AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Maybe you could learn a thing or two from her.”
“Are you giving me your blessing?”
I glance to the side and for a moment, it really does feel like she’s standing there with me; her favorite blue and white bandana holding back the donkey fringe she’d once referred to as her “quarter-life crisis.”
“I think you should stop feeling so guilty for wanting her.”
“You’re my wife.”
“I haven’t been your wife for a long time, Dmitri. It’s time to stop putting me on that pedestal. It’s tiring work to stay up there.”
Unease trembles across my skin. “Is that how you felt?”
“If you remember me as perfect, if you’re remembering our marriage as perfect—then you’re remembering wrong.”
“Blyat’,” I mutter, my hand tightening around the sketch, crumpling up half of the too-thin paper. I drop it before I destroy the rest of it and drift past her easel to the nook in the corner.
It’s a smorgasbord of patterns, shapes, and colors. A fat green sofa, a patchwork beanbag, a sleek glass table riddled with paint drippings, a color-blocked carpet with fraying ends. Nothing matches and yet it all goes together anyway.
Have I spent the last few years pining over a dream? Even worse, did I spend my entire marriage idealizing the woman I was married to? My mind picks away at raw memories that I’ve spent so much time suppressing until they feel distant and blurry. Every time I try to wrap my hands around them, they disintegrate like the sketches on the desk.
Was Bee right this entire time and I’ve just been too stubborn to listen?
“She’s so damn different than you,” I whisper.
“Maybe that’s why you care so much about her.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“She challenges you. She excites you. She doesn’t put up with your shit the way I used to. You were a boy when we met and I was perfect for you then. But you’re not a boy anymore, Dmitri.”
“I feel like I’m betraying you.”
There’s a reason I’ve avoided this room for so long. There’s a reason I took down all her paintings the moment she died and turned their faces away from me.
“You don’t want to betray me? Then do me a favor, my love. Remember me as I really was.”
I wish I could. But sometimes, it’s easier holding onto dreams than reality.
58
WREN
Dmitri’s dark circles are glaring when he walks into the kitchen the next morning, oddly underdressed by his standards in gray sweatpants and a plain white t-shirt.
“Coffee?” I ask.
He nods silently and takes the stool opposite me. I can feel the unspoken conversation he promised me hanging in the air between us.
“You look like you had a rough night,” I say to break the silence.
“I was in her art studio. Didn’t get much sleep.”
I eye him from behind my mug. He hasn’t mentioned a name, but it doesn’t take a genius to fill in the blankets. It might take a mind reader to figure out why he’s suddenly so open to discussing her now, though.
“Elena was an artist?”
He flinches when I say her name, but he shrugs just as casually as I asked the question. “I would say yes. She would object. She’d just say she liked to paint.”
