our marriage was off to a rocky start from the beginning. We were so perfect on paper, but in reality, we didn’t have a lot to connect over, you know?”
I grab a napkin for myself. I’m crying now too. It’s the surprise. The pain of seeing my sister hurt so much.
“I don’t know, actually,” I say, carefully picking my words. “Y’all were a picture of perfection from the second y’all met. You were both successful. Beautiful. You took these incredible trips and had this, like, insane wedding that was the most fun party I’ve ever been to. When I saw the two of you together, you seemed to always be smiling and happy. You were definitely always smiling for the camera, even when you were doing your workout of the day together. Hashtag WOD, hashtag the couple that slays together stays together.”
“Hey. I work hard in the gym. There’s nothing wrong with being proud of that.”
I squeeze her shoulder. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to poke fun. Guess a part of me is jealous you have the time and money to do that stuff.”
“No, you’re right.” She takes another breath. “The hashtags were obnoxious. Hell, my whole feed is obnoxious. But what was I supposed to post? ‘Hey, Palmer and I are at a five-star resort in Vietnam, but we haven’t talked in two days’? Or, ‘hey, Palmer and I just burned eight hundred calories at the gym, but no matter how hard I try, he never looks at me the way he looks at Coach Cindy’?”
“Aw.” I hand Lindsey another napkin. “Aw, Linds, that’s fucking awful.”
She puts her elbows on her knees and leans forward, nodding. “It’s such a cliché, showing the world a highlight reel when the reality is a total dumpster fire. But the pressure to be perfect, and to be happy—it’s real, Emma. I mean, don’t you feel like there’s no space for the messy parts of life? To show them and to actually live them? It’s like, hey, shit’s not great in my life right now, but I’m gonna sweep it under the rug and paste on a smile and snap a picture, and maybe if I keep doing that, the reality will finally start to look like the highlight.”
“But it doesn’t,” I say. “The disconnect only grows.”
Lindsey grabs her wine and gulps it. “Yup. You’re a much smarter cookie than I ever was—”
“Hey, you’re the one with the Ivy League degree.”
“And you’re the one with a sensitivity for bullshit. Your own and others’ too. So, yeah, you’ve always known that’s magical thinking—believing that if you just try hard enough, you can be as perfect as your Instagram feed says you are. But I guess I had to learn that lesson the hard way.” She refills her glass with a hand that shakes. “Palmer loved CrossFit. I hated it, but I did it because I wanted to have a shared hobby or whatever. And I hate my job, but I wanted us to be in the same profession so we’d always have that to talk about. Because we didn’t really have much else in common other than that.”
“What?” I widen my eyes. “You hate your job?”
“Em, I work eighty-hour weeks putting together prospectuses for structured product deals. Of course I hate my job.”
“What the hell is a structured product?”
“Trust me, you’d fall asleep long before I finished explaining that. But it’s boring, draining, never-ending work, and I fucking hate it. So, yeah. Now I’m alone, with a job I hate and a dream house I have to sell, and I just want to quit it all.” She laughs, the sound hard and unhappy. “I just might.”
“But you have it all. You’re the dream, Linds. The success story.”
Lindsey looks me in the eye for the first time since the conversation started. “If living a lie is the dream, then I want no part of it.”
“Wow.” I give myself a minute to let her words sink in. “Just…wow.”
“Look. If my life falling apart has taught me one thing, it’s that perfection is a Ponzi scheme. You rob yourself again and again of the truth so you can show the world something pretty but fake. The more you do it, the worse you feel. But the world tells us if we just keep trying, if we just get that trip or that ring or that dollar amount in our bank account, we’ll get to the top of the pyramid where pretty is finally real, and it