THERE ARE SOME things in life you can fake, but for the most part, I truly believe that people eventually give away their private thoughts in their behavior whether they want to or not.
Right at this moment, I’m sure I’m giving off a genuinely confused air that I couldn’t hide if I wanted to. And Paul seems to be displaying a genuine desire to make amends and reconnect.
He seems so different from the man I lived alongside for four years. He’s focused. Self-aware. Thoughtful. The man I was married to would rarely have noticed I’d finished my coffee, let alone have thought to ask if I needed a refill.
But I just had his full attention at breakfast, and the force of it was powerful and enticing...and bewildering. We’re walking back toward the house and he’s talking about his work—but I asked him about it, and honestly? He sounds kind of bored, almost like he’d rather talk about my job again.
“...upgrade and the development team is trying to fix this macOS bug and we’re not—”
“Paul,” I interrupt him. He glances at me warily. I was always so frustrated about how much he worked, and I have a feeling he’s expecting me to leap down his throat now. “I’m getting the impression that you actually want a weekend off work.”
He runs his hand through his hair. He looks utterly weary right now. “Yeah. I guess I do.”
It takes a minute for me to recognize the feeling that surges inside me as hopefulness. I’ve never seen Paul look unexcited about his job before, and the possibilities of this unlikely occurrence are almost endless. If he wasn’t completely in love with his work, then maybe he could have really loved—
“Don’t get me wrong,” he says suddenly. “I still love what I do. Me and Marcus and Jess...and the team...we’re really just getting started. Jess is working toward us listing on the stock exchange, and if that happens the way we think it will, the sky is the limit. It’s just that this weekend was never meant to be about work.”
It’s impressive that he has finally established a “too much work, need a break” threshold for the first time, but maybe the great love of his life really is Brainway Technologies. And that’s okay, because it’s his life now. I offer him a weak smile.
“Tell me something about you I don’t already know,” he says suddenly.
“How could there be things about me you don’t know?” Is this a trap? This must be a trap. Why would he even ask this?
“How could there not be?” Paul says with a shrug. “We haven’t really spoken in months. I’m sure lots of things have happened in your life that I don’t know about. And anyway, were we ever the kind of couple to sit around talking about our deepest thoughts and feelings?”
“I guess not.”
“There’s got to be a lot of things I don’t know about you.”
We walk in silence for a few minutes as I think about this. I can give him surface-level answers. I could tell him about my new neighborhood, and Mr. Daskalakis with the food cart just up from my building who makes the best gyros in the city. Or I could tell him about that time I was on the subway heading out to Brooklyn to visit my brother, and a guy in my carriage had cut leg holes in a gym bag so his Great Dane could stand in it, unconvincingly skirting the subway’s rule of “no dogs unless they fit in a bag.” I could tell him about how his father’s friend Ira brings me a bouquet of fresh herbs from his balcony garden every single week to thank me for helping him get active again despite his crippling arthritis.
But I want to tell him something deeper...something private, and I even have some ideas about what that might be. I’m mainly resisting the impulse because I can’t tell if my urge to share with him is genuine, or because I want to see him fail to listen, as if that will somehow validate all of the awful things I’ve thought and said about him this year.
In the end, the desire to share wins out. There is something I’ve been thinking about lately, and I just haven’t quite found the right time to talk to my friends or my brother about it.
“I do feel a bit like I’m failing at life at the moment, and it’s not just our divorce that makes me feel that way.” OMG, am I really having this conversation with Paul, of all people? He looks at me in surprise, and I feel myself flush. “I mean, there’s this whole list of things I always thought I’d have done by now.”
“Such as?”
“Such as...well, a lot of things actually. I mean, I really thought I’d have at least traveled a bit by the time I turned thirty...and here I am, thirty-four years old and the only time I ever left the US was on our honeymoon.”
“We didn’t exactly explore Belize on that trip either,” Paul points out.
“We had a great time,” I say wryly. “But it hardly counts as travel when you barely leave your hotel room for eight days. We could have just holed up in the Plaza Hotel and had pretty much the same experience.”
