Action, reaction.

“You can’t. I refuse to let you do this.”

How many times in my life, from childhood to this very moment, have I heard similar words? I can scarcely count, but I do know that with very few exceptions, they were spoken to me by men or boys. As a young child, my father forbidding me from quitting ballet, even though I was so desperately bad I was eventually made to leave lessons. (Ballet is good for posture, and mine was so terrible I needed all the help I could get.) As a teenager, teachers (you will stay in this AP French class — how else will you get into college?), and friends (stay away from Josh Brookes — he’s not right for you), and a boyfriend (if you think this is bad, think on how bad things will be if you leave me). And as an adult, well, of course there was Julian, the ne plus ultra in enforcing embargoes, the ruler of the Forbidden Zone.

I had not expected it from Ben.

After Alex had presented me with the choice of staying in Berkeley without him to pursue my career (such that it is), or joining him in his enforced move to Santa Monica, I was hesitant to discuss it with anyone but Jenn until I’d made a decision. Speaking with my parents would only get them measuring drapes for an apartment I hadn’t even looked for yet, and talking to Jen these days was nearly impossible after September’s farce. From what I understood from Sean, Mack refused to leave Jen but had started therapy with Kayla. It all seemed like an astounding waste of cash — no amount of counselling will fix a situation where one spouse wants to be monogamous, and the other insists on keeping his wife and his girlfriend who just happens to be his ex-wife. Asking Rachel for advice would probably be pointless, since my relocation has no effect on her happiness or wealth, baseline entry requirements for discussions with her.

As it stood, I had looped Jenn in only because she could provide Alex with a local’s view on the city she’d moved to after graduating from law school. I also had her promise of discretion: “Who am I going to tell, Jen? She won’t even pick up the phone these days. I tried getting a message to her by asking my mom to speak with her mom, but Addy shut that down — Jen won’t even speak to her mom now, supposedly from shame, whatever that means. I even put my dignity to one side and called that shitheel Mack, asked him to say she should call you, but I doubt he remembered to pass it on during one of their no-tell motel visits.”

Jenn needed a project now that her very best friend had noped out of her life — no more weekly dinners, no more nightly calls. In the space that opened up that had once contained Jen, Jenn was currently pouring in alcohol. Enough alcohol that speaking to her anything less than lightly toasted on the phone in the evening was remarkable these days. Getting Alex, and perhaps me, settled in could fill up some of that drinking time.

I knew, however, that I was going to have to tell Ben, and soon. Like, “Oh, hey Ben, Alex is moving to Santa Monica, and either I’m going to have to stay here and work for you and be miserable and end up sleeping on your couch all the time because I’m desperate to feel connected to someone, or I’m quitting and moving to Santa Monica and shitting on all our plans to have me become more involved in the business. Now what do you want me to get you on the coffee run?” I wasn’t sure what to expect in reply from him. No, that’s not entirely correct. If I had said I was staying in Berkeley until I figured out exactly what I wanted, he’d probably end up cradling me as I dissolved in a lake of self-pitying tears. He’d cry a little himself, call me his brave little goose, and we’d go have a cocktail or three after work at Tupper & Reed.

What I didn’t know is how Ben might react if I told him I was even considering leaving Berkeley. I imagined that he’d work hard to remain stoic while his eyes grew increasingly damp, but that he’d explain he understood that after years of being apart from Alex, to rip me away now when we’d only just been reunited would be… cruel. Something along the lines of, “I understand completely, doll, even though it breaks my heart.” And then he might whisper, “Just let me know if he’s ever cruel to you, and I’ll be there,” to which I’d scoff and remind him how very, very invested Alex and I both are in making this work. And then we’d both cry, and go have cocktails at Tupper & Reed after work. God, that all sounded ridiculous, and pure fantasy.

The day after Alex told me he had been ordered to Santa Monica was a Monday, a day I usually take off. It was Veterans’ Day, and though these “minor” holidays are usually days we’ll see an uptick in customers, Molly had assured me that it wasn’t enough to justify me coming in unless I really wanted to. I didn’t want to at all. I wanted to lie in bed, wallowing in my indecision, drinking bathtub-sized cups of tea laced with brandy. (I blame Charlie — I hadn’t realized before Sussex quite how delicious tea could be with a generous measure of alcohol.) I wanted to think about how I could cast myself as a martyr whichever choice I made — if I stayed, I’d be the strong woman who tragically balanced her personal fulfilment with love for her star-crossed husband-to-be, cursed to be apart from him forever. And if I went, I’d be giving it all up for love, but losing myself once more along the path of my husband, not my own. Quite simply, both sucked. And I bathed in the sheer masochism of how much I hated both options.

