“Baa baa, black sheep, have you any wool?”

I had been lying on the floor of the shop for the past thirty minutes, inspecting the tin plate ceiling tiles, little mock-patina fleurs-de-lis that intersected at mostly perfect right angles. We hadn’t had a customer in an hour, which really isn’t that uncommon on a Wednesday morning. I’d already gone on the morning coffee run for Ben (black Americano, two Splendas) and Molly (English Breakfast, a fair amount of almond milk) and reorganized ephemera (again). Molly was in the dank subterranean office wrapping books for mailing later that afternoon, including a copy of “Ray’s a Laugh” that had been sitting around unsold for several years at $250, no takers. Ben says a film based (sort of) on the book was being released over here, hence the sudden interest. We kept the book stashed in a locked vitrine with some of the more valuable volumes, and I pulled it out from time to time to look at a Britain I had no familiarity with: council houses, gut-churning poverty, violence (real and threatened), alcoholism that wasn’t just a punchline but a punch. I knew these things existed but my life there, some 16 months and more holidays than I care to recall, was one of unsullied privilege that Julian worked hard to maintain for me, for us. For all his casual cruelty and need to control my life, he was careful to keep pain that outside forces might threaten from me. I suppose that privilege was his alone.

Ben was not downstairs. He was standing over me, straddling my ankles. “I said, have you any wool, Mel?” From this angle, squinting up at him, I could see why he was beginning to be worried about developing a double chin, but I would never tell him this. Ben has a good five years on me, and asks me regularly to inspect him for signs of encroaching senescence. (“Hopelessly middle-aged now, my salad days behind me,” is a popular refrain on rainy days, though we haven’t had any of those recently.) He tapped my right calf tentatively with his beat-up deck shoe. “Looks like you finally amassed a big enough pile of the stuff to knock you over. Now get up.”

“Funny ha ha, Ben. Yes, ‘woolgathering’ again.” I regret ever mentioning the word to him in relation to myself; he’s recently taken to presenting me with little lamb figurines and a fuzzy Shaun the Sheep, none of which I can bear to throw away but all of which remind me of how very disconnected I feel from the present at the moment. The events of the past few weeks overshadow the rather pedestrian day-to-day trifles of my weekday life, and those events themselves are rooted in a struggle between Alex and Julian that predates my presence in their lives. Rehashing our joint past sometimes feels like I’m sorting through old photos on my computer and they start coming to life, like I’m watching little scenes in miniature play out once more, but I’m helpless to direct or redirect the characters on the screen. They play out their ghastly little dramas again and again; characters move from scene to scene, and they never learn. The little puppets make the same mistakes.

“Honey. Get the fuck up. That floor is disgusting and I know that dress is Altuzarra. Also you’re depressing me with your mopemopemope.” Ben reached down his left arm and I allowed him to hoist me to my feet. I dusted the blue gingham dress off, picked a stray beard hair (I hope it was a beard hair) off my arm and straightened my spine. Ben patted my head. “Boo, this is not good, all… this” — he swept his hands in circles before me — “is just pathetic. Why are you letting Julian take up all this space in your pretty head?”

Good question. Probably because I was a member of the Cult of Julian for over 11 years and it’s sense memory at this point, being always on guard, ready to serve or swerve or avoid a verbal lashing. Sometimes I wonder if putting up with all the gaslighting over the years has made me smarter, since I was always working to figure out whether my version of reality was actually true.

But I didn’t say any of this. “It’s not Julian.” (A lie, one of so many I have told, they slip more easily from my mouth than the truth. The truth requires me disclosing too much of whoever Melissa really is these days, and I haven’t settled on that definition yet.) “Don’t you roll your eyes at me, Benjamin.”

Another pat on the head. “Okay, honey, whatever you say. I’ll just keep patronizing you while you lie to me. We can do this all day. You’re not off until 6.”

