first. But, the more time I spend as the wife of Grant Cabot, the more I feel like that’s all I am:
The wife of Grant Cabot.
It took a few months for Adeline to slip away, for the woman I once was to respectfully bow out and allow this new person to step in with her expensive clothes and red soled shoes, with her China patterns and flower arrangements.
Now I spend more time arranging dinner parties than I do anything else. I haven’t taken a single photograph that wasn’t on my phone. I gave up my music. I haven’t danced.
All of that was in the past as Grant so often tells me, habits of youth that do nothing to enhance his image.
I understand he needs a wife that will help represent him when it comes to business and the social obligations it entails, but did he have to take everything?
In only a few months, I’d disappeared. Become unrecognizable. Saying and doing things I never would have done before I married him.
And I feel like a brat for even thinking these thoughts. I’d wanted to grow up, and he was helping me, but I didn’t think it meant so much would change. I didn’t believe he’d disapprove of so much about me.
Maybe he never saw me to begin with?
He saw a shell. Something that could be molded into what he wanted. Grant had looked at me and recognized potential, but he never wanted the girl I’d once been.
It’s my life now, regardless, and one I am determined to make the best of. He isn’t abusive or cruel. Isn’t neglectful or unattached. He just wants a wife that represents him, one who will make him proud when surrounded by his associates and friends.
Maybe this is what growing up means.
I fucking hate it.
But still, it is what it is, and despite our problems, I feel fortunate that I have a man like Grant. He takes care of me. Shelters me. Does what I assume husbands are supposed to do, even though I have no one to talk to or no experience to fall back on.
It’s what my father always did for my mother, and she’d been happy.
I think.
Grass blades run under my hands as I stare at the marble tombstone with my parents’ names carved on it. It is the anniversary of the night my father died, and I try to ignore the anger slithering inside me.
He was upset, that’s what I try to believe. Not in his right mind when he’d pulled that trigger. He’d left me without any family I really knew, my aunt officially fostering me until I was eighteen, even though she never spent many nights in the house.
It felt like a life spent horribly alone.
Now I have a husband. The promise of a family. So, why does it still feel like I’m standing in the center of nothing, my arms outstretched, heart begging for someone to take hold?
I am floating away from Earth again, almost sucked in by the black hole.
It must be why I am screaming in my sleep again.
Crying.
Fighting.
Reaching for something that isn’t there.
The symptoms hadn’t been there for the first couple months we were married. Hadn’t happened at all while we traveled for our honeymoon. I’d been in newlywed bliss and must have done a damn good job convincing myself I was happy.
Within a week of coming back home, I was empty again. Falling back on old thoughts and habits, behaviors that I never thought I’d escape.
Grant tried to understand at first, but after a few nights of it, he’d leave to sleep in the guest bedroom. I’d tried to explain to him what an old friend of mine would do to stop me, but rather than listening to what I was telling him, he got more upset that I was talking about being in bed with another man.
He was just a friend.
Grant didn’t care.
It’s been two months since he slept in the same bed as me. One since he stopped bothering to come home at all many nights.
He forced me to go see a doctor, to get tested, and now he is trying to force me to take a cocktail of pills I don’t want.
It’s been a week since I filled the prescriptions. I haven’t swallowed the first pill.
I lean against my parents’ headstone, the hard marble cool against my skin. Around me the day is beautiful. Clear blue skies stretch out, calm and languid, endless in every direction. Birds fly from one tree to