It was a terrific funk to be in, cocooned in my duvet, perched just before tipsiness at 2 pm. I’d woken up with Alex before dawn for his weekly 6:30 am conference call with London, fixed coffee, showered, and thrown on what might generously be called athleisure, if it weren’t a stretched out pair of black leggings panic-bought from Target when I was convinced I’d forgotten to bring pajamas with me on a girls’ trip to Paso Robles five years ago (I hadn’t forgotten, as it turned out), a sports bra and one of Al’s pit-stained white tees. And while Al was out the door and en route to work by 8 am, I did not stir once I’d returned to bed.

I had planned for myself a day of binge-watching Netflix while I applied various masks — face (two-step peel), hands (infused gloves) and bottom (sheet mask — who knew they made masks for your butt?). The last of these was particularly silly, as it required me to lie on my stomach for half an hour with my otherwise bare behind sticking in the air. I was 12 minutes in before I remembered I’d forgotten to pull the blackout curtain closed, and hoped that Steve or the Amazon delivery guy couldn’t see through the sheers. (I was unlucky: I got a wink and a frisky little finger wave from the Amazon guy as he dropped off a case of La Croix.)

Mondays are usually filled with such physical self-indulgence, but rarely emotional self-indulgence of the sort I was sloshing about in. I won’t go, I told myself. Following Alex only because I want to be in his immediate orbit is purely symptomatic of my continuing low self-esteem. I stake my claim to independence from any man! But not to go would deny what I actually wanted — to be with him, wherever that may be. Staying in Berkeley would be only to make the point that I am my own person; it’s a point I could make just as easily by being where I wished to be. And then — would anyone believe me when I said it was what I wanted, and why did that even matter?

Underneath it all were two further, slithering fears. If I stayed in Berkeley, what if Al turned to some third party for emotional support, some kind and loving voice on the phone, just as he’d turned to me when Minty left him? (And by third party, I mean Miranda.) And if I went back down south, I’d be drawn closer to Julian, and his encroachments on my family. (He and Rachel have taken to weekly “meetings” on Wednesday nights at The Rendition Room in Studio City — he now claims to be a “patron of the arts” and wants to buy his way into producing a film.) To be fair, it was more likely that Julian would be a burr fastened on my skin than Alex would find himself seduced by Miranda, but still.

By 2 pm, I was jittery with caffeine and nerves, unable to drift fully into the nap I’d been trying to coax myself into with a CBD gummie and C-SPAN. A bottle of Klonopin six months past its expiration date bleated to me from the bathroom — just half a tab, Mel, that’s all you need. I was about to reconsider exactly how bad of an idea that might be when my phone rang. A Pasadena area code, but I didn’t recognize the number. I answered anyway but didn’t speak immediately.

“Mel, I’m sorry.”

Jen.

“Mack told me you’re trying to reach me.” Her voice was strained, a little croaky. “I… I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s happening to me right now. I’m sorry I’m so selfish.”

“Jenny.” I rarely called her this these days. We’d aged out of our “baby names” as we referred to them — I had been “Lissie” for a while myself — but sometimes, there was weight and comfort in them. It was our language from the time before Jenn, our secret, youngest, neediest selves.

“I can’t talk too long. Mack’s down in reception getting some more towels.” The mysterious phone number now made sense — they were most likely at the Westin, where Mack used to take Kayla, back when the tables were turned and it was Jen the wronged wife. Mack is predictable, at least, in his caddish indecision.

My own misery reeked of the privilege it had been forged in — Alex was still in love with me, waiting for me to tell him when I was ready to set a date, and he wanted only that I choose where I would be happiest. Jen’s? Hers was rancid. The best of us six by far, the most patient, kind and romantic, the most cautious, the least prone to savagery and sourness, was the most morally compromised. I did not envy her.

