‘No, I don’t.’
She fell silent.
‘I always listen to you,’ I said. ‘I might not always agree with you, but I listen. You have had my absolute trust, the whole time we’ve known each other.’
Tears were beading at the corner of her eyes. She knew me well enough to know what I was going to say next.
‘But you don’t give it back.’ I did my best to keep my voice steady, but it wasn’t working. ‘It isn’t just this. It isn’t just that you undermined my plan for the show. It’s everything. Everything that you’ve been doing to me, over and over again, since you came back. You don’t listen to me. You keep things from me. You – you lie to me.’
The first tear fell down her cheek.
‘I thought you were my partner,’ I said. ‘I would have done anything for that to be true.Anything.Even go along with you turning yourself into Lily Fireball, even though I hate it more than anything else in the fucking world. I would have filed down every one of my hard edges for you. Every single one.’
The words made a visible impact on her. The worst parts of me were viciously glad of it. Let her feel it. Let her feel even a little bit of what she’d made me feel.
‘But you couldn’t do this one thing for me,’ I said. ‘There was only one thing I asked of you, Lily. Let me do my job. Even if you refused to help me do it – just don’t stand in my way. Don’t make my life any harder. And you couldn’t even do that.’
I ran a hand through my hair, tugging at the ends. ‘I’ve been so worried that I’ve been helping you burn your life down,’ I said. ‘But you just cavalierly burned down everything I was trying to build here without a second fucking thought.’
‘Please.’ She choked on the word. ‘Just – let me fix it, Murray. We’ve got a couple of weeks here. Let me help you put it back together.’
I shook my head. ‘The limo’s coming back in the morning. You’re leaving.’
More tears spilled down her cheeks. ‘Murray, please.’
‘I love you,’ I said. ‘But I need you to listen to me this time. I need you to do things on my terms for once. I need you to trust me when I tell you I need time and space to figure this out.’
29LilyOne year ago
After Jeff died, I did nothing. I just sat, and felt.
It went against every instinct I had. Everything in me was screaming at me that I should pack those feelings away like I was packing away all of Jeff’s things, close them up in a box and relegate them to the darkest, dustiest corner of the vault, one where I would never have to think about them ever again.
But I didn’t. I sat on the couch, hugging the cushion he’d had made for me as a joke gift for our first anniversary, the one that hadAre you ready to be brave?embroidered on it, and I made myself feel it all.
I made myself feel the grief. I made myself feel the pain. I made myself feel the aching absence in my heart and in my life where he had been, the void of a future without him in it.
I made myself feel the guilt.
Thank god it wasn’t Murray. Thank god I didn’t lose Murray.I couldn’t survive losing Murray.
‘Are you familiar with the five stages of grief?’ asked a therapist Thuong had bullied me into going to see. ‘One of those stages is bargaining.’
‘I know,’ I said, annoyed by her condescending tone. ‘But this is not the direction you’re supposed to bargain in. I should have been offering to trade Murray for Jeff, not the other way around.’
‘Sometimes our minds work in strange ways. What if this is one of your brain’s defence mechanisms?’
‘Like, my subconscious is trying to protect me by convincing me that things could actually be a lot worse?’
‘Just a thought,’ she said gently.
I didn’t go back. She was wildly misreading what I was telling her, wildly misreading me.
I didn’t want solace. I didn’t want comfort. I didn’t want tofeel better.
I needed to suffer.
I’d married a man I loved – but I’d known perfectly well there was someone else I loved more. And now Jeff was dead, and there was no way I could ever make it up to him.
