The Ex (8 page)

“Oh, I guess you heard about that. Does it bother you?”

“Yeah, I don’t like it. I miss seeing you.” He stopped walking and turned me to face him. I couldn’t believe how happy he looked.

“Oh my God, you’re actually turning pink. Olivia Randall is
blushing.
Why are you embarrassed?”

I have no idea how bungled my answer was, but I remember telling him about Valentine’s Day when I was nine years old. My mother asked me why I didn’t want to give a special card to one of the boys at school. I told her that feelings were
gross
. It was a conversation Jack
and I would revisit many times in the years that would follow. What I had been trying to say to him was that, even at nine, I understood that feelings were what kept my mother with my father:
Olivia, don’t you see that I love him?
Feelings led you to make bad decisions.

“And what bad decisions are your feelings for me leading you to?” Jack and I were standing in the center of the South Lawn, and I felt like everyone was looking at us.

I shrugged.

“But you’re saying you don’t want me to see Shannon anymore?”

“Right.”

There was an obvious next question, but he never posed it. Instead, he just kissed me. And when he took me back to his room, everything felt different. It was tender and loving, sober and unrushed. It felt absolutely pure.

For the next two weeks, we were as inseparable as two college students living with roommates could be. And then Jack showed up banging on my door when his father died. We may have fallen in love slowly, but being at his side in the days that followed pushed our relationship into hyperspeed. I met his aunt, uncle, and brother. I helped him and Owen select the urn. I missed a week of classes to get the house ready for the estate sale. I was there when the lawyer broke the news about the finances. I was the one who met with the realtor because they couldn’t bring themselves to set a price.

Charlotte, Jack, and Owen may have grown up as the three musketeers, but the four of us became adults together. Even though Owen wasn’t on campus, he saw us at least twice a week. By the beginning of junior year, Jack had poured his grief into writing, publishing a story about his father in the university’s literary magazine. With the encouragement of two professors who believed he had “real talent,” he was even working on a book proposal to submit to agents. Owen found a second family in the police department. Charlotte started to use her family’s wealth for something more than frolicking. Even I had found
a silver lining in the aftermath of Jack’s father’s death: apparently what my mother always called my “cyborg” responses to emotion might make me a good lawyer. I liked feeling needed.

For the first three years, Jack and I were happy. Being with him felt easy and safe, the way I always thought relationships should be but never were. But I should have known that a fear of losing someone was not the best reason to kick off a serious relationship. Because five years later, it was me—not Shannon Riley—who broke Jack’s heart.

WE GOT ENGAGED GRADUATION WEEKEND,
but didn’t set a date. We didn’t need to. We agreed that I needed to finish law school first. For the time being, our change in status was only a word and a ring.

While I jumped into my studies, Jack fiddled around with stories that he never seemed to finish. He went to classes to get his teacher’s certification. He even started to check out hotel ballrooms for our wedding.

I was thriving in law school without him—or at least that’s how I felt—and all Jack could say was that he couldn’t wait for law school to be over so we could get married and “start our future.” His future felt like my end. What was supposed to be a word and a ring had changed everything. What used to be easy seemed boring. What had felt safe was now confining.

My sins started small. I stopped picking up after myself, put less effort into my appearance around the apartment, snapped at him on occasion. He seemed happy as ever, so I spent more time without him and was bossier when we were together. Before I knew it, it was like I was playing a game to see just how much Jack could take.

And, still, he waited for my every free second so we could spend it together.

The first time I cheated on Jack—truly emotionally cheated—was with the editor in chief of the law review, Gregg Bennett. I was a 2-L, he was a 3-L. It was during the big cattle call for law review submissions.
We students got lobbied by professors from all over the country, trying to get their articles placed in a top-ten journal. It was like March madness for law geeks. Who would land Judge Posner’s latest masterpiece, sure to be cited by other scholars for years to come? Could we bluff Cass Sunstein into accepting by telling him we needed a decision in two days? Heady stuff for a twenty-four-year-old.

And no one got off on it more than Gregg.