“How are you holding up?” I would never tell Jen, but when she’d blocked Jenn, Cait and her mom on Instagram, she’d forgotten to click to block me, too. Since September, I’d been watching a steady stream of her moody, maudlin posts and stories flow in my feed, “inspirational” quotations about how a woman is like a tea bag (you don’t know how strong she is until you put her in hot water), near-koans about what is the meaning of love unless your heart is first broken. A bleached out photo of two hands, a man’s and a woman’s, clasped before a setting sun, both sporting wedding rings, with the word “FAITH” superimposed. She’d started posting lines from Ariana Grande songs with the hashtag #arifeelsme. Honestly, if anyone needed my expired Klonopin, it was probably Jen.

“Terrible. I’m sorry about calling you from the hotel, I just didn’t know if you’d pick up if you knew it was me.”

“I’ll always pick up. You know that. I’m not Caitlin.” That was mean, I know, but true. For Cait, the affair was a sharp smack, a rejection of the hours she and Jenn had spent steering Jen through the divorce. Since September, I’ve had more than a few spaghetti dinners at Caitlin’s recently which were served with sides of garlic bread and yelling about how Jen’s affair made her feel expendable, worthless.

In the meantime, I had the heartless, hopeless cheater herself on the phone, the first time any of us but Mack had spoken with her in months. “I know,” she muttered. “Can I ask you something?”

“Anything. And you can call me whenever you want to ask me something. I can’t promise I’ll know the answer, but I’ll try.”

I could hear Jen sniffing, but she didn’t say anything for a few seconds. And then — “Do you ever miss him?”

What a minefield this question was, a plain criss-crossed with tripwires, seeded with makeshift bombs. That its answer could refer to more than one person in my life only made the snares harder to avoid. “Sometimes. I think I miss what it might have been, if that makes any sense.”

“I missed him. I missed almost everything about him, Mel. I missed doing his laundry and cooking dinner with him and going to the flea market together and the funny little songs he makes up and his stupid cologne that he wears too much of and how he makes me feel so perfect in my own skin. And I threw it all away because… because I thought that’s what I was supposed to do. I didn’t even try.”

“He didn’t try either.” Mack has never tried hard at much of anything, except getting Jen to fall in love with him. A standout on the high school football team, he’d never even played the sport when the coach spotted him in freshman gym class, jogging lazy laps around the field with Sean. He joined the team because it sounded like a good excuse to get out of gym class and pick up girls. When it came time for college, he passed on trying out for the team because he wanted to focus on drinking beer and doing bong rips. And after graduation, he somehow ambled into a job at Mckinsey, working on “blue sky city planning” (as he put it), then flipped that into his current role for the City of Pasadena, where he doesn’t seem to do very much, but is compensated well enough to support a wife and a girlfriend.

“I know. It’s just… Jenn convinced me it was the right thing to do. The divorce, I mean. She told me he’d been lying to me for a year and there was no going back.” She stifled a little sneeze. “I sometimes wonder if every problem in a marriage looks like a nail to Jenn, now that she’s got her divorce lawyer hammer.”

“She just loves you,” I reminded her. It was for your own good, I thought, but didn’t say.

“I can hear him trying to open the door. I love you, Mel. I’ll call again. Love to Alex.” The handset clattered in the receiver, and she was gone, the line dead. Mack would be cruising in with an armful of towels, setting them down on the granite bathroom counter so he could scoop Jen up from the window seat and set her down so, so carefully on the bed’s crisp white sheets. Mack had always handled Jen like she was a porcelain doll, bound to break in or slip from his grasp at any time. It wasn’t a weird chivalry thing, like the way Julian insisted on opening doors for me or standing up whenever a woman walked in the room. It had little to do with Jen being a woman, but rather that she was his person.

At Mack’s request, their first dance at their wedding reception was to the Big Star song “Blue Moon.” It had the bonus of being quite short (important to Jen, who hates dancing in public), but the lyrics spoke loud from Mack’s soul:

Morning comes and sleeping’s done / Birds sing outside / If demons come while you’re under / I’ll be a blue moon in the sky.

He wanted to be her blue moon, her lodestar, to block out the demons and the sorrow. But Mack, oh, Mack is weak. He’d float away with the Santa Anas if he weren’t so large. Life happens to him, reaction, rarely action. Kayla happened to him one night at a conference in Sacramento. Mack wasn’t even supposed to be there — he’d broken three fingers on his left hand in a touch football game a few days before, but he could never pass up an opportunity to get out of the office on the city’s dime.

