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By the end of the first year of marriage, the truth was like a black, gaping hole that couldn’t be ignored: she’d made a colossal mistake and there was no way of fixing the relationship. Yet the idea of extricating herself was daunting. For starters, she loathed the idea of failing, of looking—especially to her parents—like some Hollywood type whose marriage had the shelf life of a Bic pen.
And then there was her company, which had just begun to really take off. She had a full-time assistant by then, and Eric had come onboard, too. To pay their salaries she’d scaled hers back, relying on Derrick’s paycheck for living expenses. If she blew up her marriage, she’d have to fire Eric. Her rent-free office above the garage would have to go, too.
But finally, Emma stopped worrying about any of that. She knew she had to save herself before his behavior escalated into something even scarier and/or before it eroded any more of who she was. She kept her head down at home and worked like crazy, signing up as many new clients as possible so that she could survive on her own. She told no one what was going on—not her parents, not her brother, not evenBekah, her closest friend since college—but she was laying the groundwork to succeed on her own.
“Who’d like coffee?” Jackie asked, dragging Emma back to the present.
“None for me, thanks,” she said. “And to tell you the truth, I think I need to go upstairs and collapse.”
Of course, they’d both said, and within minutes they were mercifully gone.
Rather than trudge upstairs, Emma flopped on the couch in the small family room off the kitchen so that she’d hear her brother’s knock when he arrived from the airport in Newark. Though her parents hadn’t managed to snag a flight that day, her brother would be there soon.
She let her eyelids droop closed. Her nausea had returned with a vengeance. Was it from stress, she wondered, or the salmon, or sheer disgust from faking it so much with Kyle and Jackie?
Emma didn’t regret faking it, though. There’d really been no choice. The only regret she had was the fact that someone like her, who as a respected trend forecaster was supposed to read tea leaves so brilliantly and glimpse what the future held, hadn’t envisioned how her life would unspool this way.
She could never let that happen again.
