“Sometimes it still feels that way to me.”
Matt sits on the bed.
“Stop,” Phoebe says. “Don’t sit on the bed.”
“I’m sorry,” he says.
Phoebe feels very protective of her space. She doesn’t like seeing him under the canopy. This is her room. Her hotel.
“What are you doing here?” she asks.
“I called you a million times, Phoebe,” he says. He stands in front of the balcony door and answers into his hands. “I’m sorry to show up like this, I really am. I know it must seem crazy. But you have to understand that for a few days, I really was going crazy. I thought you might be dead.”
“I’m not dead,” Phoebe says.
“I can see that.”
He comes up to her, like he wants to put his arms around her, but he is scared.
“You just disappeared, Phoebe,” he says. “On the first day of the semester. You would never do that.”
“You don’t know what I would or wouldn’t do anymore,” Phoebe says.
“I know you wouldn’t just take off without it being an emergency. We were all worried sick about you. We thought something terrible happened to you. Like Larry.”
Larry was a professor who stopped showing up to classes without emailing. When they found him, he had been vomiting for days.
“You thought I had a stroke?” she says.
“I could only think the worst.”
She was not in the house when he went to check, and there was nothing missing, no signs of any real departure.
“And then I couldn’t find Harry,” he says. “And you don’t know what that felt like, finding him down there in the basement. Digging his little grave.”
The thought of Harry snaps her back into her old self.
“Thank you for doing that,” she says.
Matt starts to cry just thinking about Harry. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Why would I tell you? You left.”
“I loved Harry,” he says. “You know that.”
“You loved Harry?”
“I loved you, too. I still do. I always will. I know that now.”
He takes her hands.
“When I saw you on Monday, I was so stunned. I wanted to talk to you, but I didn’t know how. And then I thought you were dead, and I just … couldn’t handle it. Why did you just leave like that?”
She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t have to say anything. He is technically not her husband anymore. She doesn’t owe him the deep truth about her life.
“How did you find me?” she asks.
He says it was easy. Too easy. “You never took me off our bank account.”
He saw the charge for the airplane and the Newport hotel, and he remembered the name, the Cornwall. He couldn’t remember why it sounded so familiar to him, maybe they went there once, maybe they were supposed to go there.
“But why? Why leave like that, so cryptically, to come to … a wedding? And whose wedding is this?”
“Lila’s,” Phoebe says. “And Gary’s.”
“Gary? The man who was just here?”
“Yes.”
“Oh,” he says. “But it seemed like … I thought … never mind.”
“And so you just fly here? After two years of living fifteen minutes away from you, never visiting me once, you fly all the way here to find me?”
“I missed you. More than you know. I’ve thought about you every day since we got divorced. I wanted to call or text. I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t. I didn’t know what to say. I was so awful to you. And then you were just gone. You weren’t answering my texts or calls. And Bob said your email was really cryptic. I’m sorry, I just had to come. I had to make sure you were okay.”
“I wasn’t okay,” she says. “I was … very upset. I’ve been upset since you left.”
“I know. I’m so sorry I did that to you.”
