of her seedy little life. It clearly meant so much to her, and now it’s mine. So even though, by Liebling family standards, it’s a fairly modest ring, I know that this is the ring that I want. Maman would’ve approved of what it symbolizes.
“It’s your family heirloom and I love it. It doesn’t matter to me if she had it first.” Then I catch on the word that he just used—baggage—and reconsider. “As long as it doesn’t remind you too much of…her?” I can’t make myself say her name. I’m not even sure which name I would use.
I study Michael’s face for grief or regret, but what’s there is inscrutable. Maybe it’s anger. Maybe it’s resignation. Maybe it’s just love. He leans in and kisses me, so hard it’s almost painful.
“Not a bit,” he murmurs.
* * *
—
I wake up a wife, and I think: I won.
25.
ASHLEY FELT SO REAL to me, for a moment there. That morning when we sat in the library, I believed in the empathy in her eyes, the way she held my hand while I cried, how she teared up about her own father’s death. When I clutched at her on the couch—Tell me what it’s like to be a healer!—she looked me straight in the eyes and said she slept well at night. She hugged me! She assured me that we were friends.
What a fake. What a liar.
And oh! The irony that I felt so intimidated by her. Her cool detachment; her serene poise; the way she seemed to float around Stonehaven, above it all, occasionally gracing me with that knowing smile. That morning, after I wept on her shoulder about Daddy and Maman, I actually felt embarrassed! I stood at the window and watched her meander back down to the caretaker’s cottage, her yoga mat tucked under her arm, and convinced myself that I’d somehow screwed it all up. Because I’d noticed the way she hesitated to embrace me in the hall. And so, as she walked away, I convinced myself that she was repulsed by my messiness, my neediness, by the way I’d bragged about my Instagram fame.
I let myself believe she was better than me.
What a fool.
* * *
—
For a few days after our conversation in the library, I slunk around Stonehaven, acutely conscious of Michael and Ashley down the hill in the cottage, too self-conscious to go knock on their door. Certain that I’d screwed everything up. Barely climbing out of bed, the black funk having once again descended with its curtain of self-loathing. Occasionally, I’d spy Ashley doing her yoga out on the lawn, or the pair of them walking the grounds—bundled up in their parkas, bumping up against each other as they walked—and I’d long to go out to them.
I forced myself to stay inside, my skin breaking out in anxious hives that I scratched at until they were bloody and raw.
You’ll know they genuinely like you if they come to you, I told myself.
But they didn’t.
On their fourth day in the cottage—two days since Ashley and I had talked—I lay in bed for most of the morning, watching the shadows move across the room as the sun crossed overhead. I could see myself reflected in the mirror on the front of the giant armoire that hulked on the other side of the room and the sight of myself (a greasy-haired wraith, so pale and weak that I might as well just disappear) made me want to break something; so eventually I got up and threw open the armoire doors just to make the damn mirrors go away.
And oh! My mother’s sweaters. I’d forgotten they were still there, beautiful pastel stacks of cashmere folded into neat rectangles. (Lourdes had a way with laundry; we did love her so.) My father had never cleaned out the closets in Stonehaven and I hadn’t ever bothered to unpack myself and so there they still were, the last vestiges of Maman, filling the ancient armoire. I touched one: thin and soft, the very essence of her.
I pulled a pale pink angora cardigan down from a shelf and pressed it hopefully