CHAPTER
EIGHTEEN
My replacement doesn’t see me coming.
By the time she senses my approach and shock fills her eyes, I am very close.
She looks around wildly, probably trying to find an escape.
“Vanessa?” Her voice is incredulous.
I am surprised she recognizes me so swiftly. “Hello.”
She is younger than me, and her curves are more generous, but now that my hair is back to its natural hue, we could be sisters.
I’ve anticipated this moment for so long. Remarkably, I don’t feel any panic.
My palms are dry. My breathing is steady.
I am finally doing it.
I am a very different woman today than when Richard and I fell in love all those years ago.
Everything about me has transformed.
At the age of twenty-seven, I was a buoyant, chatty preschool teacher who hated sushi and loved the movie Notting Hill.
I palmed trays of burgers at my part-time waitressing job and rummaged through secondhand-clothing stores and went out dancing with my friends. I had no idea how lovely I was. How lucky I was.
I had so many friends. I’ve lost every one of them. Even Samantha.
Now all I have left is Aunt Charlotte.
In my old life, I even had another name.
The first time we met, Richard nicknamed me Nellie. That was all he ever called me.
But to everyone else, I was always—and am still—Vanessa.
I can still hear Richard’s deep voice as he would tell the story—our story—whenever people asked how we met.
“I spotted her in the airport lounge,” he’d say. “Trying to roll her suitcase with one hand and holding her purse and a bottle of water and a chocolate-chip cookie in the other.”
I was returning to New York from visiting my mother in Florida. The trip had been a good one, despite that going home always conjured painful memories for me. I missed my father more than ever when I went back to my old house. And I could never escape the recollections of my time at college. But at least my mother’s erratic moods had somewhat stabilized thanks to a new medicine. Still, I hated to fly and I felt especially anxious about being in the air that day, even though the sky was a swath of azure dotted with only a few cottony clouds.
I noticed him right away. He wore a dark suit and a crisp white shirt and was frowning at his laptop while he typed.
“This little kid started pitching a tantrum,” Richard would continue. “His poor mom had a baby in a car seat and was at her wit’s end.”
I had that cookie, so I gestured to the mother, asking if I could give it to the crying boy. She nodded gratefully. I was a preschool teacher; I knew the power of a well-timed bribe. I bent down and gave the child his treat and his tears evaporated. When I glanced in Richard’s direction a minute later, he’d disappeared.
As I boarded the plane, I passed him, seated in first class—naturally. He sipped a clear liquid from a glass. His tie was loose around his neck. He’d spread a newspaper open on his tray but was watching the passengers file in. I felt a magnetic pull when his gaze stopped on me.
“I watched her thumping that suitcase down the aisle,” Richard would say, drawing out the story. “Not a bad view at all.”
I wheeled my blue suitcase to row twenty. I settled into my seat and performed my usual preflight superstitious rituals: I slipped off my Converse sneakers, closed the window shade, and wrapped a cozy scarf around myself.
“She was sitting next to a young Army private,” Richard would continue, winking at me. “And suddenly I felt quite patriotic.”
The attendant approached to say a first-class passenger had offered to trade seats with the soldier sitting next to me. “Awesome!” the soldier had said.
Somehow I’d known it was him.
When the plane lumbered into the sky, I gripped the armrest and swallowed hard.
He offered me his drink. His ring finger was bare. I was surprised he wasn’t married—he was thirty-six—but later I’d learn he had an ex, a dark-haired woman he’d lived with. She’d been upset when they broke up.
After Richard proposed, her existence haunted me. I felt her presence everywhere. And I was right—someone was following me. It just wasn’t Richard’s ex.
“I got her tipsy,” Richard would tell his enthralled listener. “Figured that way I’d have a better chance of getting her number.”
I’d sipped the vodka tonic he’d passed me, very aware of the heat of his body.
“I’m Richard.”
“Vanessa.”
Here was the part of the story where Richard would turn away from our audience and glance at me tenderly. “She doesn’t look like a Vanessa, does she?”
Richard had smiled at me that day on the plane. “You’re much too sweet and soft for such a serious name.”
“What sort of name should I have, then?”
The plane bumped through another air pocket and I gasped.
“It’s just like going over a pothole. You’re perfectly safe.”
I took a big gulp of his drink and he laughed.
“You’re a nervous Nellie.” His voice was unexpectedly gentle. “That’s what I’m going to call you: Nellie.”
The truth is I always disliked the nickname. I thought it sounded old-fashioned. But I never told that to Richard. He was the only one who ever called me Nellie.
We talked for the rest of the flight.
I couldn’t believe someone like Richard was so interested in me. When he took off his jacket, I caught a citrus scent that I’d forever associate with him. As we began our descent, he asked for my phone number. While I jotted it down, he reached out to stroke the length of my hair. A shiver ran down my spine. The gesture felt as intimate as a kiss.
“So beautiful,” he said. “Don’t ever cut it.”
From that day on—all through our whirlwind courtship in New York City, our wedding at the resort in Florida, and our years spent living in the new house Richard had bought for us in Westchester—I was always his Nellie.
I’d expected my life to unfurl gracefully. I thought he would always keep me safe. I’d become a mother and would resume teaching when our children were grown. I dreamed of dancing at our silver wedding anniversary.
But of course, none of that happened.
And now Nellie is gone forever.
I am only Vanessa.
“Why are you here?” my replacement asks.
I can tell she is gauging whether she can be quick enough to duck around me and run down the street.
But she is wearing strappy high-heeled sandals and a fitted skirt. I know she is heading to her bridal fitting today; her schedule was easy to obtain.
“All I want is two minutes.” I spread open my empty hands to convince her I mean no physical harm.
She hesitates and looks up and down the block again. A few people mill past, but no one stops. What is there to see? We’re just two well-dressed women standing in front of an apartment building on a busy street, near a deli and down the block from a bus stop.
“Richard will be here any second. He’s just locking up my apartment.”
“Richard left twenty minutes ago.” I was worried he might drop her off at the fitting, but I watched him flag down a cab.
“Please just listen,” I say to the beautiful young woman with the heart-shaped face and lush body that Richard left me for. She needs to know the story of how I transformed from buoyant, chatty Nellie into the shattered woman I am today. “I need to tell you the truth about him.”