’s about to be magnanimous to placate his nagging shrew of a wife. So of course I say,No, it’s okay, this will do.

I could have taken photos of myself, I suppose. But just the idea of it makes my skin crawl. Even the term for it, “selfie,”sounds unbearable, a stain on my generation that we’ll never be able to wash off. So there’s my sad Instagram page. Might as well be a giant stamp on my forehead that says: FAILURE.

I close the Instagram tab and go back to the list of social media pages that Thalia’s on. Twitter. She’s got about fifteen thousand followers on it (I have one hundred), but her Twitter bio says: I’m not active on here. This is just for book updates. Instagram is my jam! Follow me on there @ThaliaAshcroft.

A small laugh escapes me. Follow her on Instagram. Well, some of us are trying, Thalia.

I close Twitter and open the third and last social media page: Facebook. The same profile photo appears. I scroll down and my heart stops, because this is it. A post about SusPens Con (ha, very cunning), a convention for suspense/thriller authors in New York City that takes place six days from now. And Thalia’s going to attend. The post says: “Can’t wait to see you there!”

I can’t wait to see you there either.

I approach this carefully. Patiently. I make a cup of Ted’s favorite hot drink—chai. He’s white, not Indian, but he loves loving things from other cultures because it’s so very progressive, so very NorCal. Here I am, my whole life spent trying to fit into white American culture, and all of a sudden, to be not-white, to be a person of color, is trendy. What a name, “Person of Color”—like whiteness is a blank canvas that you start with, and along the way, some of us are splashed and come out stained. But now, being stained is cool, so men like Ted are scrambling to show how worldly they are. The same people who, as kids, told me my lunches were “weird” and “stinky” now lecture me on the health benefits of tempeh and matcha.

Ted’s turned his nose up at things that he thinks are too basic—the pumpkin spice lattes that I like, the American cheese I used to buy (now we buy feta and camembert and queso, which he pronounces “koo-ay-sow”), the Red Delicious apples I like for their mealy texture and the way that I can masticate them with a forceful tongue (apples are too American for Ted, though he’ll settle for Fujis if we must). I watch from the sidelines and wonder if maybe part of the reason he was so attracted to me in the first place is because of my not-quite-whiteness. I’m different enough to be exotic, but not so different that it scares him. Of course, if I were to even broach the edges of the subject, Ted would be horrified.You really think I would marry someone just because they’re—ugh—exotic?He can’t even say the word without choking on it. One time, I bought a bag of “exotic mixed nuts” from Costco, and Ted snorted and said, “Exotic? I thought we’d done away with that word.”It’s a fucking bag of nuts, Ted, I wanted to say, but I didn’t, because then he’d tell me I don’t get it, because I’m “white-passing,” therefore I don’t understand the struggles of real POC. He loves this term, “white-passing.” Often uses it to remind me I’m just as white as he is, and thus am just as unequipped to tackle the gnarly, tangled subject of race as he is.

But this isn’t the time to ruminate. I must focus. Eyes on the prize. I pour the tea, its fragrance spicy with cloves and cardamom, into Ted’s favorite mug and put a Trader Joe’s dunker on a side plate. As a last-minute addition, I sprinkle a pinch of cinnamon on top of the chai.

I carry the offerings to his study, pausing after I knock for him to say, “Yeah?” I go inside and have to swallow my anger again, because Ted’s office is pristine. Bright and airy, not asingle sheet of paper cluttering the space. Everything slotted neatly into its assigned place.

So Ted, the guy who has never lifted a finger to help me clean the rest of the house because he’s always claimed he doesn’t mind clutter, evidently DOES mind clutter, and not only that, but he knows how to fucking clean. He just doesn’t do it because why bother when you’ve got your wife, basically an unpaid live-in maid?

But never mind that, I remind myself. That’s minor stuff. Don’t focus on it. We’ve got bigger things on our minds, don’t we? So I plaster a smile on my face—not too big or he’ll get suspicious.

He barely looks up from his big computer screen (a splurge he had deemed necessary for analyzing numbers, though honestly I think it’s more to do with Fortnite). “I’m kind of busy—” Then he sees the chai and the side plate with the stupidly huge dunker on it and his eyebrows lift a little. “Wow, this is a nice surprise.”

I suppose it is a nice surprise. I don’t tend to come in here with tea and a snack. A small coil of guilt tightens in my chest, which makes me resentful. Did he say this is a “surprise” to drive home the fact that I don’t often do things like this? To highlight what a negligent wife I am? No, I’m being too sensitive. Or am I?

When did every tiny thing between us turn into a barb? I hate to admit it, but it’s probably my fault. In the early days, after the wreck that was Oxford, I’d contorted myself to fit the image of a normal, happy person because I needed to fill that void so badly. And when I’d met Ted, I’d fooled him. I kept up the charade for about a year after we got married. Then I got lazy. Let the mask slip a few too many times, and slowly, wechanged from partners into adversaries. I wonder if he knows what I really am, and he’s pushing so he can expose me.

“Thanks,” he says, looking genuinely pleased as he slurps his tea. “What’s the occasion?”

I shrug. “Just thought it would be nice.”

“Well, it is.” He looks at me quizzically before replacing the look with a smile. “This job’s turning out to be a lot more complicated than I expected.” He leans back with a sigh (not a sigh meant for me, so it’s not The Sigh) and dunks the biscotti in before chewing it noisily. “How’s your day going?”

I make myself nod. “It’s okay. I was just looking up book events, and there’s a book con that I think could be good for my career.”

Ted’s eyes flick toward mine, and my hackles rise. Oh shit. I wasn’t careful or casual enough. He knows I’m here for something. My defenses clap into place, ready for his attack. “A book con?” he says.

He knows what a “book con” is. Bastard.

“You know, a book convention? Everyone in the industry will go—publishers, authors, agents, booksellers, librarians, reviewers... It’s a great opportunity to network with other industry people.” Good job, me. That’s a great way of describing it—a smart business move.

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