“I’d like to say sorry about that, but that was one of the best weeks of my life so I don’t think I can sincerely apologize for it,” Paul laughs. “So, where would you go, if you were going to travel?”
“I don’t even know. I’m mildly curious about loads of places, but it’s the experience of traveling that I feel I missed. I always wanted to do something adventurous and dramatic, you know? But after high school, I went right to college. Then after college, I went straight to work and then once I had a job, I was just sucked into working life.”
“I hear what you’re saying,” Paul murmurs thoughtfully. “Adult life just kind of started for you, then bam! Suddenly you’re in your thirties. Right?”
“Right,” I say, but then bark a surprised laugh. “Wait—was that active listening I just saw, Paul Winton?”
He laughs sheepishly. “Maybe. Was it convincing?”
“It was entirely convincing.” And more than a little shocking. “How on earth did you learn about active listening?”
“Don’t change the subject,” he scolds. “Do you think you went right to work because you were trying to prove to your mom that going to college was the right decision? You were offered a scholarship to a ballet school after high school, weren’t you?”
“Yeah,” I confirm weakly. “I turned it down.”
“And Veronica disapproved, right?”
“That’s the understatement of the century. Mom was livid.”
Maybe I had some measure of raw talent for dance, but I lacked something equally important in that sphere—passion for the craft of it. You simply cannot commit to a professional career in ballet if performing fills you with dread and the thought of dozens of hours of practice each week makes you want to break your own ankle. By the time I turned eighteen, I’d endured fourteen years of ballet lessons at Mom’s urging, but I couldn’t continue to live my life pursuing her dreams.
“I never understood that,” Paul says thoughtfully. “I remember we talked about that when we were dating and I couldn’t quite figure out why you dancing mattered so much to your mom. I mean, Dad encouraged me to focus on math instead of coding, but I don’t think he really cared that I decided to forge my own path.”
“Mom only wanted two kids. She wanted a boy and a girl—a perfect pigeon pair.”
“So why have seven?” Paul asks me blankly.
“Dad wanted to stop after Zach.” I sigh. “But Mom wanted her princess, and I think she was determined to just keep on having babies until she had a girl. She wanted a pretty daughter to dress up in pink dresses, a girl she could take to the salon with her. And maybe most of all, she wanted a daughter who could achieve all of the ballet dreams Mom herself couldn’t achieve because her knee gave out when she was seventeen.”
“She was trying to live through you.”
“And she had no shame about that fact,” I mutter. “But that’s sometimes how it goes with dance moms. Unfulfilled and unresolved hopes and dreams make excellent fuel for pushy parents.”
The day I told her I wasn’t going to take the scholarship, Mom told me I’d broken her heart and then she wept for hours. But I expected a reaction like that—I knew before I even sat down with her that day that we’d probably never come back from my decision. I was used to disappointing Mom by then.
“I can’t imagine you were a kid who wanted to wear pink dresses and go to the salon,” Paul says, cautiously. His gaze drops down over my running clothes, then shoots back guiltily to my face. I’m in tights and a tank today, but not just because I’ve been running. I wear clothes like this pretty much all of the time because they feel the most natural and comfortable to me.
“No, I didn’t want to play makeup and wear fluffy dresses, I wanted to drag my crazy curls up into a ponytail, pull on some sweatpants and head out to climb trees with my brothers in the yard. Enduring several ballet classes a week for all of those years was my way of trying to appease her, but it couldn’t go on forever. I think refusing the scholarship was as much an act of rebellion against her as it was me trying to find my own path in life,” I admit, then joke, “This might shock you, but I can be pretty stubborn.”
Paul and I share a grin that’s only a little uncomfortable.
“You’re right. I guess as soon as I decided I’d go to college, I was focused on showing Mom I’d made the right decision. So even when my friends graduated and went off working in bars while they backpacked around Europe before they came back to look for internships, I didn’t dare follow them because I thought Mom would see that as an admission of failure. So I went right to work and made sure to call home every weekend to rave about how much I loved every second of my job.” I wrap my arms around my waist and look at my feet, suddenly and unexpectedly exposed. “That’s pretty stupid, now that I think about it.”
