Page 89 of On the Line

Her laugh comes out almost like a snort, and it’s adorable. I wish she wasn’t so likable.

“So, we were friends for like a year and a half—part of a larger ski group that met up periodically at different mountains, usually when there was some sort of an event because several of us worked for companies that have partnerships with these resorts. I never thought of him as more than a friend,” she says, “but then he started opening up, talking to me more, feeding me what were apparently a bunch of lies about how bad your marriage was, how difficult the decision was to get divorced, and how hard it was on him to not see the girls every day. I didn’t realize, at the time, how he was conditioning me to feel special, feel like I was the only one who understood him ... like he needed me.”

I nod, because it’s not that different from how he made me feel when we were first dating ... like I was special and he couldn’t live without me.

“When I started questioning where our relationship could go, given that he lived in Park City and I lived in Boston, he bought the house in Brookline. I started helping him remodel it. Actually, it felt like I was doing all the work—meeting with the contractor, picking out cabinets and stuff for him—but he didn’t seem invested in the process at all. Like, he never actually said he was moving into the house and never asked me to move in with him.”

“Wait, you guys weren’t remodeling that house to live in together?”

She takes a sip of her martini. “I don’t actually know. That’s what I originally envisioned. But he never really talked about it that way. The more I worked on that house, and the less he was involved in it, the more I started to question what was actually happening. Combine that with the fact that half the time I called him it went straight to voice mail, or I’d go days without hearing from him, and finally, I did the thing I’d been resisting doing for the six months I’d been seeing him.”

“What’s that?” I ask when she stops speaking.

“I looked you up on social media.”

I think back to what my social media would have shown right before he died. His birthday was in September and we went away for a night. There were definitely pictures of us out to dinner, and a selfie on the balcony of our hotel room, and then of him blowing out birthday candles on his cake, with the girls in his lap, the night we got back. In October, there would have been pictures of us taking the girls to the pumpkin patch, where he pulled them around in a wagon, and then pictures of him with the girls dressed up for Halloween. We did family portraits in October too, with all the beautiful colored leaves in the background. We must have looked like quite the happy family. “Oh.”

“Yeah, ‘oh’ was right,” she says, then presses her lips between her teeth.

“Did he try to deny that we were still together when you approached him about it?”

She rolls her eyes. “Of course. Liars lie. Josh was so damn narcissistic and selfish, I think he couldn’t help himself. If he wanted something, he was going to have it, no matter who he hurt in the process. I hope you realize that.”

“Realize what?”

“That what he did wasn’t about you. It wasn’t that you weren’t a good enough wife, pretty enough, loving enough—it wasn’t about you at all. It was about him having no self-restraint and being completely incapable of loving anyone as much as he loved himself.”

“I don’t know if that makes me feel better.” I’m sure she meant for it to. “I feel ... like an idiot for not seeing that part of him as clearly as you did.”

“I only saw it because I figured out his lies. You would have too, eventually. It sounds like you had no reason to suspect anything was amiss, whereas I did.”

We sit there for a minute, staring into our drinks.

“When I met Josh,” I tell her, “I was living in Boston. I had family here, and a great job. He kind of swept me off my feet, and we were engaged within six months and married within a year. I left everything behind for him. But before he died, I’d been talking about moving back here because I wasn’t happy in our marriage and I wasn’t happy living so far from my friends and family, and I thought Boston could be a fresh start for us. So after he died, and I found out about the house ...” I take a deep breath, realizing that this isn’t as hard to talk to her about as I thought it would be. We don’t know each other, but we’re bound together by the same man’s lies. Ifanyonecould understand how I feel, it’s probably her. “I thought he’d bought it to surprise me.”

Now it’s her turn to say, “Oh.”

“Yeah. Did you know I renovated it and moved in?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I figured it out.”

“Now I don’t know how to feel about the house. At first, it felt like the last piece of him I had left. And now that I’ve been there a few months, it just feels like where the girls and I were meant to be.”

“Maybe it is.” She shrugs.

“When my neighbor told me about you and Josh—”

“Wait, Greg?” she asks, and I nod. “He’s so nosy. If there’s a neighborhood gossip, it’s him.”

I laugh. “I only met him once, but that doesn’t surprise me in the least. So when he told me you two were renovating the house together, something snapped inside me. I was still holding on to the idea that the house was proof that Josh had loved me, even though—” I stop, thinking about how nothing about that house reminds me of Josh.

“Even though?” Sophia prompts.

Even though it’s the house Jameson built for me.

How is it possible to feel this way? It isn’t his house, but he’s the one who made sure it was a house that I would love living in. And in my mind, he’s everywhere in that house. He’s fed me dessert in my sunroom, cooked me dinner in my kitchen, shoveled my driveway, watched movies with my kids on my couch, and slept in my bed.

He’s the man I want to come home to every day.

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