“Better that,” I say, “then being with a man who doesn’t appreciate you.”
Sophia looks down at her hands.Sophia,I think. The name fits her. Soft and strong and classic, somehow. Steady.
She doesn’t respond to my words and I raise an arm to hail for a taxi. Lord knows I don’t know what to say to crying women. Or crying men, for that matter, not to mention crying babies. My younger brother has one on the way now, and no doubt the little kid’s favorite activity will be screaming his lungs out whenever I hold him.
A taxi rolls to a slow stop in the designated waiting spot outside the Winter Hotel. Sophia looks up at me. “I’m embarrassed,” she says softly.
I shake my head. “Don’t be. You reacted exactly like a person in your position would.”
She blinks away a new set of tears. They glitter like diamonds along her lashes. “Thank you. Truly.”
“Anytime,” I say, and open the car door for her. Sophia Browne, soon to be something else, the woman with the heaven-blue eyes and balls of steel, steps into the car. Dark hair, camel coat, nude loafers. The picture of elegant put-togetherness, marred only by the devastated expression on her fine features.
I can’t let her go just yet. I pause with my hand on the door. “Just promise you’ll do one thing for me?”
“Yes?” she says.
“Don’t let this ruin your image of the Winter Hotel.”
Her mouth curls into a small smile. “It won’t. It’s thanks to your shampoo bottles that I even found out!”
I watch as the taxi drives off down the avenue, hugging the edges of Central Park in the direction of the Upper East Side.
Then, I shove my hands in my pockets and walk down the street toward Flake’s, my original plan intact, even as my mind dwells on the diamond-like eyes that shone brighter than the one on her finger.
1
SOPHIA
Ten months later
Divorce has taught me a lot of lessons.
One is that the cushions, towels, and cutlery adorned with the couple monogram is a spectacularly bad idea. It hadn’t been mine, of course, but my former mother-in-law’s, but that doesn’t change the fact I now have a set of beautiful towels I don’t want to use. A couple monogram is only useful as long as the couple exists.
And Percy’s and mine no longer does.
But the lesson that hurts the most has little to do with cutlery or the artful intertwining of our initials. No, it’s all about our mutual friends.
I’ve now learned the hard way that there’s no such thing. In the trenches of divorce warfare, everyone takes a side.
It had started as soon as I filed, the slow decline in texts, phone calls, invitations, brunch invites and hellos from the people we’d surrounded ourselves with during our seven years as a couple, four of those married.
Our mutual friends chose a side, and it was very rarely mine. Oh, our female friends were very understanding when I met them, of course.I was so sorry to hear about it all,Maud had told me at a dinner, two months post filing for divorce.Was there no way to… repair it? To look past his little indiscretion? Here, let me give you the name of the couple’s therapist Mark and I used when we were going through something similar. Just think about it, Sophia. You two have so much together.
Yes, I’d thought. We have a shit ton of monogrammed junk.
So maybe they weren’t so very understanding, after all.
Most of the people Percy and I knew were more his friends than they were ever mine. His old camaraderie of buddies from school, be it the semester he did at boarding school or from his Ivy League college. His squash friends and his golf buddies, and his parents’ friends and their children, and the entire vast, ivy-covered network we’d built together in New York—except it wasn’tournetwork, and I didn’t build it. He and his parents did, and I had naively thought I’d become a part of it.
That I’d made it my own and that I had a life here.
But one divorce later and I’m as much of an outsider as I’d been when I arrived in New York a decade earlier. Percy’s part ofthem. I’m not, and what was once a hairline fracture is now a yawning gulf between us.
I’m Sophia Bishop from Marhill, an outsider, no longer invited to bottomless brunches and couples’ golf sessions.
So, I’ve done the one thing I can… and that’s work.