“It’s Alex,” I blurted out, which was sort of the truth, near enough to it. “He’s leaving Friday afternoon for Lucy’s sixth birthday and then he’ll be at work in London and I won’t see him for over a week.” This was all completely true, even if it wasn’t what was gnawing at me, and seemed like a plausible explanation for the dreamy funk in which I’d been swimming while staring at the tin tiles, mentally squaring the ones that were slightly misaligned.

“Aw hon, that’s what FaceTime is for. And it’s not like you two live together, so you can’t miss him that much.” Ben slapped his hand over his mouth immediately but too late — he’d pressed a bony finger into the sorest spot in my relationship with Alex. You two don’t live together.

I can’t say that he’s wrong. I also can’t say that Al’s continuing refusal to cohabitate doesn’t feel like rejection, week after week, as we trudge the 15 miles back and forth from my home to his then back again. The wasted hours and money on the BART and the bus and in Lyfts and Ubers and the occasional car rental. The nights we stay up until 1am anyway talking on the phone, sharing the minutiae of our days when we could be tucked into the folds of each other, telling each other these very same things before drifting off, side by side in his queen bed. The painful Sunday nights we spend sitting hip to hip on the blue velvet loveseat (I’ve bought Alex an ottoman to prop up his long legs), reading novels in companionable silence or political news to each other, spinning off long debates, every minute a chance to prolong the time until he’s asking me for one more kiss, and another one, and another one, until he has to call a car. Until I’m kissing him at the garden gate with my back pressing down the wisteria and waving goodbye, goodbye to the back of his head, and thinking, why are we still doing this? If you love me so much, if you’ve loved me for so long, why do you still want to be alone?

But I said none of this. “Well, I just worry about him.” I ducked my head, pushed myself forward onto my toes, and back onto my heels. “Particularly if he’s going to be crashing at Will’s for a week. Alex just doesn’t drink like he used to and Will’s going to use the visit as an excuse to get Al blotto every night.”

Alex tipsy or on a mellow buzz is deliciously fun, relaxed, verbose, affectionate, loose. He’ll buy rounds for the whole pub, break out into song in his lovely baritone, order useless crap like a vintage Grand Seiko watch from eBay (which he claims he’ll flip later, but I don’t think he ever has), make his girl feel like she’s strong and golden, his best mates geniuses. When Al’s a notch up from there, there might be awkward dancing, confessions of love for all within earshot, extemporaneous poetry recitation, maybe a drunk dial to me if I’m not there. But he’s still kind, he’s still fun.

Alex utterly drunk… Flip a coin. Heads (and most frequently, the coin seems to be weighted this way) you get him passed out, snoring, his dark hair dipped into sloshed beer on the pub table, a smile on his face, oblivious to Jamie writing “WANKER” on his forehead in Miranda’s lipstick, or you shuffling him out into a waiting taxi. Tails? As Julian said before, Alex drunk and angry can be unstable. You get Alex remembering past slights great and small (“you cunt, you stole my FUCKING crisps/jumper/£40,000/daughter!” — choose one, or choose your own), threatening (and rarely executing) a beating or a lawsuit, a sheen of sweat on his forehead, his eyes unfocused. But ever towards me? Oh, never towards me. If there is one filament of sanity in these sad moments, it’s the melty half-smile he develops if he sees me or hears me try to pull him out of the idée fixe possessing him. “Ah Mel, my girl. My sweet girl, my heart. Where shall we go, my lovely?”

You can imagine how thrilled Julian was to hear Alex say these things long after my dalliance with Al was over, and I was supposed to be Julian’s alone. And after we’d come home from the pub, or the dinner party, or were back in our bedroom at some dreadful house party in the country, Julian would deliver a verbal thwacking. “You encouraged him again, Liss. How many times must I remind you that even though he is my best friend, he is NOT yours? You can’t be so open with a flirt like him. You simply can’t encourage him. You mean nothing to him, and I see it make you nervous when he responds. You shouldn’t have to put me through this embarrassment. There’s a very simple solution, even you can understand it: don’t flirt.” (Everything I said to Alex was flirting, every laugh and glance was too, according to Julian.)

