She’d expected it to be perfect.
She’d played out her life in her head a thousand times, first after they started dating and then again after he actually proposed, down on one knee in a fancy restaurant like something out of a really good movie. She’d planned out the details in a steady, scientific way, marking out dates and times and possibilities on a great, long mental timeline that began that evening he asked her to join him for dinner and ending when they were old, gray, and wrinkled on a porch swing, the grandchildren running in the yard.
But there had been no children. There had been no white picket fence or rambling, sodded back yard in Henderson. There had been no dog pattering across the linoleum, no lazy house cat curled in the sun, no rose bushes lining the patio.
Instead, she’d raised books and carefully chosen African spitting cockroaches, watched tarantulas grow from infancy to adulthood in the big tank in the spare bedroom. She’d imagined that bedroom becoming a nursery until they moved out of the condo and into a proper house, except they never moved. They stayed in white-painted walls with shiny hardwood floors and kept an empty back bedroom with a tarantula tank.
She, of course, pretended she didn’t hate it. She pretended for seven excruciatingly long years that she was not miserable in her own skin. She went to work with everyone else and laughed aloud at the little trappings of normalcy, earning an Oscar for Best Performance in a Life. She joined Nick and Greg over at the Brown household and played tag and catch with Warrick’s sons, making excuses for her better half when he chose not to attend. She signed both their names on Lindsey’s high school graduation card and picked out the present herself, twenty-five minutes before the party because he’d forgotten to do like she’d asked. She stood up in Greg’s wedding but ended up dancing with corresponding-groomsman-Nick than her own groom. And all the while, she smiled a dazzling smile and laughed aloud when Nick asked if anything was wrong.
Nothing was wrong. Nothing could be wrong when you lived a dream. Dreams were, by definition, perfect, and she would not fly in the face of that perfection.
Year seven, though, that was the breaking point. When Greg came in with the sonogram pictures and a future father’s pride, something snapped and she couldn’t act anymore. She couldn’t pretend, so instead she ran, ran out of the room and down the hallway and into the locker room, stealing a strategy from her middle-school playbook and sitting down in the back-most corner, arms around her legs and face pressed into her knees.
“You okay?” Greg asked a few moments later, his voice surprising her. She glanced up at him, watching the concern cover his face and Nick’s. She tried to nod, but her traitorous muscles forced her to shake her head instead, and she shook as she started sobbing, seven years of something like emotion streaming out onto her cheeks and jeans as she cried.
He was wordless as she packed her bags, wordless as she stuffed books and clothes and more books into the matching suitcases they’d received as wedding gifts and zipped them shut. He stared at her as she buttoned her coat, fixed her hair, went back for her toothbrush.
When her hand was on the doorknob, she glanced over her shoulder at him, standing in the foyer with his hands in his pockets. He swallowed visibly and pursed his lips, his icy eyes focused on her.
“Not enough?” he finally questioned, a quiet inquiry that cracked the silence and abandoned itself.
She shrugged. “Enough, not enough… I don’t even know,” she replied, her voice as cool as his eyes. “Something’s missing.”
“From me, or from you?”
Her heart twisted as she looked away. “I don’t know,” she repeated, and then opened the door.
She drove in long, looping circles, around and through the city, looking on blurred neon lights and milling pedestrians. She coursed the strip, went to work and then back, out to Henderson and even back to their neighborhood, the car rumbling down the street of cookie-cutter condos.
Nick greeted her on his stoop with a sad smile. “Hey, Sara.”
“Hey.” It was barely a whisper, and she tightened her grip on the suitcase handle, just in case it tried to roll away, down the sidewalk and into the street. “I, uhm… I didn’t know where else to go. You got a minute?”
He nodded and opened the door further, helping her and her suitcase in with a gentle hand. She crossed into his living room and sunk into the leather couch she’d sunk into when he’d hosted an impromptu “bachelorette” party for her with Greg, Warrick, Catherine, and a handful of others, and surveyed the same furnishings and décor she had seven years ago. She propped her feet up on the edge of the coffee table and bit the inside of her lip as Nick settled down next to her, his eyes concerned.
“Sara – ”
“It never changed,” she said quietly, silencing whatever comfort he’d been preparing. “You think it’ll change, and grow, and it never did. It just sat there. It was…stagnant.”
Nick frowned but nodded his agreement, glancing, too, at his own house and simple trappings. “Not everything has to change,” he offered with a shrug. “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, you know?”
“But if it is broken, or splintering,” she countered, turning to meet his eyes, “you should at least try.”
“Can’t expect everything.”
“You have to expect something, Nick,” she told him, and her voice cracked as she did. “Even if you can’t expect it to be perfect, you have to expect something.”
Nick smiled sadly and wrapped an arm around her shoulders, pulling her close as she gave into another wave of emotion. “Yeah,” he agreed, and smoothed her hair as she buried her face in his shoulder. “You do.”
