“You’d regret it if you didn’t try,” he summed up. He was very still, very watchful, but didn’t express any regret on his side. This was purely her decision, he seemed to be saying.
“I think I would, yes.” She said the words steadily enough, but her heart was listing in her chest. Sinking.
He nodded. “Then, you should do whatever you need to. I have every confidence that you could be very successful if you give it your all. I won’t hold you back.”
His words were like the slide of a guillotine, hissing and thunking. She’d known this moment would happen, but the shock still reverberated through her. It was over. She had wanted him to fight for her, but he was making it easy for her to leave him. She nodded, head loose on her shoulders. “I’ll go email them.”
She rose, feeling weightless and uncoordinated. Despite the warmth of the morning, her skin pimpled with cold. Her fingers were nerveless and her essence stayed at the table while the shell of her body moved away.
The separation of soul and self was so painful she couldn’t even react. Couldn’t cry.
* * *
When Roman made love to her that night she shuddered in ecstasy but couldn’t talk afterward. Couldn’t face the emptiness of her future, even though emptiness was the only option open to her.
If she had thought there was a chance for them, she might have forgone taking the job and stayed with him, but Roman wasn’t like her. He enjoyed female company, loved sex, cared to a point, but he didn’t love her back.
And maybe, if she hadn’t seen firsthand how emotional and financial dependence had gutted her mother’s self-esteem, Melodie might have settled for one-sided love. But she couldn’t do that to herself.
So she held back her tears until, a handful of days later, Roman left for New York and she caught a flight to Italy. They pretended they’d see each other soon, but she knew this was the beginning of the end. Better to make the break a clean one.
* * *
Before Melodie had even finished her work in Italy and sent her thank-you note to the Marcussens for referring her, she received a request from each of Nic’s three siblings asking her to do similar jobs for them. Without hesitation she accepted the commissions. She found herself in Athens by the end of that week, Paris the next and over to New York at the end of the month.
Roman was gone from that city by then, having been called to a supplier’s factory in China. Their face-to-face wireless connections had turned into texts and emails and became more sporadic. She had thought—hoped—Roman would make the effort to track her down or invite her to meet him somewhere, but her schedule was constantly filling and he was making no effort to ask her to come back to him.
Their temporary separation had obviously clarified itself into the natural end to their arrangement. It felt like an amputation. She pined and longed and yearned. Fortunately, though, she was so busy she could only break down at night before she went to sleep alone and dreamed she was with him again.
At least she was creating a decent life for herself. As word spread, a studio in New York reached out to her. It was extremely well respected, had all the print facilities and lined up gigs for its photographers. Quite unexpectedly, Melodie had a home base in the city she’d always wanted to inhabit. All her preparations for the wedding-planning business came in handy now as she reworked them for her new photography business. Practically overnight she was supporting herself.
Roman greased the wheels, of course. She realized that after a few weeks, when one of the studio owners dropped a remark about how he’d come to hear of her. The sublease on her one-room flat was equally a convenient find, but she chose not to fight Roman on it. She suspected he was trying to make up for flattening her first attempt at a proper career. She let him help her. It was a kindness that went both ways.
But she missed him with every breath in her body, every minute of every day.
* * *
Roman was stunned. It took him weeks to fully absorb that Melodie had left him. One day he was waking to the shift of silken limbs against him, the next he was walking around like a bomb-blast victim, shell-shocked and unable to make sense of the empty landscape around him.
He kept going back to that moment when she’d told him she had a job offer. He had felt everything in him draining away then. He’d seen himself about to lose everything and he hadn’t known how to stop it. It was like being nine years old again, completely powerless to change what was happening to him.
He couldn’t stand in the way of Melodie taking a job she wanted, though. He’d already caused her to lose her livelihood twice. And she genuinely loved photography. How could he blurt out that the idea of her leaving him made him physically sick?