“You’re right,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

“And stop saying you’re sorry! God! Don’t say you love me, and don’t say you’re sorry. You fucking betrayed me, and you know it! How long have you known this? How long, Noah? You knew all along through all the wedding planning that you didn’t want to do this, and yet you just stood by and let the whole wedding thing happen! You let me invite all those people and you kept us all waiting even though you’d known for weeks you couldn’t do this! What is wrong with you?”

“I wanted—”

“Don’t you dare talk to me about anything you wanted! You lied to me, and embarrassed me, and now you’re leaving me to go off on some fantasy trip that just came up! And when I say I love you and I’ll support you, you turn me away! Like I’m just some object you’re tossing out of the window! Some useless extra baggage!”

“You’re not just some—”

“I said, shut up! You don’t have the right to talk to me about what I am or what I’m not. Listen, you idiot, I’m willing to give my whole heart and soul to you, and work together on our dreams! We have to sacrifice! Nobody’s happy all the time! Look at my parents. They have a very successful, long marriage, but do you think they were happy every single day? No one is happy every single day. And work is called work because that’s what it is. That’s what you do!”

“No,” he says, and his eyes are shiny with sadness. “No, your parents definitely aren’t happy, and neither are mine. And that’s just the point. I’m not going to do that.”

“Fuck you,” I say.

He gives me a sad, knowing smile, and then he lifts his hand in farewell and walks away. Our surroundings have gone berserk, the heavy wet air filled with screeching and hollering, animals taking sides, flinging leaves and nuts at each other, raucously arguing, probably over the meaning of work versus love. I abruptly turn off the trail and go a different way down the mountain, and I walk furiously with my head down, not caring if I ever see the hotel again, or him, or the airplane that’s going to take me back to California.

I want to throw myself off the cliff into the ocean.

Oh, stop already. You’re going to be okay, a voice says.

I say back to it, I am never again going to be okay.

But it laughs and says again, No, you’re absolutely going to be okay. You have a big life coming. A big, gigantic heart song of a life.

And I say back to it: What the hell does that even mean?

He moves out as soon as we get back to our apartment in Burlingame, the place we have shared for six months. He feels it’s best that he stays with a friend because—get this—he feels too guilty to look at me across the room. He needs to punish himself for hurting me this way. I hate the way he’s almost getting off on all this suffering—how it makes him seem so heroic in his own head, the villain with the hangdog look, the guy who bows down and closes his eyes out of such sweet sorrow with his own bad self.

Before he leaves me for good, backpack and suitcases overflowing, he tells me about all the decisions he’s made without me. The one about how he and Whipple are flying to Africa in another month. Then the one about how he’s not going back to teaching. Ever.

He looks at me with his new tragic expression and says he’ll be in touch if I want him to be, which makes me laugh a high-pitched, maniacal laugh and fling the butter dish across the room. I think of how proud Natalie will be when she hears that I’m not putting up with being treated this way, that I am actually throwing crockery.

And then I start to cry, because I know that I am supremely unlovable in a very deep, unfixable way.

With great sadness, he picks up the pieces of the butter dish, sweeps up the shards, drops it all in the trash can. He tells me he’s paid his portion of the rent for the next three months so I can keep the apartment without having to take in a roommate. He even leaves me the recipe for his secret six-layer dip—the one with four kinds of melted cheese, red onion, and avocado, the dip that he never, ever would tell me how to prepare. I rip it up in front of him while making hyena noises. He flinches, and I get louder.

So this, this is what I’ve come to: being thrilled I can screech loudly enough to possibly scare him out of his mind.

SEVEN

MARNIE

Three weeks later, I come home from work to find a letter from an online divorce site. I drink two glasses of wine, turn our engagement picture toward the wall, and then I sign the papers that say I promise not to love him anymore.

Soon after comes a copy of the decree.

And just like that, I’m divorced.

I say things to myself that get me through each day: I loved him for two years; we got married in an ill-advised ceremony; we broke up; I am still sad. I will fold my laundry and get around to sending back the wedding gifts. I will buy coffee and cream and eat oatmeal and cranberries for breakfast.

I say: This is the poster on the wall. This is my kitchen table. This is my car key. I like coffee. It is Thursday.

Then I do what MacGraws do in times of great personal upheaval and grief: I go into full denial mode. I tell my emotions that they are now on stage-four lockdown, forbidden to show up in public.

I am, in fact, a denial warrior-queen, bouncing into the nursery school where I work every day, playing the part of the happy little fulfilled bride with a big smile on her face. I don’t tell anyone what has happened. I go in early and stay late. I smile so hard my face hurts sometimes. I think up approximately seven art projects for the children per day, projects that necessitate cutting up hundreds of little construction-paper shapes. As an added flourish, I make little books—one for each child, with stories in them of laughing cats and turtles that talk.

I could tell my boss, Sylvie, what happened, I suppose. Sylvie would be outraged for me, and she’d take me home with her, and she’d tell her husband, and they would comfort me, and I could sleep in their guest room until I’m healed up. Sylvie is the most motherly person I know. I could fall apart around her, and she would know how to put me back together again.

But I don’t tell her the first day, and that makes it harder to mention on the second day, and then impossible after that. Maybe if I don’t talk about it out loud, it will cease to be true.

But because the universe is in the mood to test and toy with me, the bride talk at work increases exponentially. My life becomes a hilarious succession of Bride Stories: the ones I am begged for by the women I work with (Meatloaf for dinner tonight! Noah just loves it! Yes, we eat by candlelight! And then early to bed! You know how it is!)—and the ones the four-year-old girls insist on hearing. They are obsessed with weddings and need to know every detail.

“Were you like a princess that day?” they want to know, their eyes shining. Oh yes, I was! In honor of my wedding, they wear white paper napkins on their heads at snack time, and walk through the reading corner wearing the nap room blankets like long trains.

“We are your Bride Girls,” they tell me solemnly, and I laugh and help them toss bridal bouquets.

It’s only at night that the bitterness comes for me, laying bare all my failures and misfit-itude. The bitterness has been at home all day long, pacing and waiting impatiently for me, and now it sits on the side of the bed filing its nails and smoking cigarettes. Ready now, sweetheart? it says. My turn!

That’s when I see who I really am, when I know that I will never be all right, that the person who said he loved me and wanted to spend his whole life with me came to his senses at the last freaking minute, and then like some kind of idiot, I still made him go through with the charade of a ceremony.

I’m a misfit who can’t pretend any longer. A dandelion in the lawn. An ugly duckling out paddling among the swans, hoping they don’t notice.

Then after one sleepless night during which I think I will lose my mind, I jump out of bed at five in the morning and find myself punching in Blix’s number on my phone. I can’t believe I didn’t think of this earlier. She is probably the one person in the world who could get him back for me. It’s 8:00 a.m. in Brooklyn, and I somehow just know she’ll be up. And sure enough, she answers the phone with, “Hi, Marnie, my love. I was waiting for you to call.”

I’m taken aback a little. “You were?”

“Of course. I’ve been thinking about you.”

So I just blurt it out. “Blix, it’s awful. I-I need your help. I know you can do things, and so I want you to bring Noah back to me.”

She’s silent, and it occurs to me that maybe she didn’t get the news from his family that he left me. So I back up, tell her about the honeymoon, the fatal hike, Africa, the fellowship he applied for without telling me, Whipple, all of it—even the online divorce.