time my anxiety tore me apart, he stitched me back together again. Which was kind, if also self-serving. In order to get satisfaction from fixing something, you either have to leave it broken for a while first, or break it again yourself.
I drive slowly along the fast London streets, silently rehearsing for real life, catching unwelcome glimpses of my made-up self in the mirror. The thirty-six-year-old woman I see looks angry about being forced to wear a disguise. I am not beautiful, but I’m told I have an interesting face. My eyes are too big for the rest of my features, as though all the things they have seen made them swell out of proportion. My long dark hair has been straightened by expert fingers, not my own, and I’m thin now because the part I’m playing requires me to be so, and because I frequently forget to eat. I forget to eat because a journalist once called me “plump but pretty.” I can’t remember what she said about my performance.
It was a review of my first film role last year. A part that changed my life, and my husband’s, forever. It certainly changed our bank balance, but our love was already overdrawn. He resented my newfound success—it took me away from him—and I think he needed to make me feel small to make himself feel big again. I’m not who he married. I’m more than her now, and I think he wanted less. He’s a journalist, successful in his own right, but it’s not the same. He thought he was losing me, so he started to hold on too tight, so tight that it hurt.
I think part of me liked it.
I park on the street and allow my feet to lead me up the garden path. I bought the Notting Hill town house because I thought it might fix us while we continued to remortgage our marriage. But money is a Band-Aid, not a cure for broken hearts and promises. I’ve never felt so trapped by my own wrong turns. I built my prison in the way that people often do, with solid walls made from bricks of guilt and obligation. Walls that seemed to have no doors, but the way out was always there. I just couldn’t see it.
I let myself in, turning on the lights in each of the cold, dark, vacant rooms.
“Ben,” I call, taking off my coat.
Even the sound of my voice calling his name sounds wrong, fake, foreign.
“I’m home,” I say to another empty space. It feels like a lie to describe this as my home; it has never felt like one. A bird never chooses its own cage.
When I can’t find my husband downstairs, I head up to our bedroom, every step heavy with dread and doubt. The memories of the night before are a little too loud now that I’m back on the set of our lives. I call his name again, but he still doesn’t reply. When I’ve checked every room, I return to the kitchen, noticing the elaborate bouquet of flowers on the table for the first time. I read the small card attached to them; there’s just one word:
Sorry.
Sorry is easier to say than it is to feel. Even easier to write.
I want to rub out what happened to us and go back to the beginning. I want to forget what he did to me and what he made me do. I want to start again, but time is something we ran out of long before we started running from each other. Perhaps if he’d let me have the children I so badly wanted to love, things might have been different.
I retrace my steps back to the lounge and stare at Ben’s things on the coffee table: his wallet, keys, and phone. He never goes anywhere without his phone. I pick it up, carefully, as though it might either explode or disintegrate in my fingers. The screen comes to life and reveals a missed call from a number I don’t recognize. I want to see more, but when I press the button the phone demands Ben’s pass code. I try and fail to guess several times, until it locks me out completely.
I search the house again, but he isn’t here. He isn’t hiding. This isn’t a game.
Back out in the hall, I notice that the coat he always wears is where he left it, and his shoes are still by the front door. I call his name one last