I’ll give Kayla this: she wasn’t to know Mack was married when she navigated him from the hotel bar to her room. In the emergency room, doctors had cut off the wedding ring Jen had placed on his left hand only a year before. Even the white stripe left where the sun had hit his hand was obscured by a cast. Mack? He had no excuse, never once mentioned the woman back in Pasadena watering his African violets and paying household bills. Kayla happened to him, and he drifted in the current of her attention. It was something that happened to him, but he never stopped it, even though he wanted to. He deserved his punishment, he asserted. But now he wanted his punishment and his absolution and his True Love. He deserved all and none of it.

How much of my own life had I spent just letting things happen to me, letting others chart my course? Josh, of course, had been delighted to drag me on the route he’d fashioned, even when I didn’t want to heed the signposts and had to be shoved forward so I wouldn’t deviate from the path. Julian picked up where Josh left off, and I stepped neatly along the track Jules laid for me, knowing by then the consequences for slipping away. I didn’t dare leave, even in those very last months when Alex had signalled to me that Julian sensed the truth about us, and was merely waiting for his last crumb of suspicion to be validated. Julian was something, someone who had just happened to me — he’d slotted himself between Alex and me, from the very first evening. Alex had been hard work, more work than I was willing to slog through. And Julian? Ever so happy to take the reins I was sick of handling for myself.

To what end? I asked myself, throwing off the duvet and padding to the bathroom. I plucked a discarded and balled up pair of Alex’s socks that lay on top of the hamper and threw them at the mirror, at my own reflection. Who are you anymore, Melissa? Melissa Layla, 34 and 1/2. Strawberry blonde, a little pale today. Green eyes, a petulant tug downwards on her pink lips. I wasn’t my father’s devoted daughter any longer, nor the supportive wife to Julian Cranford. I no longer wished I was as steadfast as Jen, or as brave as Caitlin, or as dazzling as Jenn when she’s at her best. I loved Alex, but I wasn’t Alex’s girl, not like I’d been Josh’s.

What remains of Little Melissa, or did she go up in flames with that slip of paper? I asked the woman in the mirror, pulling my hair out of its bobble. Who are you anyway?

The phone I’d placed on the sink blipped — a message from Alex. “can we have meatball subs for dinner trevor mentioned in mtg now i want meatball subs. love you!”

This is who I was. Apparently I was a chef who could just magic some meatball subs into existence because my fiance’s boss’s boss, who had ordered him out of the life I had built for myself, had mentioned a fucking meatball sub. Fuck this.

No. I tapped back. I’m going out tonight, might be late. I didn’t even know if that was true, but I was sick of gorging myself on my squalorous self-pity. Little Melissa may be gone, vanished in a sizzle of burnt up pink stationery years ago, but it was far past time Big Melissa took up the reins she’d so willingly dropped more than half a lifetime ago.

I made myself up carefully with the cateye liner Jules had liked so much on that sweaty day in Burbank, dusted my cheeks with blush and slicked on a rosewood lipstick. The athleisureish rags got stripped off and shoved in the hamper (in, Al, in the hamper), traded for a pair of slim black jeans and a navy boatneck sweater. It took a bit of fiddling with a butter knife, but I managed to pry open the mildewy, crumbling leather case (“Victorian,” Cora stressed) holding my engagement bracelet. The bracelet — 18 carats of sapphires, 3 of diamonds, in an intricate gold setting of tiny leaves and thistles — was excessive for daytime, but at this time of year dusk creeps in at an alarmingly early hour. By the time I got to Ben, it would be nighttime.

The clasp fastened around my wrist with a satisfying click. Your Bracelet of Submission, eh? Julian had texted me after I posted a picture of it on Instagram from Scotland. Sad you didn’t get the ring, Alex has never been good with timing. Too early or too late. Pity, but it will look nicer on Fenn’s hand. I didn’t bother to remind him that in the Amazons from Wonder Woman wore the Bracelets of Submission to remind them of the dangers of submitting to any man. Mine would be worn similarly, I decided, but it was no mark of bondage. Mine is to remind me that I am free to leave Alex as equally as I can elect to stay with him. Together, apart: the choice would be mine. “As it should be,” Alex’s voice echoed from this morning. “In your time. I will love you no less whatever you choose. I can only love you more, sweetness.”

I checked the time on the microwave clock: 4 pm. Leaving now would throw my plan slightly off — get Ben at the end of the day, when he’s aching to peel out of the shop and into a booth with a beer in his hand — so I heated up my lukewarm tea, poured a little more brandy in for Dutch courage and called Jenn.

