said instantly, and confidently. “This one will bring me luck. You wait and see.” And she was right. It has.
It doesn’t look like a traditional wedding band, and nothing like the large pear-shaped diamond she wore all those years, but people were less traditional these days, and it could certainly pass as a wedding band; yet still, people were calling her “miss.”
“You look younger,” Charlie said once, when they were discussing it. “You look, well, real. Like a real person. When you were married you looked like the wife of a hot-shot banker.”
Kit laughed. “That would be because I was the wife of a hot-shot banker.”
“That’s the point. You looked it.”
“Do I really look that different?”
“Yes. You do.”
Occasionally, Kit looks at old photos of herself. She didn’t particularly want to keep the albums from her marriage, except for the ones with the children, but now that there is little negative charge around Adam, she is able to look at them without feeling anything other than amazement: this was her life, this is who she used to be.
Kit, like so many women, is a consummate chameleon, or at least was, before her divorce. In those days she wasn’t at all sure of who she really was, and so she tried to fit in with what she thought people wanted her to be.
With Adam, that meant being a perfect hostess, a perfect wife. Dressing up, looking glamorous and elegant, in an attempt to present themselves as the perfect couple.
But designer suits and high heels just weren’t Kit. She knew how to do them, knew how to pull off the look—with a mother like Ginny, how could she possibly not know?—but she always felt like a poor facsimile of her mother, who was, she suspected, the type of person Adam really wanted her to be.
And because she was so much happier in jeans, with no make up, her feet in Dansko clogs or Uggs, she was never able to relax in those formal clothes, never able to be herself, always felt as if, at any moment, the façade would slip and Adam’s colleagues or business partners or friends, would see that she was not the person she was pretending to be, and that Kit Hargrove, plain old Kit Hargrove without all the accoutrements, was no one.
There had been a time—Kit must have been around eleven—when she was staying with her mother during the summer, and Ginny had been ill. Kit had tiptoed in to see her early one morning while Ginny was asleep, and Kit had been entirely shocked. Ginny’s face was scrubbed bare, her hair wispy and thin around her face, her mouth hanging slack as she snored lightly.
This wasn’t the woman Kit knew as her mother. This was an old woman. A stranger. And often, as Kit set about turning herself into a glamourpuss for Adam, she thought of her mother, of how she too wore her clothes, her make-up, her jewels, as a costume.
They certainly worked as armor. Kit felt reserved with them on. She could be someone else: gracious, elegant, charming. What she couldn’t do was what she does all the time at home these days, now she doesn’t have to pretend to be someone else: curl up on the sofa, or slouch at the kitchen table drinking coffee.
She did what all the other women did, what she thought she had to do in order to be accepted. She spent her days going to ladies’ lunches, or sitting primly at the local theater, or attending book group meetings where everyone strived to show off their intellectual prowess.
She dressed her children in the requisite French designer clothes, put them in class after class after class, because she was trying so hard to be like all the others, to be good enough, to be liked.
But since the divorce, she has changed immeasurably. Since the divorce, she has remembered who she is. Not a meek replica of all the other wealthy wives in Highfield, not someone who follows the pack, but someone who is in full charge of her life, who doesn’t have to prove anything to anyone else, who never feels the need to play a role, or try to be someone else.
These days she has taken to wearing little or no make-up, choosing clothes for practicality and function, not to impress, and as a result she moves differently, with a grace and comfort in her skin that is surprising to those who only knew her during the marriage.