“You wanted her to be proud of you, Bel. That’s understandable. But it’s not too late for you to travel, right?”
“Of course it’s not. But I couldn’t just take off for a year like that anymore.”
“It doesn’t have to be a year at a time, does it? There are ways to cram adventure around a career. You know all too well what my work schedule is like, but I found time to go hiking with Jake a few months ago,” Paul says.
I give him a skeptical look. “Hiking?”
“It was Jake’s idea, obviously.” Paul grimaces. I laugh. “We met up in Kentucky and we hiked the Red River Gorge for two weeks. No phone, no laptop, no internet, no electricity.”
“No phone?”
“Well, Jake carries a satellite phone for emergencies with his patients.” Jake is an oncologist, working out of a clinic at Stanford, so that makes sense. “But I actually left my cell behind when I flew out.”
“That must have been quite a shock to your system.”
“The first night was. I couldn’t wind down, I just kept thinking about what was happening at the office and all of the work I didn’t get done before I left. But the second night I started to relax, and I guess I adjusted after that. When it was time to come home, I didn’t want to leave.” He pauses, then grins. “Do you remember when Marcus wanted us to go camping a few years back?”
“Yeah.” I laugh, too, even as I shake my head. “He thought Abby would be open to the idea if I went.”
“And the kicker was...?”
“No showers and no flushing toilets,” I finish. Paul was mildly interested at least at first, and I knew I could manage a few days in a tent, but I refused to entertain the idea once I learned there were no restrooms.
“Well, you were onto something with the shower thing,” he assures me. “After twelve days of just bathing in streams and hiking ten hours a day, it’s fair to say Jake and I were the least popular people on the bus on the way back to the hotel. But it was such a great experience and I want more of that. I love the idea of going off-grid now...maybe even training properly so I can do an endurance hike. Something like the Torres del Paine hikes in Chile, or maybe I’ll take a few months’ leave from the business and do the Appalachian Trail? I don’t know when, but at some point, I just want to take on a big challenge and disconnect from the world for a while. I wouldn’t take my cell, or even a camera. I’d just see things and hear things and taste things, you know?”
“I actually love the idea of experiencing a new place and being completely mindful while you do.”
“Exactly. Anyway, I’m only telling you that because if I learned anything from that experience, it’s that travel has this way of opening your eyes to things you didn’t even know you’d enjoy. I hope you do travel, Bel. But don’t convince yourself you have to do it in a big block or blow up your career. You could make short trips, and if you can get past the bathroom thing, I actually do think you’d like hiking.”
We share a smile, but mine fades rapidly as I realize that we have accidentally just discovered that we still do have things in common, even things we never knew about. This leaves me feeling surprisingly uncomfortable, and so I awkwardly change the subject.
“I have other things I wanted to do, too, besides travel. I have this secret bucket list no one knows about. It’s just silly things...like getting a cat. And learning how to knit. Taking a cooking class. And there are things I want to experience but have no control over. I’d like to win something, even just a dumb raffle would do. I’d love to see a flash mob.”
“A flash mob?” He looks at me blankly, and I blush.
“It looks like a random thing, but a big group of people get together and do an organized dance in a public place. You can watch them on YouTube.”
It occurs to me suddenly that each of our unspoken hopes and dreams says something about us. For Paul, this newfound love of hiking is probably rooted in the reality that he’s most comfortable alone. And while I grew to loathe dancing myself, I have always loved to watch it. A well-choreographed group of dancers is like a single organism, each individual dancer a cell working in perfect harmony with the troupe. I’m still fascinated by the way the human body can perform that unique magic, telling a story without a single word. I think that’s why the idea of a public performance with no agenda other than to bring joy to a random audience thrills me so much.
“A cat, huh?” Paul says suddenly.
“I know you’re allergic to cat hair. That’s why I never mentioned it.” I smile sadly.
“I don’t even remember telling you that.”
“Me either, but I know it, so I guess you did.”
“You were always so good at paying attention to the little things,” he murmurs, and the light flush on my cheeks intensifies.