“Afternoon, Jennifer Lodge,” she barked into the phone. “Oh, hey Mel. Sorry, didn’t look at the caller ID. Why the Monday afternoon call? Don’t tell me — Julian proposed to Fenn.”

I made a little whimper of disgust. “Ugh, god no. I texted Alex just now. I’ve made up my mind about Santa Monica. I’m ready. I know what I want and it’s about bloody time.”

***

My Lyft pulled up in front of the shop at 5:30 sharp. The soft golden glow of the Edison bulb in the front window illuminated my November display — I’d passed over the obvious Thanksgiving theme, and given the spotlight to books about Iowa, simply because when Molly had finished the annual inventory at the end of October, she’d counted 45 books on the state languishing on our shelves. It also seemed vaguely topical, given the upcoming caucuses, and had the added bonus of making me look far more clever for this (admittedly accidental) aspect than I truly was.

Pushing down the hood of my duffel coat, the evening’s wind nipped at my neck. I peered beyond the display to watch Ben, alone in the warmth of the shop. He was gazing through the small window to the left of the large maple desk that serves as checkout counter, gossip den, coffee bar and detritus collection point. Puffing out his cheeks, he then pushed out the air he held in with the eraser end of a #2 pencil. He looked a little bored, and quite younger than his nearly 40 years, now that he’d let his sandy crewcut grow out over the summer into the fall. “I’m looking too fashy for Berkeley, I think,” he’d told me in September with a huffy little note in his voice. “Some child on the Cal campus asked me if I was into Richard Spencer cosplay.”

This shop, this town had saved his life. After he’d dropped out of his Ph.D. program at Ole Miss, he’d hung around in Oxford, dealing books and tutoring the sons and daughters of professors. It was during this time, he told me, that he developed his “Orvis aesthetic,” the chinos and buttondowns, the Sperry Docksiders and the braided belts. “There were plenty of beautiful children in the Greek system who affected the look, but most of them didn’t get it quite right. The clothing was too tight or too cheap, the prints weren’t right, and there were too many accessories.”

Though raised a Baptist, he started attending Episcopalian services and observing the middle-aged, high prep parishioners’ style over muffins and coffee in the undercroft after communion. He scoured local thrift stores for castoffs that mimicked their fashions, and gradually swapped out his jeans for Nantucket reds, his ever-pilled J. Crew sweaters for crewneck pullovers from Bean. In his greatest coup from a thrift store, he found a slightly moldy but serviceable Barbour jacket, which he then wore with everything from critter pants to rumpled chinos from Brooks Brothers.

The preppy exterior hid the failure he believed himself to be. “I was supposed to be on the tenure track by now,” he told me once over Japanese curries at Muracci’s. He pushed a strip of lightly breaded katsu around on his plate, trailing it through the curry in a spiral with a chopstick. “Five years in, and I realized I didn’t have it in me. I resented nearly every single undergrad I worked with as a teaching assistant — most of them were unprepared, hadn’t even read the shortest of the articles or chapters assigned by the professor. Just babysitting brats who made it clear classes got in the way of football or partying or sleeping in. The thought of another thirty years of the same assholes and buffoons with different names… I couldn’t do it.”

“What about your thesis?” I popped a chunk of tofu in my mouth.

“Just another re-tread of tropes in Southern Gothic literature,” he smirked. “Its death was unmourned.”

After six years eking out a living improving well-heeled teenagers’ chances of getting into Princeton, he’d packed up his old Corolla and come home to his dad’s low-slung red brick house in Southaven, Mississippi, just across the state line from Memphis. Home was a no judgment zone, from his status as Ph.D. dropout to his metamorphosis into a devotee of heritage brands to his homosexuality. “Dad’s a modern Southern redneck. When I came out to him, he just shrugged and said, ‘Good for you, son.’ Then he cracked me open another Bud Light and we went back to watching Forensic Files.”

