need to listen to them. She could feel their cool disapproval of her choices from across the world and knew exactly what they’d say. That they were disappointed that she hadn’t risen to the occasion and shown her mettle as a Martin should.
They would have shown her the same frozen disappointment if she’d ever, say, gotten a bad grade in school or made a scene in public. Not that she’d ever dared do either one of those things.
Her sister had moved on to text messages:
Ethan is not cooperating. He insists he needs to talk to you, personally. Please advise.
Maya waited for that familiar rage to sweep through her again. That deep, comprehensive fury at the man she was supposed to be married to right now that had been keeping her aloft all this time. But it was gone. And the room it had taken up inside her was filled with that brightness...and its matching panic.
She knew why. The why was out there in her bed, fast asleep, beautiful and golden and capable of making her body sing like some kind of celestial instrument only he knew how to play. He’d proved it again and again.
But she had spent these weeks secure in her anger and she hadn’t spared a thought for what might wait there on the other side of it. A different kind of grief, maybe. For the life she had thought she would be living by now. The life she and Ethan had built, one conversation and goal at a time, year after year...
A life she not only didn’t want any longer but couldn’t imagine how she’d ever wanted.
That thought felt slippery and treacherous. She slid a hand over her own chest as if that could soothe her poor heart.
Maya hadn’t understood how black-and-white her world was—and always had been—until she’d come to Italy. Or how gray her emotions were, or the sex she’d had was, until she met Charlie and he’d turned her inside out.
Now the colors were too bright.
And there was no pretending that she could go back. Not to the life she’d left behind in all those embarrassing wedding-day pieces. She wasn’t the same person whose wedding had been canceled in such a humiliating fashion.
Maybe you were never that person, a voice inside her suggested.
But that kind of heresy made her entire life some kind of sick joke, didn’t it? And the notion that might very well be true only made it harder to breathe.
Maya moved farther into the rambling washroom suite that was larger than the dormitory room she’d lived in with Lorraine a lifetime ago. She made her way to the huge, dramatic bathtub that was perched in the big arched window, offering a view—by day—of the patchwork, pastel quilt of ancient buildings stuck to the side of the steep hills and the beautiful stretch of the sea beyond.
She climbed into the tub and sank down into it, not minding at all that it was dry and it was too dark outside to see much more than the lights and the suggestion of the water, far below. She felt as if she was in some kind of cocoon, tucked up and safe from the world.
Or maybe the truth was, simply, that she felt safe here. That was what Italy—and Charlie, if she was honest, and maybe mostly Charlie—had done for her. And it wasn’t until she had started to feel that remarkable sense of safety that she’d truly understood how deeply unsafe she’d felt for most of her life, in a variety of ways. And with just about everyone she knew.
But that was a breakdown for another time.
Right now, she needed to clean up her own mess.
She swiped her phone open, found Ethan’s number and hit the button.
The phone rang and rang. It only occurred to her that it was after midnight in Toronto—long past Ethan’s preferred bedtime, since he liked to rise at 4:30 to get his run in every morning before work—when she heard the fumbling noise that suggested he was picking up his phone from the nightstand.
“Do you know what time it is?” Ethan demanded, his voice thick and annoyed, and Maya could picture him perfectly. He would be scowling, his eyes even more bleary than usual without his glasses on. His dark hair would be standing straight up and his jaw would be rough.
She waited for a wave of regret to crash over her. Longing, maybe. Yearning, despite the likelihood that he wasn’t alone in that bed they’d picked out together.
But all she felt was a kind of soft sadness.
“I beg your pardon, Ethan,” she said crisply, the way she might in a fractious deposition. “Is it inconvenient for you to talk to me now? It’s obviously very important to me that your convenience take center stage here.”
“That’s not what I meant.” Now he sounded aggrieved. “For fuck’s sake, Maya. You really are making this harder than it has to be.”
“Out of curiosity, how hard do you imagine something like this ought to be? Is there a certain level of reaction you would find acceptable, under the circumstances? Am I allowed to react at all? I’m guessing not. Because—and correct me if I’m off base—I suspect it’s possible that you don’t like being so clearly and inarguably in the wrong.”
She heard a sound like a sigh—even more aggrieved than before, which she would have said wasn’t possible—and a faint clattering noise that she knew was Ethan fiddling around on the table beside the bed for his glasses.
And maybe because she could picture it all so clearly, as if she was standing in the corner of the bedroom herself, Maya knew she didn’t want to go back to that condo. Not even if Ethan removed himself. She didn’t want to live there, surrounded by so many ghosts of a life that would never happen. Not to mention, though she couldn’t hear another person, she was sure he was sharing that bed—and the couch and the soft rug in the den and God knows which other surfaces—with Lorraine. She had to assume they had been sneaking around in her home for some time.
Which meant Maya could never touch anything in it again.
That notion might have hurt her before. And then made her angry, because who didn’t prefer a little spurt of righteous anger to the pain that lay beneath it? But today she could hardly muster more than a shrug.
“You want to hurt me. You want to punish me. I get it.” Ethan actually sounded self-righteous, she realized. As if he saw himself as the victim here—and more, wanted to be the victim.
It should have made her furious. Instead, she wanted to laugh.
And instead of gulping that strange urge down because it was unseemly, she...let herself laugh.
At him. And better yet, unapologetically.
“I don’t want to hurt you, Ethan.” She wasn’t sure that was true. She didn’t want to actively cause him pain, maybe, but she doubted she would work too hard to keep from smiling should karma catch up with him. “And I think we both know that the life you’ve chosen is punishment enough.”
“If that’s meant to be another nasty little dig at Lorraine, you should know straight off I won’t allow it.”
“Good to know.” She was sure he could hear the way she rolled her eyes, and she was fine with that, too. “I’m not being unkind when I point out that the smooth, easy life you always claimed you wanted? That’s not going to happen.