Ben took me by the shoulders and touched his forehead to mine. “Melissa Layla Cranford, Alex is a big boy. He can take care of himself.” (Can he?) “Stop torturing yourself. He had a whole life without you before he came over here. He was married and started raising a kid. It isn’t always about you, Mel, and I mean that in the best way.” He mussed my hair, and then thought better of it, carefully restoring the part and tucking some loose tendrils behind my left ear.

(he’s right he’s right)

Ben touched his lips to my forehead. “You’ve been through the wringer the past couple of weeks, baby girl. Let’s do something tonight.” His eyes shot to the tin tiles, seeking inspiration in the cockeyed pattern there. “Let’s go see Midsommar at the Regal and I’ll take you out for a cocktail after at Beta. Let’s eat Twizzlers and drink mojitos and say ‘fuck it’ to your past and future husbands. Oh shit.” He clamped his hand over his mouth again.

He’d touched the second sorest spot. We do not speak of marriage to Alex.

***

“Think about it this way,” Ben said as we walked out of the cinema later that night, down Shattuck towards Beta Lounge. (I had to steer him away from slipping into Pegasus Books, reminding him of such a thing as a busman’s holiday.) “Julian’s a rat bastard, but at least he didn’t fuck a Swedish virgin as part of a pagan ritual and get himself burned up in a bear suit.”

I grunted. “There’s still time.” The number of times I wished Julian had just stopped existing has now started to eclipse the number of times I wanted to slip into a months-long coma to escape my life for a while (with no consequences, of course), so I count that as a mark in the credits column of my time on this planet. I don’t want him dead so much as not being on the same plane of existence as me.

Grabbing my hand, Ben pulled me through Beta’s front door and settled me onto one of the couches in the back. “I’ll get you that mojito on one condition,” he told me, his finger pointed at me as if to accuse me of some offense. “You are NOT to post about this on Instagram while I am up at the bar. Last thing we need is Julian to know yet another place where you hang out.”

My turn to roll my eyes like a chagrined teenager. “Like he’s going to show up here.” Like Rachel, Julian sees Berkeley as some heathen backwater, but is if anything more offended by its very existence because “the place is riddled with hippies, leftists and socialists.” (Actually, true.) I could not have chosen a better place to lay low: “I could practically smell the unwashed bodies from the back of the car when I came to see you settled into that clammy little houselet.” One time was enough for Julian; his visit was only to ensure that his money was being spent on something suitable for me, and not suitable for me and Alex together. “Stop acting like a mother hen.”

“Cluck cluck, try and stop me, chick,” Ben teased as he walked over to the bar, a vision of studied Northeast prep in his Nantucket reds, Gant buttowndown and Topsiders. It’s his disguise, and quite a good one — even with that Mississippi accent, he’s able to affect an air of casual entitlement far better than I could ever, even with the years I spent hovering at edges of a quite smart set. If you could get Ben to keep his mouth shut for more than two minutes, he could pass for a Dartmouth-by-way-of-Andover man in the Vineyard.

Just because I couldn’t, shouldn’t post didn’t mean looking was off limits. Jen was toasting the sunset in Santa Fe with her cousin Carly. Bex was doing bridal hair trials (consensus was gathering over the slightly messy Dutch braid). Rachel had been at the Lion King premiere the night before, looking sickeningly gorgeous in vintage Azzedine Alaia (rich green, off the shoulder) as Matt smiled gamely one step behind her. Annabelle had a new chicken named Scarlett. Miranda posted a close up of her eyeball. Even Julian, who rarely posts anything except pictures of himself with various politicos at $2,000 a plate fundraisers or occasionally a moody black and white self-portrait in profile, had a new post up.

