Page 61 of A Smart Girl's Guide to Second Chances
‘Do you have a minute to talk?’ I asked.
‘Not really,’ she replied. ‘But given that tone of voice, absolutely.’
‘You know the night Alex told me he wasn’t moving to London with me?’ I started.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Whenever I had bad breakups, I’d console myself with the image of you being dumped on a Ferris wheel in a ballgown. Sorry.’
‘That was false consolation. Because it didn’t happen like that,’ I said. ‘I had a panic attack that night. I took a pill after drinking gin and champagne. I had another blackout.’
‘Wow,’ Lily said.
‘There’s more wow. A way bigger wow,’ I said. ‘The part of the night I don’t remember is... when Alex asked me to marry him.’
‘Holy shit!’ Lily almost yelled down the phone.
‘I mean, it was so I could get a visa and go to Harvard with him,’ I added quickly.
‘And you don’t remember this? Like, any of it?’ Lily asked.
‘No, nothing,’ I said. There was a pause down the line as Lily processed this version of events.
‘If I hadn’t seen you in a blackout before, I wouldn’t believe this,’ Lily finally said.
‘He told me he loved me and still wants to be with me,’ I said. ‘At Arlo’s party.’
‘I was totally right about why he was here!’ Lily said. ‘God, there’s so much to unpack here. But before we get into excavating your temporary amnesia about a core-memory situation, I just want it noted that I can still throw parties with drama. Who says that motherhood changes you?’
‘I told him to back off,’ I added, before Lily could ask. ‘He’s going to stay out of my way at work. Except...’
I paused. Except I held the power to potentially upend his professional life. I needed to tell Lily this to give her thefull picture, to ask for her advice. But I couldn’t. This was confidential information. I wasn’t allowed to tell her. Or Alex.
‘... nothing,’ I finished. I had to work out what to do next on my own.
After I ended the call with Lily, I stayed sitting on the banks of the Yarra. The brown river gently flowed a few metres from my feet. Could you stand in the same river twice? I’d written an essay on this question for a philosophy subject at Oxford. What precocious conclusion had I reached?
‘To tell Alex.’ I plucked a yellow petal off an almost-naked dandelion I’d pulled out of the grass. Grandma Evelyn had taught me this game when I was a kid, mainly in the context of trying to work out whether the widowers in her bridge club were madly in love with her.
If I told him what our advice for ATG was going to be, he’d be able to reject the option to keep working for them. He could take his enormous brain and everything he’d learned to another company. He wouldn’t lose two years of time being paid a bloated salary to do work he didn’t care about. This would be a lot of people’s dream, but I knew it would be Alex’s nightmare.
And I didn’t want to hurt him again. I knew how he must have felt after I’d left – heartbroken, bereft, unsure how life was meant to work anymore.
I didn’t want to make a decision. I understood that even the smallest, most random choices had the potential to change the trajectory of a life.
What if I’d done something different during the Trinity term?
What if I hadn’t run away from the Ferris wheel, had let Alex continue to explain his thinking to me? What if I hadn’t hadanxiety medication with me at Oxford? What if I hadn’t asked Dad to book me a flight home?
What would, what could, our story have been?
Would we have got married that summer in Oxford, in one of the college chapels or the town hall? I bet we would have decided to elope, so we didn’t have to confront the absence of Alex’s family and the complexity of mine. Then, would we have applied for visas and moved to the US?
Would I have even found a job? Would I have become a consultant? Would I have celebrated all the days he made a breakthrough? Would I have picked him up on the days when it seemed like his research would never work out. Would we have made all the ordinary days count? Would our conversations have stayed in the realm of ideas or would they have descended into the banalities of running out of milk and having to change the sheets occasionally?
If I’d followed Alex, I wouldn’t have been asleep in the cinema that day. I wouldn’t have been gently woken up and asked to dinner. I wouldn’t have said yes.
If I’d married Alex, I wouldn’t have met Matt.
I felt my throat tighten and my heart clench, as if it had missed a beat. I took a deep breath then pulled the final petal off the flower. ‘To not tell Alex.’ The flower had spoken.