“But slightly less good at fixing broken Wi-Fi,” I muse, deflecting the compliment with another joke. “Well, what’s something I don’t know about you?”
“I know memory lane didn’t work so well for us back at the café,” he says after a pause. “But there is something I’d like to tell you about, if you’ll allow me a brief reference to the past.”
“Well, we’ve been civil to one another for—” I make an exaggerated display of checking my watch “—almost an hour now, so we’re well overdue for an argument. Just make it a good one.”
We share a slightly awkward laugh, but when Paul sobers, he points to the laneway that leads to the beach in front of the vacation home. It’s a wordless question: we can walk back that way and it’s a more scenic trip over the private beach that fronts our whole street, but it takes longer because there are patches of rock we’ll need to climb across. I’m in no hurry to wind this conversation up or get back to the house, so I nod in silent agreement, and we start off down the path.
“Remember the night I asked you to marry me?” he asks.
I swallow. Hard. “Asked?” I say lightly.
“I know. It wasn’t really a question, was it? More a...suggestion.”
We’re living together anyway, so I think we should get married.
“No.” I pause. “It wasn’t really a question.”
“I threw up twice that night.”
I frown at him. He’s looking ahead along the beach, and I suspect he’s pretending not to notice my eyes on his face.
“You were sick that day?”
He laughs quietly. “Sick with nerves, maybe. I threw up before I asked you, and then after you said yes and you were calling your family to tell them, I threw up again. I think that second one was from relief, but when I told Jake that story, he told me ‘nausea due to relief isn’t recognized medical phenomena.’”
“That is not true,” I say, and I’m not sure why I sound so defensive. “You weren’t even nervous!”
Paul barks a laugh, then gives me a pointed look, and I realize he’s serious.
“But...” I begin.
“...but I seemed so calm?” he guesses.
I nod, still frowning.
“You told me once you’d dreamed of getting married in the summer. And it was already spring, so I thought if you did say yes, we could get married right away. Honestly, I just couldn’t wait another second. But we’d only been dating for eight months—hell, we’d only been living together for a few weeks. Things seemed great, but I knew it was early, and I had no idea if you would say yes or no, so I tried to play it cool. If you said no, I didn’t want you to know how disappointed I’d have been.”
“I can’t believe you ever thought I might say no,” I say blankly. “I mean, it was the worst proposal ever and I didn’t even care.”
“That’s the funny thing about life, isn’t it?” Paul stops to pick up a rock from the sand, then he skips it out into the water. “I was scared you’d say no and I’d make an idiot of myself by asking, so I put zero effort into it, which probably only increased the chances of you saying no. Sometimes, the very things we do to protect ourselves from failure are the same things which make failure more likely.”
“That’s insightful, Paul. I’m impressed.”
“I’ve had a lot of time to think this year,” he says as he resumes his path along the beach.
“That’s pretty obvious. But why did you tell me that?”
“I read a book about relationships a few months ago. The premise was basically that we understand a person by the parts of them we can see. So, most relationships aren’t actually between two people, but rather between two masks. But for authentic connection, you need to look behind the masks. The longer you think you’ve known someone, the harder that is to do, because your preconceived ideas about a person become a part of the mask you see.”
He shrugs. “I figured after everything you and I have been through already in the last few years, the only way we’re going to re-form a relationship is to change the way we see each other. I can’t fix what’s happened between us in the past, but I can ask you questions to redefine how I see you, and I can let you peek behind the mask to understand me. What better place to start than by showing you what was really going on for me at one of the most important moments of our shared history?”
His tone barely modulates as he talks, and he’s looking out toward the water again, his expression neutral. If someone listened only to his voice and not the words, they might assume he was talking about something exceedingly dry...economics or programming or politics. Paul’s speech often defaults to this same flat effect, but it is more than unusual for him to show such insight into something as abstract as forming genuine relationships.
“Profound,” I whisper, almost to myself. It’s almost like Paul has taken all of that astounding intellectual curiosity and focus, and applied it to learning how to connect with people.
“It’s not my material,” he assures me with a quiet smile. “Don’t give me the credit. I can lend you the book if you like, I’ve still got it at home.”