Memphis was supposed to be the goal — not even 15 miles away from the plushly-piled carpeting of his childhood bedroom, the same one where his mama had kissed him on his 10-year-old forehead one September evening and walked out into the night, never to come home. He’d moped around Burke’s Books for months, poking at the paperbacks in the Southern Gothic section (“old fascinations die hard, which is probably why I can’t get enough of your melodrama, Mel”), working up the nerve to talk to the staff about a job. (He never did.) Instead he got back in the business of tutoring, this time for the children of wealthy Germantown lawyers and doctors, spending hours at their mock Tudor mansions and new-build “Federal-style” homes and French provincial monstrosities. He lied openly and said he was “ABD” (all but dissertation) at Ole Miss, and had come home to Southaven to focus on writing up. When one of the moms referred to him as “Dr. Ben,” he didn’t discourage it.

“What made you leave?” I’d asked that very first December afternoon at the coffeehouse, nearly a year ago. “Why come here?” The sun was down by then, and past the plate glass window the immediate post-work crowd marched down Shattuck towards the Downtown BART station.

“Why’d you come here yourself?” He didn’t look at me, and focused intently on the vegan “buttermilk” doughnut he’d been picking at for the past twenty minutes. When I didn’t respond, he pushed back the doughnut and caught my eye. “Running away from someone when I thought I was running to something.” We’d been laughing for the past two hours, making fun of our adopted home’s intricate wokeness, singing to the grey skies above its weather and its food, revelling in the sheer bliss of feeling at home, at last, somewhere in the world. Now, the mood had shifted and darkened, just as dusk had shaded the street outside the cafe window.

“I came here to be with Alex,” I sulked. “I wasn’t running away from anyone. I just thought if I was going to be stuck somewhere with nothing to do, I might as well be with him.” (I thought this was an excellent point.)

“Hush. If you really came here to be with him, why didn’t you just show up on his doorstep with a suitcase and a hatbox and inform him that you lived with him now? Naw, it’s that husband, ex-husband of yours. You’re running away from him, but it sounds like you almost don’t want him to let you go. Let him go, girl, and love your boy.”

Ben saw me, saw through the lie I had been telling everyone for the past two months that I was living apart to grow into my skin some more, saw the unsettled and cowed Melissa who didn’t trust herself enough to let Alex in, not completely. It was better to obey Julian’s edict that I was not to move near Alex, let alone move in with him — if I did, I knew he could still punish me, even with the divorce nearly final. Julian’s wishes and prohibitions were so wrapped around every desire I might have that I could scarcely make my own thought out any longer. It was as if, on our wedding night, the Princess Melissa had passed over the drawbridge of the castle Julian bought for us and I was never seen again, not even when he left me, not even when I left the castle myself.

And now, nearly a year later, I had come to tell Ben I’d finally made up my mind on together, apart. The twin brass bells I’d installed only last week chinkled as I pushed open the door. Reflexively, Ben rose from the green director’s chair he’d been sitting in before he realized it was just me, but he didn’t take his seat. Instead he cocked his head to the right, and tapped a finger to the side of his nose.

“5:30. Why are you here?” He stepped around several milk crates of old copies of 1960s era Amazing Stories magazine to reach me where I dawdled in front of the poetry section.

“Drink?” I mimed bobbing a cocktail glass from side to side. The bracelet clunked with my gesture and glinted where the fluorescent strip lighting caught its facets. It was so ostentatious that it had passed from the realm of the garish to grand heirloom chic.

Ben trilled a low whistle. “The engagement bracelet? Let’s see it.” Raising up my wrist, he turned it over, tracing the leaves and the thistles with his pinky. “Did his great-grandmother mug a grand duchess or something?”

“Nah. Great-Grandma Sarah’s aunt did. And it was a countess.” This was actually almost true. According to family legend, great-great-grand aunt Lady Fennella Dysart had something of a little other-people’s-husbands problem. At a ball celebrating Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, she’d crept away from the dancing to meet her lover in one of the many guest bedrooms. Unfortunately, the lover in question was the earl hosting the party, and at the appointed hour, he was waylaid by his countess who had watched her husband fawn over the lovely, slutty Lady Fennella throughout the country house weekend.

After pacing for ten minutes in the mauve bedroom, Great Aunt Fennella got bored and started poking about in the mahogany chest of drawers. In the top drawer, perched on top of a guipure lace shawl, was a small leather case, which she popped open with a small nail file pulled from her beaded reticule, forever jamming the lock. Inside was the same bracelet I wore now in a small bookshop in Berkeley, California.