It was the last of these that I found most confusing, because it was neither a selfie nor from a chicken dinner with a clutch of young(ish) Republicans. Julian was lounging shirtless, poolside on a deck chair, the setting sun reflecting off his sunglasses. He was more tan and blonder than just the other week, and his face was lit not only by the sun but a genuine smile, broad, warm, even joyful, the one I remember from our very first days together, a smile directed at the photographer. The caption read simply, “SB and AH.” Who took this picture? Who was SB? AH?

Spotting Ben approaching with our drinks, I hastily opened the New York Times app and started reading about some Mississippi politician who was invoking the “Billy Graham rule” of not spending time alone with women who were not his wife, which is so ridiculous and sexist that even Julian would scoff at such a stand. While Jules was never completely comfortable with me having male friends, he didn’t stop me from having the occasional drink with Mack or Sean (preferably Mack, no romantic history there). “Never could stop you from doing what you want, I’ve learned to my detriment.” This wasn’t completely true — he “let” me go when he felt like I had “earned” time through my compliance in other areas of our marriage, like behaving nicely at a business dinner, or filling the house with vases of ranunculus (his favorite), or submitting to another humiliating round of trying to conceive.

Ben wordlessly handed me a mojito and then grabbed my phone from my hand. “Hey! I was reading an article in the Times about Mississippi! I thought we could talk about –“

“Stop lying to me, Mel. I could see what you were doing from the bar. Now let’s see what you’ve been up to.” Ben flipped through my open apps. “New York Times, oh! Some truth for a change. Google Maps, YouTube, acceptable. My word, what is this?” Ben looked up from my phone with a feigned look of surprise turning his lips into a little “o.” “Instagram? Whyever would you look at that when you had literally just promised me that you wouldn’t?”

“Give it back. It’s private.” I slashed through the air trying to grab the phone, but Ben held it high above his head, out of reach. “And anyway, I didn’t promise I wouldn’t look,” I grumbled. “I said I wouldn’t post, and I didn’t.”

“Semantics!” Ben laughed, and started scrolling through my feed. “Now let’s see what we have here. Holy hell, your sister is beautiful.” I scowled at him and sucked a long sip of mojito through the reusable metal straw I’d fished out of my handbag. “I can see the family resemblance, but of course, you come by your looks naturally instead of resorting to fillers.”

“Do you really think she uses fillers?” I asked, eager to know there was some comparison with Rachel in which I would prevail, even though I knew it was hopelessly petty.

“Aw honey, nobody’s lips look like that after 35 but it’s not too too, if you know what I mean. Whoever she sees knows what they’re doing. Hmm, what else… chickens, old houses…” He’s too vain to wear his reading glasses in public, so Ben squinted down at the screen, wrinkling his brow (I should really tell him not to do that, it does make him look his age).

I sucked down the rest of my mojito, knowing the picture of Julian would be coming up soon. If I kept up this pace of drinking, I’d be the one face down in a pool of beer soon. “Hey Ben, mind getting me another one?” I tilted the empty glass back and forth in front of him, between his eyes and the screen.

“Can it, brat. You might could go get us both another while I figure out what had you so… transfixed.” I know I could have wrestled the phone away from him, but part of me wanted to talk about the mysterious poolside picture. “Go!”

By the time I got back with the drinks, Ben was fiddling with both my phone and his own, as well as a tablet I didn’t even know he had with him. The cocktail napkin was covered in smudged notes in black ink: “SB? Name or location. SB = Santa Barbara. AH? Already Hot? Animal Husbandry? Alex… Hopeless? ARAMINTA H-Somebody???”

“You’re funny, Mel. I bet you’ve been halfway bursting out of your dress waiting to talk to me about this.” (Perfectly accurate.) “I have to say though, I understand from this picture exactly why you stayed married to him for so long. Rich and he looks like this? Damn girl, sorry he’s such a domineering asshole.” Ben reached up for his mojito, took a sip and looked thoughtfully again at the picture.

