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But it was never less busy at work—not since Patrick left. Not before that, if he was being honest.
He couldn’t tell Jake that what had really happened was that he’d watched his wife as she crossed the lobby, and he’d seen so much pain in her eyes. That he’d wanted more than anything to be able to fix it, but he had no idea how.
Jamila had given him this chance to do something to make Amber feel better. This one chance. So he’d taken it.
He still wasn’t sure it had been the right thing to do.
“She needs a break, that’s all,” he said.
“You puh-promise?”
“I promise.”
He looked over Jake’s head, out the window toward the tarmac, and willed himself to believe it.
She’s coming home. Not leaving us.
This is the right thing to do.
By the time the plane lifted off, Jake and Ant were both asleep.
Tony kept reminding himself to breathe.
CHAPTER THREE
Amber sat at the edge of the pool, dangling her legs in the water. They appeared to fracture at mid-calf, dividing cool, blue-tinted flesh from the warm light brown of her thighs. There were dry white spots on her knee where she needed lotion.
At least she’d shaved her legs.
At least she’d shaved twenty-five pounds of stored excess off her frame, working out twice a week with Marc for a year and a half, until Tony had announced they couldn’t afford it anymore.
She’d felt so different when she was losing the weight. Especially at first. So much better, as though she were uncovering her true self from beneath layers of debris.
She’d been so hopeful that her body was the problem, its resurrection the solution she’d been seeking.
But beneath the Caribbean sun, wearing a silver bikini that she’d purchased at the resort gift shop with two fifties peeled off the wad of cash she’d found in the envelope Jamila had pressed into her hand, Amber didn’t feel hopeful. She felt the impulse to pinch the goose-pimpled expanse of her thigh. To twist her own skin between her fingers until she left a red mark, a bruise.
She had done this radical thing, effected this transformation, and it hadn’t fixed her.
It hadn’t fixed anything.
That’s what she would have told Tony if she’d had a minute to think before the van pulled away from the curb. That these kinds of changes—these big gestures—didn’t help.
She and Tony didn’t have the kind of problem that could be fixed with a gesture or a glorious truth delivered at exactly the right moment. They had a dead ember. A light that had gone out.
It wasn’t his fault or hers. It wasn’t anyone’s fault. It had just happened, somewhere along the line. They’d been preoccupied with raising their kids and paying the mortgage, and they’d lost each other.
When she looked around at the other couples she knew—her friends, the moms and dads of the kids in the boys’ classes at school—she thought the same thing must have happened to them. They weren’t kissing against pillars in the sunlight. They had things to do, lives to tend to.
This was marriage. This was life.
But God, she missed Tony sometimes.
She missed feeling like she knew who she was, apart from the roles she inhabited.
She missed wanting things.
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