I didn’t set out to fall in love, at least that’s what I would tell myself later. But I knew I enjoyed being around Gregg. Later, I’d realize that what I was really enjoying was not being with Jack.

And even though I knew that I was enjoying being around Gregg more than I should, I let it happen. Despite his engagement to a congressman’s daughter—or maybe because of it—we flirted to the point of making other staffers feel like they were crashing a date.

And sex with Gregg was everything it wasn’t with Jack. There was nothing slow or sensitive about it. It was a hand under my skirt in the library. Getting pulled onto a table in the law review office when another staffer stepped into the hall. His hand over my mouth as he whispered to me from behind, “You like this, don’t you?”

But then after, I’d go home to that stifling apartment at night. And hear Jack’s daily “miss you’s” as I left in the morning with my backpack.

For months, I lied to everyone about everything: where I was going, why I ran late, who was on the phone. I lied so much that I didn’t even realize that I was also lying to myself. It wasn’t just my stupid little rules—never in our apartment, never with both of them on the same day, always taking off the necklace Jack had given me for my twenty-first birthday before being with Gregg, my promise to myself to break the news to Jack once classes were over. Those were the selfish things I would tell myself every time I lied to be with Gregg Bennett. The biggest lie I told myself was that my infidelity was somehow special.

It’s not my fault I fell in love.
The power of this particular lie is over
whelming. A few years ago, a newly married couple went so far as to highlight in their Sunday Styles wedding announcement the fact that they had met each other while still married to former spouses. The public lambasted the bride for whining about her feelings of being “punished” for having failed to meet the love of her life earlier, but that’s exactly how I felt while I was with Gregg. To avoid feeling like a horrible person, I elevated Gregg (he’s my soul mate), derided Jack (I deserve someone who is more of a challenge), and turned myself into the victim (I met Jack too young, he’s suffocating me). When I hear other people talk about how infidelity “just happens,” I know how lame it sounds, but at the time, those words became my mantra.

I worked later and left home earlier. I gushed when Gregg landed a clerkship with the chief judge of the D.C. Circuit, which would make him a front-runner to land a Supreme Court clerkship.

And then when Gregg graduated, he dumped me. No, he didn’t dump me. He just moved—to D.C., to his fiancée, to his real life. He had used me. And the thing is, I felt more
right
with him for months than I ever had with the man who loved me. One night the following summer, Jack saw me staring into space and asked if I missed Gregg. “I mean, you guys were pretty good friends, is all.”

He knew. All that time, he had known. He just didn’t want me to
know
that he knew. And now that it was over, Jack was still there. He even wanted to comfort me. I felt so guilty that I started to hate him for it.

I would look at him and imagine the scene play out in my head.

We need to talk.

I love you, but I’m not in love with you.

You deserve someone better.

I’d picture myself giving back the ring—his mother’s engagement ring—and I’d hear him telling me, once again, that we belonged together, that he knew me better than anyone else, that we were perfect. I could almost hear my mother:
I knew it was too good to be true.

No, I just couldn’t do it. I couldn’t marry him, but I couldn’t be the one to say I wouldn’t marry him. He would have to be the one to see that we were all wrong. I wasn’t a good person, and I certainly wasn’t good enough for someone as accepting and forgiving as Jack.

I WAS RECOUNTING BITS AND
pieces of this history when Don interrupted. “The case, Olivia. What does this have to do with Jack’s arrest?”

“You need to know about the last time I saw Jack before today.”

Law school graduation was a month away. We had a wedding date eleven weeks out. The plan was to keep it simple—vows in Central Park with a reception to follow at a French restaurant on the Upper West Side called La Mirabelle. The honeymoon was more of a splurge, a week at Lake Como. My signing bonus at the firm would barely cover it all.

You know how gamblers keep adding good money after bad, unable to walk away with a loss? That was me. Nearly a year had passed since my thing with Gregg ended, but I found more where that came from. Hours spent at the library. Late nights at bars. Unexplained phone calls. I was never home, and when I was, I would bark at Jack constantly, all in the hope that he would be the one to walk away. I needed him to walk away. What did I need to do to make him leave me?