“I wasn’t talking about the analogy. I was talking about the way you applied it to our situation.”
“Anyway, enough of all that,” Paul says, for the first time looking almost self-conscious. “It’s only a matter of time before we stop having deep and meaningful moments and start having furious ones if we don’t change the subject. How are your brothers?”
I laugh weakly. “It’s weird with all of them now, except Noah.”
Paul climbs over a section of rock, then extends his hand to me and helps me do the same. When we’re on the gritty sand again, I say quietly, “They worry about me, but when they try to express that, they end up smothering me.”
Five of my brothers are scattered in other cities all over the country, so the only one I regularly see in person is the youngest of my brothers, Noah. He lives in Brooklyn with his partner Emma, and the three of us catch up for a meal every few weeks. But since I left Paul, I feel like the rest of my family has kicked into some overdriven support mode.
“Until last year, I hardly ever spoke to them. Remember? Maybe I’d text each brother every now and again or occasionally have a video chat with them to see their various kids, but now, my phone runs hot with some contact from my family every day,” I say. “Even Todd, who had never sent me an email in his life before this year, has started regularly emailing me links to self-help sites and articles like ‘Should you reconcile with an ex?’ and ‘Ten ways to get over a breakup’ or ‘Navigating online dating in your thirties.’”
“Can you forward some of those to me? They sound like really helpful articles,” Paul says dryly.
I chuckle. “I mean, what is Todd even doing on those sites? Is he sitting around between earthmoving jobs reading Cosmopolitan? And Zach calls me every Tuesday night at 6:00 p.m., so I know he’s set a reminder in his phone, and I don’t know why he bothers because I teach Tuesday nights at six so he only ever gets my voice mail. Will has visited New York ‘for business’ six times this year, and each time he stays with me in my teeny tiny loft and we make awkward small talk until he packs his bag and goes home again. Jane recently told me she’s getting annoyed with him for leaving her alone with the kids so often. She’s convinced he comes for meetings he could have easily done via video conference because he just wants an excuse to check in on me.”
“And let me guess, Chad is full of helpful advice?”
“At Christmas, he pulled me aside so he could mansplain nutrition and health to me because apparently I’m too skinny now.”
“I’m guessing that went down well.”
“He hasn’t eaten a vegetable in two decades and the farthest he’s walked since he left college is to his car, so no, it didn’t go down well,” I mutter.
“I’m guessing Owen and Janine would be offering you lots of helpful tips, too.”
I laugh softly. “Oh yeah. He got a job at a new church, did you hear?”
“No, I haven’t kept abreast of Parker family gossip.” Paul winces.
“Owen’s pastoring in Iowa now. He calls me every few weeks, even though the calls are brief and consist mostly of him booming questions at me, and he doesn’t really give me the time to answer before he leaps off the phone. Whenever I talk to Janine, she makes judgy comments about loyalty and ‘fixing what’s broken instead of throwing it away.’”
“Ouch.”
“Only Noah and Emma actually listen to me. I guess I’m just lucky that the easiest of all of my brothers happens to be the one who lives closest to me.”
“And your parents?” Paul asks.
“Dad keeps trying to convince me to move back to Chicago...”
“Will you?”
“Definitely not.” I shudder. “Not while Mom lives there.”
Paul laughs.
“Instead of property, maybe we should have divvied up family in the divorce,” I say. “I’d happily swap a few of my brothers for Jake.”
“Your family is a lot,” Paul says, with surprising diplomacy.
“I know they all mean well. But Mom in particular just does not understand why I left—” I trail off, realizing that once again, I’ve flipped the conversation right back to the divorce, and Paul and I sigh simultaneously.
“It’s hard to avoid, isn’t it?” he remarks.
“It takes real effort,” I agree.
“Worth it, though, don’t you think?”
I glance at him. It’s still early, and the sunlight is still golden, illuminating his face against the backdrop of the sea. There are new lines in his face this year, but they only add a depth of maturity. When he turns to smile at me suddenly, I forcibly extinguish the butterflies in my stomach and make myself return a friendly smile.
“You know what, Paul?” I say faintly. “It really is.”