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Resentment is a poison and a thief. It has eaten at me and left me with nothing but bitter remnants of the happiness thinking of Milly used to bring.
I walk out of Cristal’s office and head straight for mine. I close the door and rush to my private en suite bathroom and splash water on my face.
Seeing Milly, sharing the same air as her, having to pretend I didn’t care, was almost too much. I knew she was in Cristal’s office when I walked in. I had prepared myself to see Millicent Dennis standing there.
I was not prepared to see my Red standing there. Milly Hassan. The girl who had tied me in knots as a teenager, ripped my young heart to shreds, and then disappeared when my world fell apart.
She taught me the taste of betrayal at an age when I wasn’t prepared to learn it.
She had been my best friend, my everything. Then her father disappeared after those fuckers at Enron took a chainsaw to innocent people’s lives.
And days later, she was just gone. Without a word, without a clue as to where. It wasn’t until weeks later the FBI issued a statement that they had been moved to an undisclosed location due to threats they had received, and I had never seen or heard from her again.
Then, Thanksgiving weekend of last year I was sitting on the couch in my hotel suite watching the news. I, along with the rest of the world, found out she and her mother were in the DC area, while her sister, Addie, was in London. There was no word on Lilly, but I don’t know if I would have cared anyway.
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sp; Milly. After more than a decade, I was laying eyes on her again. It was like a jump-start to all of the emotions I’d spent years battling. Love, anger, fear, relief, sadness all came flying back into the fractures seeing her had made in my heart.
Pictures of her flashed on my television screen, along with pictures of her husband and their son. She was married. She had a child. And so, I added resentment to that toxic brew of emotion. When I swallowed it, I tasted the bitter essence of all of my foolish dreams.
I didn’t realize until this moment that for the last almost fourteen years, I had been holding onto some hope that Milly was out in the world missing me as much as I missed her.
When I found out they had been moved by the FBI, I convinced myself she left because she had no choice. That as soon as she could, she would find me.
As the years passed, I thought they were living in some bunker, or under some witness protection program, that one day she would be free. This illusion was shattered by the news that Milly had in fact gone to Brown, gotten married to her college sweetheart, and then had his child. And now was a housewife in a DC suburb.
The timing was uncanny because we were just in the middle of negotiating terms on office space in the nation’s capital.
I knew I had to find a way to see her that didn’t require me going to her house and having to deal with seeing her husband face-to-face.
Clearly, she had gotten over me very quickly, hadn’t ever looked me up after she left, and probably wouldn’t appreciate me trying to intrude on her domestic bliss.
I just wanted to ask her “why?”
I stewed over how to make this happen. I didn’t get a chance to stew long because at the same time this was happening, my own relationship went up in a ball of flames.
When I finally came up for air, it was mid-January and the story wasn’t in the news anymore. I did an Internet search for Milly under her new name and came up with nothing. Not even social media profiles.
I tried again a few weeks later and found a listing for an event planning business under her name. I sent her details to Cristal and said she had been referred by a friend of a friend.
I thought I would see her, she would look guilty or pissed, and I would get some answers. Maybe even finally get her out of my system and out from under my skin. Looks like the joke is on me.
I rinse my mouth and splash water on my face and stare at myself in the mirror.
Seeing her standing there, looking like a deer caught in headlights, was like a punch to my gut. With a sledgehammer.
She was always pretty. But the years have been very kind to her and now she's impossibly beautiful.
Her hair seemed a more vivid shade of red. Her eyes, the gold that could cut me down with a single glance seemed to burn even brighter on her face. And the way she looked at me, her eyes practically spilling with longing and frustration, like she was the one whose heart had been broken. Like she still loved me. Which is impossible.
I don’t feel anything that resembles control over my emotions. I have an acute sense of panic that she's going to leave this building, and I won’t see her again.
At the same time, I feel sick at the thought of seeing her and finding out that what I thought we shared didn’t mean as much to her as it did to me. That she never intended to keep the promises we made. That she has been happy all this time. Without me.
My mind pings to Nicola, my ex-fiancée. Over the course of five years together, she never affected me the way Milly has, even when she was completely absent from my life.
