Things I Want My Daughters to Know_ A Novel - Elizabeth Noble [64]
She could see the back of John’s head. His wedding haircut was too short, and his neck was red. For the first time, she really listened to the vicar, to the words of the marriage service. They were profound and serious. It seemed to her, sitting in the back of a church full of strangers, watching two people she neither knew nor cared for take lifelong vows, that the priest was talking directly to her. Except that he wasn’t a priest anymore, he was a scientist, this his lab, and his words the litmus test of her feelings for John. The evidence was inescapable. Each vow forced from her heart a resounding no. By the time the groom got to kissing the bride, Jennifer’s relationship was as dead as the wedding couple’s was born again, and when her eyes filled with tears watching them pass her, triumphant, on the way to be photographed in the churchyard, not one person, save maybe John, knew what those tears meant.
After that, of course, the day was an agony without end. John and the other ushers held the prone bride in their arms for photographs, stood on the endless receiving line, sat at high table for the interminable schmaltzy speeches, waltzed bridesmaids around the floor to the strains of Celine Dion, and grew quietly and determinedly drunker. She saw Stephen up close just once more before she made her escape. She was waiting, by the door, for John, who’d returned to the fray for one more good-bye, or thank you, or something. She was shifting from aching foot to aching foot, and her back was to the room. She knew that he was behind her, before he spoke.
“Are you okay?”
She didn’t look at him.
“Not remotely.”
He touched her arm lightly, but for long enough to make her turn and meet his gaze.
“You will be, Jennifer. You will be.”
It was three months after that before she talked to him again. He called her at work one Friday morning. Though it had been weeks, and though it wasn’t a voice she knew well, she recognized his voice at once. Which was strange, since she didn’t think she’d given him a single thought—well, not many—since that miserable day. And, actually, exciting.
“You’re not easy to get a number for, d’you know?”
She laughed. “I can’t begin to imagine how you went about it?”
“Means fair and foul.”
“Is that why it took so long?!”
“Nope. I’ve had it for a few weeks. Couple of months, in fact.”
“Taken this long to work up the courage?”
She was flirting. She didn’t even know that she knew how.
“Bah! You wish. You weren’t that frosty.”
“And I was trying so hard….”
“Can’t fool me.” She felt then, listening to his voice at the end of the line, that maybe she couldn’t.
“Why so tardy, then?”
“Wanted to give you time….”
“To forget you entirely?”
“No…to get out of your…situation.”
She left the line quiet.
“And you have, I hope?”
She had. Almost as soon as their return from Yorkshire. Not because of Stephen—that would have been ridiculous, on the strength of two short conversations. And Jennifer was never ridiculous. Because it was the right thing to do, and because that had suddenly become clear to her, sitting in that church, and because once she’d made up her mind to do it, she couldn’t wait.
It had been weirdly easy to extricate him from her life. She was so glad they’d never formalized their relationship or moved in together. Two cardboard boxes (Hurrah! The gluten-free pasta and the earnest biographies!) was all it took to eradicate all evidence of him from her flat, and there was even less for him to do. Telling him had been hard, of course. But not as hard as the