By the time the earl found Alex’s great auntie trying the bracelet on for size, she was fuming and demanding he apologize for his tardiness by handing over the piece permanently. Hoping to avoid attracting even more attention from the countess, and wanting to keep Lady Fennella in his bed (or at least in the bed in the mauve bedroom), the bracelet passed to the Dysarts, and then onto the Carrs when Lady Fennella made a gift of it to her niece, Sarah Dysart Carr. (Lady Fenn was smart enough to get the transfer in writing, so that a challenge from the earl’s family in the 1940s was quickly put down.)

“Well,” Ben drawled, “if it’s only a countess, I suppose it’s fine. Why you really here, princess?”

“Can’t I want to get out and have a drink with my best friend?” I beamed back at him. “Looks dead here. I’d ask the manager if we can lock up early.”

Crossing his arms across his chest (must tell him that the time he’s put in on the pectoral fly machine is paying off), he walked around me, considering (if I knew him, and I do) my apparel choice and hairstyle. “You look… almost aggressively tidy. Everything about this –” he twirled a finger in the air “– is safe. Almost. The bracelet, of course, is absurd, darlin’, but I put it to one side. For now.”

I shrugged. “No need to get dressed up for a Monday night drink. Come on, shut down the register. Let’s go have an Old Fashioned or three.” I tugged gently at the arm of his scarlet pullover. “Princess needs a drink. There’s some… stuff with Alex I need to talk about.”

That brightened him up, relaxing the quizzical squint he was subjecting me to. “Bad stuff or good stuff?” He gingerly plucked each of my fingers — pip pip pip — from his sweater and pulled the fabric back into shape.

“Just… stuff. Big stuff, though. I could use your opinion.” It wasn’t just that I wanted Ben’s opinion as my manager, or as my closest friend here, even closer than Caitlin these days. I wanted to crumple into the honey-warmth of his arms, wanted to hear him say my choice was right for me, and damn everyone else. Too many men have plotted my route for me, set the parameters, ordered the trails and freeways and city streets and country paths I was to follow. This one? I chose this one for myself.

We didn’t make it to Tupper & Reed that night. At 5:45, I closed the register (Molly was right — sales had been slow that day) and sharpened the five pencils I like to have at the desk on a Tuesday morning. Outside, Ben fussed with the awning, which recently has been more finicky than usual in allowing itself to be rolled up ever since a very windy Sunday at the end of October nearly ripped it from its mounting. A quick check downstairs revealed no lingering Hobbits (what we call customers who hide in the corners for hours, absorbed in a book they’ll never buy, hoping they’ll be shut in to read for the evening — we’ve had more than one). When I got back up, Ben was flicking the Yale lock on the handle and clunking the deadbolt into place, before snapping off the bare bulb in the window.

He wiped his large hands on his seersucker half-apron and dragged the back of his forearm across his brow. “That awning… I’ve got a bottle of Merlot downstairs, behind the bubble wrap. I want you to tell me everything, but I want to hear you, doll. Nice and quiet here. Go pull down the shades and we’ll talk.”

And over the bottle of Merlot, cross-legged in front of the cookbooks, I told him, with far fewer tears than I’d expected. He held my hand while I told him about Harris the chair, and hapless Dave, and the new office in Santa Monica. I told him about how Alex had been ordered to go stabilize the team down there, and how there was no negotiation on this point unless I wanted Al to leave the States. I told him that Alex had stressed it was my choice alone to stay in Berkeley or join him in SoCal. I told him that I was planning to go the following week to Santa Monica with Al to look at apartments within walking distance of his work. I told him about the Bracelet of Submission (he laughed a little, and I don’t really blame him) and all the many, many times I had let life just happen to me, how I refused to be only reactive now. How the drumbeat-demand of together, apart had ricocheted constantly through my brain until this afternoon.

But now I had made my choice: I was staying in Berkeley. “Alex isn’t leaving me, and I need a little more time to keep figuring out who I am, I guess, and how that works with him.” We were drinking straight out of the bottle of Merlot, forgoing the niceties of the blue-glazed mugs from Cora’s studio I’d brought back from Pitlochry, and I sucked back two glugs, one-two. The Bracelet of Submission clanked against the glass as I pulled the bottle from my lips and passed it back to Ben’s waiting paw.

“You’re kidding me.” He sipped more slowly, and I watched the tilt of the bottle pass a slow stream into his mouth. “How much more time do you need to figure out you need to be with Alex?” Another sip, and though I had my hand out for a swig myself, Ben held the bottle close to his chest. “Fourteen years, woman. You’ve had fourteen fucking years to figure this shit out. Grow up.”