In my head, there was no alternative. Not after all this time. I became reckless to the point of inevitability.

Until that night, I had never brought another man into our apartment. But I crossed that final line in the biggest possible way. I knew Jack would be home any minute; his writers’ workshop could have only so much to say about the dozen pages he’d managed since the last meeting. It was only his phone call from the corner that kept us from being caught in flagrante.
Need anything from Duane Reade? If I don’t get some Q-tips, my ears might start to sprout.

My companion made it to the staircase before Jack stepped off the elevator, but I hadn’t even bothered to make the bed. If I had, I might have noticed the Seiko watch, unmistakably male, resting next to my pillow. I’m the one who’d slipped it from the wrist it belonged to.

Not even Jack could pretend to miss the clues. It was a cruel thing to do, I knew, but like Nick Lowe said, sometimes you’ve got to be cruel to be kind. Jack would finally see that he was too good for me.

I never stopped to think about what would happen next.

I HAD GOTTEN TO JACK’S
slamming the apartment door behind him when Don interrupted. “I’ve got two ex-wives for a reason: I stepped out on the first for the second, and then the second stepped out on me for the friend of a cousin who she met at our Christmas party. I figure it was karma biting me in the butt, so we’re even. You’re not the first person to fuck up. You were young, and you weren’t even married. Get over it.”

“Are you listening to me, Don? It’s not just that I cheated. I intentionally set it up so Jack found the evidence.”

What I had done was actually far worse, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell Don that part. I just couldn’t. I had never told anyone except Melissa.

“Not to be a lawyer about this, but does your mens rea really matter? As far as the harm to Jack, it’s all the same.”

“That’s my point, Don.
The harm.
Jack was absolutely devastated. It wasn’t until I saw his face that I realized that he really did think of us as forever. We were so young, and I was still in law school; being engaged just seemed like a word. But that’s how he thought of us—his entire future. He ran out of the apartment like it was filled with poisonous gas. I waited for him to come home, but he didn’t. I finally broke down and called Charlotte at three in the morning, and she told me that he had shown up at her apartment not much earlier than that,
drunk and upset, with no explanation—or at least that’s what she told me at the time. She was smart enough to figure out we’d had some kind of fight, but didn’t press me for details. I was just relieved to know that he was okay and with a friend. I figured we’d talk the next day. I’d apologize. I’d say all the stupid things that people who cheat say when they get caught. And we’d do all the things that I had been dreading—figuring out who would keep the lease, dividing up the furniture and the CDs, all that messiness.”

“Been there, done that.”

Ramon, Melissa’s headwaiter, came by to check on us for orders, but I indicated that we weren’t ready. “But that’s not what happened. I spent the whole morning staring at the television, wondering when Jack would be ready to talk to me. And then the phone finally rang that night, and it was Charlotte. There’d been a car accident. Jack’s older brother, Owen, had died.”

I could tell from Don’s expression that Melissa had never told him any of this. Of course she hadn’t. Melissa was better than a vault. “I remember reading that in one of the profiles about Jack—his brother was a cop, right?”

“Yeah, NYPD, but he lived on Long Island, not far from where they grew up. Charlotte said they thought Owen fell asleep at the wheel on the LIE. Ran head-on into an embankment. He was DOA.”

“It’s a sad story, Olivia, but I’m still not sure why we’re talking about it.”

“Because I’m the reason Owen was in his car in the middle of the night, too exhausted to stay awake until he got home. He was in his car because when Jack found out I was cheating, he called his brother for support. Owen was in the city and met Jack at a bar. They stayed out because of me, because of what I did to Jack.”

“You can’t put that on yourself, Olivia.”

“There wasn’t even a funeral because there was no family left. For months, I had no idea where Jack even was.” How many times had I
drunk myself to sleep, wondering where Jack had gone? “Eventually Charlotte came to the apartment to pack up Jack’s things. She told me that he’d had a psychotic break. Major depression, catatonic, wouldn’t move or speak or eat or drink kind of depression. He was in a psych ward.”