“In my defense,” I added as I tucked my legs beneath me to lean closer to Ben and the multiple screens, “I had no idea this picture was going to be up when I started scrolling. I mean, Julian so rarely posts anything, and never pictures like this.”

“Oh, I looked through all his posts.” Ben shrugged. “You were up there for a while. He really likes that tortured-emo black and white aesthetic, doesn’t he? What a window into his soul, really — he definitely sees himself as a victim of his circumstances, which in turn explains the other clutch of pictures at all those MAGA events. He really is a darling little snowflake, isn’t he? Christ.”

“What were you able to figure out? I don’t think it’s Minty by the way who’s ‘AH’ — she’s in Dorset right now, definitely. Lucy’s party is in a couple of days.” Minty tapped Alex for a tidy sum to throw some ridiculous event nominally for their daughter, but really to impress all the other mums and remind them that she is definitely the queen bee in that village, and the next one over. Not only will there be pony rides and facepainting and a visit from a fairy princess for the kids (most of which I think is not too outrageous), but also an OTT high tea for the 20 or so parents in attendance. The entire back garden, already a tumult of roses and hydrangea at this time of year, will be stuffed with yet more roses, peonies and lisianthus, dianthus and tulips and thistles (one small nod to Lucy’s Scottish blood, a reminder that Alex had some role in bringing this tiny princess into the world). Tea and champagne and cake and those dumb little finger sandwiches that you eat because it wouldn’t do to drink on an empty stomach, and yet nobody really wants to eat anything substantial for fear it might make them “fat” or at least put a lining in their bellies and thereby dull the buzz from the champagne. (I’ve been to enough of these types of affairs to know.)

Alex just rolled over and paid for every last tulip in that garden, every bottle of Perrier Jouet, the fairy princess and the six cakes and the bloody waitstaff. I know he pays out of guilt, but I also know that Minty uses that guilt to ensure she never has to feel the wolf is anywhere near the door. Lucy would be safer if she had a new Range Rover. Lucy would be more cultured if she could travel to Mauritius with Minty on holiday. Lucy would have more success if Alex could just see to getting Minty and Lucy back to London from parochial and boring Dorset. (“She’s practically sounding like a Wurzel these days, Alexander. It’s simply beyond the most dreadful ITV Thomas Hardy adaptation. We have to do something before her accent is stuck like this, or she’ll only be fit to work in a Poundbury tea shop.”)

Ben passed his tablet over to me. “I was able to figure out ‘SB’ — Santa Barbara. Look at that picture.” On the screen was the very pool in Julian’s picture, the same loungers. the same palm trees. “He’s at the Ritz-Carlton, very nice. But who or what is ‘AH’?”

I drew a blank, though I was very impressed by Ben’s sleuthing. “No idea. Have you ever thought about a sideline in detective work though?”

Ben puffed his chest out a little. “Got through the first round of interviews for the CIA, you know. Failed a psychological test though.” He looked down, stirred the mint in his drink with the stick of cane sugar. “I’m a researcher, really. That’s why that Ph.D. seemed like a good idea at the time I started, but I got bored. I was only there” — meaning Ole Miss — “to avoid having to grow up. Read an article about bookselling and thought I might make a little on the side to supplement my Top Ramen diet. Oxford turned out to be surprisingly larded with people looking to offload quite decent old books and I got sucked in by the thrill of the hunt. Fuck that Ph.D.”

I was now a little loopy from two mojitos on a dinner of Twizzlers, and put my head on his shoulder. “Benjamin, who do you think took that picture? I mean, Julian looks like he’s happy, happier than I remember seeing him in years. It’s not just that he’s smiling — he smiles when he’s smug, he smiles when he closes a deal, he smiles when he gets one over on someone — but it’s that smile. That’s a smile he used to give me before we started really disintegrating, back when we still were… whatever we were.”

