Sue had been rummaging through the desk drawer for the past hour and eventually, sank back in the leather armchair with a deep sigh. Vincent was giving her a run for her money, literally, and she was tired of trying to draw neat divides between what they had owned together as a couple for ten years. She didn’t want to have to sell the house, that is the last thing she wanted to do, but if Vincent’s lawyers got their way, she would have to do exactly that. Who was she kidding? The lawyers were working on Vincent’s biddings.
She sighed again and took a large gulp of whiskey from one of Vincent’s glasses, swirling the amber liquid around in her hand. She wasn’t being sentimental, she insisted on that to herself, but the room reminded her of him. The early days of their marriage, when they had just moved into this house, had still been good. Vincent had recently published his first novel and was working on his second, which meant that he spent nearly the whole day cooped up in this study. Sue would pop her head in around dinner time and he would look up at her, a dazed and confused expression on his face, and smile. That was until his second novel received no reviews, at least no positive ones, and it was all downhill from there.
Sue took another large swig of the whiskey and decided she needed some distraction, at least for a few minutes. Their shared computer, the one neither of them used in the past few years when laptops were purchased individually, was lying neglected and dusty on the desk. Sue ran a finger over the keyboard, collecting brownish dust on her forefinger-tip, which she then scraped off on the edge of the table.
She pressed the Power button, which brought the computer back to life from its long slumber, and waited while the system updated itself. When the screen finally awoke, an old photograph of them greeted her as the wallpaper. Sue, her fawn colored hair flying to the side, her younger triangular smile had overtaken her face and she had her long skinny arms around the man she was about to marry. Vincent, with his flamboyant beard, smiled too. His smile looked genuine enough and he seemed content and happy to have Sue’s arms around his neck. She remembered the photograph, it was taken on their first and last vacation together, a few months before they married. She struggled to recognize the two people in the picture as she stared at it longer. Those two people looked happy, he looked happy and in love. Perhaps, he was happy now. Perhaps, he was happy now with the skinny arms of his new girlfriend around his neck.
Sue clicked furiously on the browser icon. She wanted his face out of her line of vision. However, the first thing she did was log into her social media page. She hadn’t bothered looking up Vincent’s profile before, to stalk his recent activity and maybe if she was lucky, catch a glimpse of the new girlfriend. But, she was in the mood today. The whiskey was making her lightheaded all right, but it made her feel a little invincible too. She wanted to take a peek into his new life.
He had removed her from his Friends-list. In fact, he had blocked her completely. Sue typed his name in frantically over and over again, hoping it had been some kind of technical glitch the first…ten times. She finally gave up, after fifteen minutes of trying to dig up his profile. He had removed her from his social connections with a certain severity, with almost professional perfection. Surprisingly, rather than the grief she was expecting to feel to be rather rudely shown the door out of his personal life after more than ten years of sharing a life together, Sue was more angered by the fact that she hadn’t thought of it first. She should have shown him the door, blocked him out of her online presence. She banged the table with her fist in rage and immediately, picked up the glass again, to drain it of its contents.
She sank back in the chair and instinctively, started scrolling down her social media page, blankly staring at photographs of kids and smiling families, photographs of vacations, links to news articles, a few online eyesight test results that all her friends seemed to be taking these days. Sue laughed to herself, she knew she was being a maudlin bore, but there was no denying that she was pushing forty and alone all over again. The silly eyesight tests and photographs of grown up kids were proof enough that they were all getting old. She was too tired to start over again.
In the middle of her self-pitying thoughts, her attention fell on a news story that one of her old friends from college had shared. She read the title three times over, with rapt attention, her back straight as a lamp-post now, before she clicked on the link. ‘Newcastle Alumnus, Gerard Tate in this year’s Forbes Richest in America List’. The link opened up and the smiling, older face of Gerard Tate stared back at her. Graying hair, the same sparkling brown eyes, arms crossed over his chest and Sue didn’t miss the Steel Explorer Rolex on his wrist.
The link was an updated profile of him and Sue read every word of it. While she was vacationing in Mauritius with her fiancé, Gerard wrote the code for a hacking program and set up a company from his parents’ garage. When Sue married Vincent and they invested in a house they couldn’t afford, Gerard’s new company was shaking things up in the Silicon Valley. While Sue’s husband’s failing career and their inevitably doomed marriage sent her down a dizzying spiral of depression, Gerard’s company had begun to rake in millions; no tech-company in the Silicon Valley could afford to ignore the security services that he could provide them with. Now that she was officially divorced, sitting alone in a house she was going to have to sell, Gerard Tate was, perhaps, sitting in his living room, gazing at the city skyline from his penthouse, eating caviar and champagne, smiling proudly at his children while his gorgeous supermodel wife ran her fingers through his hair.
Sue stood up suddenly; she knew she was allowing her imagination to run wild, but she couldn’t control her anger, for some reason. She felt lonely, a failure and slightly drunk, and she paced around the study with her brows crossed. Every few minutes, she returned to the computer screen to take a look at Gerard’s smiling face again. She couldn’t believe how ridiculously cruel the joke was. The boy she had dated in college, the boy who she had given up because he locked himself in his garage for days together, was now a billionaire. So many bad choices, Sue said aloud, admonishing herself as she shook her head like a disappointed school principle.
The tears came soon, hot and uncontrollable. She plonked herself down on the couch as she cried loudly, in the empty house. She had been angry with Vincent, but Gerard’s success, his happy and fulfilled life made her sad, made her regret every decision she had ever made. The memory of Gerard’s smiling face filled her mind and she burst into tears again. She could see him standing in his Khaki pants and an old striped shirt, his backpack hung loosely from his back. He was waiting for her outside her class and she ran towards him, his smile grew. She remembered it like it was yesterday. She pressed her face against his chest as they embraced tightly. He smelled of coffee and doughnuts, probably all he ate in the past twenty-four hours.
“I hadn't seen you in a day. I missed you,” she heard him say and she looked up to stare at his handsome face.
“I wish you would make your breakthrough already, so we could spend some time together, finally,” Sue said, his eyes held her gaze confidently. She could see he worshipped her.
“Soon,” he said before he bent his head down to kiss her. Even now, as she sat alone on her couch, trying hard to hold back another volley of tears, she could feel his full lips on hers. He kissed her with an intensity she hadn’t experienced after him. That thought immediately led to the memory of Vincent returning home after a book tour. Sue opened the door for him and flung her arms around her husband.
“I missed you Vincent!” she squealed and showered his face with adoring kisses. Vincent only peeled her arms off him and hurried into the house past her.
“Vincent?” she called after him as she heard the sound of the door of his study shut behind him.