I snatched the bottle away and favored him with a snotty little moue before sinking another gulp. “I thought that’s what I’m do-ing. I’m growing up. I’m taking my time. He’s not going anywhere.”

“How the fuck is that fair to him after what you’ve put him through! You can’t! I refuse to let you do this!” Ben roared, before swiping the bottle back and composing himself, patting his lips softly, as if regretting the volume, if not the sentiment. “I’m sorry, doll, but he’s waited fourteen years for you, even when you led him on and then married his best friend. Lord help him, I do love your Alexander, but he’s a fool if he’ll put up with this from you any longer.”

The pain of unvarnished truth wracked my bones, a deep, deep ache. I wasn’t the sunny princess any longer. She was long gone before I ever passed over the drawbridge, before I married my handsome English prince. She left when I let Julian slide my engagement ring on my hand for the second time, even when I knew I was in love with Alex. That ring went on my finger for the same crooked reason Julian thought he was owed someone like me — I deserved more. More than what Alex could offer me — what, a falling down house in dankest Perthshire? A husband who couldn’t control his spending, who let every pound drain away in pursuit of pleasure to numb his spasms of misery, or to prop up his hapless family? A man who could be bought so easily, even if it were for “a good reason”? I deserved more.

I am not the sunny princess anymore, if I ever was. And my time in Julian’s castle taught me that a gourmet kitchen and a housekeeper and holidays in Gstaad and Lake Como and the Maldives and every material craving that even flitted through my mind were not actually the “more” I deserved. I deserved love and devotion, if I earned that love and devotion. I deserved a husband who trusted me, if I proved myself worthy of such trust. I deserved an equal partner, provided I treated him equally. I had that man, and he had let me walk away from him again and again, always trusting I’d come home and fold myself in his arms, let him rest his chin on my head while I listened to his heart thump lub-dub lub-dub for me. I didn’t deserve him, not really, nor had I ever earned his love. But I did love him back, perhaps enough to merit his too, someday, and not resent myself for demanding it.

Shame slapped at me, shame for making Alex jump through an infinite set of narrow hoops for me, while I did almost nothing in return, just waited for life to happen to me, for circumstance to nudge me off my perch. “So staying,” I mused, “isn’t being brave or independent? It’s just… more delay.” My legs ached from sitting on the concrete floor — the nasty industrial carpet provides little cushion — and I stretched them before me, like I was going to touch my toes, if my inflexible body were capable of such things. (It rarely has been, despite all the money I’ve spent on Pilates.) “But I feel like I’m abandoning you. I love you, Ben, and I love this city and I love my job and this shop and the neighborhood we live in, and the tiny studio and the paella and the doughnuts and the coffee and the cheese and the bread and the being of my own self somewhere other than home.”

“Oh chick, get over here.” Ben spread out his own legs, and I scooted in the vee he formed, resting my back against his chest. “I will miss you, princess, and I’m flattered you worry about me but this isn’t my fight. And as for the other stuff?” He tapped a brief kiss on the crown of my head. “Santa Monica has doughnuts and coffee and all the food you could think of. They even have funnel cake and a rollercoaster, and we don’t have that. And as for a job, well, you hang tight, girl. Let’s see what old Ben can scare up for you. Hmmmmmm.”

“What does ‘hmmmmmmm’ mean?” I worried a small moth-eaten hole in the arm of Ben’s red sweater, and he swatted my hand away.

“Shoo, pest, stop that. It means, Southern California is full of rich people looking to buy and sell books. Maybe a job with someone else, maybe some freelance work for me. I mean, the shop. Ah hell, I mean me. Let me cogitate upon it a little, and you’ll be busy setting up a new home down by the ocean for a while anyway. You’ll be plenty busy. Two bed, right? Because I’m planning on staying in that other room.”

“So, I’m going?” I twisted my head around to take in his face, to read anything there that might belie his words, not that I needed his permission. (I do know this, mostly.) Only love there, only his smile and indulgence, not that I deserved it much.

“What does your heart say when you ask it?” Ben picked up my wrist again to gawk at the sapphire obscenity clasped there, the spoils of a trampy Carr ancestor who sounded much like her 21st century namesake.

What say you, Melissa? Together, apart. Together, apart.

Together.