“Before he made you permanently sad, darlin’.” Ben stroked my hair and kissed the top of my head. In Alex’s weekday absence, Ben’s tender Platonic love keeps my rudder steady, stops me from sailing off into the miserable past to replay those sorry scenes again and again in my mind, hoping to find the keys to all the wretched little rooms in my mind, each haunted by their own pathetic ghosts.

I don’t deserve Ben’s love, but I’ll take it anyway. (“You’re so greedy for affection, Mel,” Julian would tell me. “You want everyone to fall in love with you without ever having to earn their love. It’s endearing, sweetheart, but it will lead you astray.” Once again, Julian was right.)

Giving me a slight nudge off his shoulder, Ben righted me to a sitting position again and took my hands in his. “Look in my eyes, Mel.” He does this from time to time when he’s trying to remember some scrap of information that’s evading his consciousness, floating like a feather before him that he just cannot grasp — he’s convinced it aids the brain in “opening up.” Pure horseshit, but I do it every time for him.

“What are you trying to remember?” I stared in his hazel eyes which were just starting to get a little bloodshot.

“Not me, silly. You. You are going to remember who ‘AH’ is because I am pretty convinced it’s a person, not another place.” He took a big breath in and exhaled. “Make your brain feel… flat. Like all the people you have ever met are standing in a great big field, and they’re all wearing name tags. Your job is to find ‘AH’ because I know she’s in there.”

“She?” I blinked.

Ben cocked his head to one side. “Is there something you aren’t telling me about Jules? I mean, was there some Brideshead Revisited shit going on back in Bristol you never told me about between him and Alex?”

I laughed. “God no.” Julian isn’t inclined in that way in the slightest. The one time Charlie made a little — and I mean little — pass at him, he was pleased to know he was attractive to men as well, but not out of unexpressed bisexuality. No, it just meant that he was irresistible to men too, another feather in his cap.

“Okay then. Go look at all the women and find me ‘AH.’ I’m dying to know too by this point.”

Even though I felt ludicrous, I stared into Ben’s eyes and pictured the field full of all the women I could remember. I started by winnowing it down to people Julian and I would both know. Araminta, no. Annabelle, god no. Amy Thurston, our neighbor in Pasadena, the one who borrowed my umbrella and never returned it, no. Alison Jones, my study partner from my class on the Royal Academy in the 18th century, no (he said she smelled like old trainers). Agnethe Ffolkes, the half-Danish dogwalker who took care of his mother’s old setters before they died of old age, no.

Then: Amanda Harrington. I looked at the nametag, and up at her face in my head, and then back down. AH. Amanda, Julian’s first “real” girlfriend, the woman who should have married him, not me. Amanda Harrington. AH. Red hair and long legs and a permanent scowl for me.

Ben saw the flash of recognition: “It worked! You know, you know! Who is she?”

“Amanda,” I said dully. Why did I even care?

“That sow?” I’d told Ben much about Amanda and her disdain for my very existence, about how she saw me as her rival even though Julian never did pay her any attention once he’d set his mind on winning me from Alex. “Fantastic. She and Julian deserve each other. They can pair off and you can go live your best life with Alex without having to worry about Julian butting in any longer.”

I wish it were so simple. It’s never so simple with Julian. As much as Ben says it isn’t all about me, I don’t doubt that Amanda’s presence in Santa Barbara is completely about me, that the post is meant to speak to me in some way. As if Julian wanted me to ask the very questions that consumed Ben and me that evening, and come to the very conclusions that we did.

As if Julian wanted me to ask him one question directly: If you still love me so much, why are you with her? And I can’t ask him, mustn’t ask him. I knew I should tell Alex that night, let him have a laugh about it, and as Ben says, live my best life with my dearest heart. Julian can smile at Amanda, and it does not touch me. It does not signify.

Of course it does, Melissa. But what is the signal and what is the noise?