The First Husband by Laura Dave Page A

feeling, that is something else.
    It’s a little like taking a trip. You find that lift, that lightness again, that you can’t believe went missing. Even if you know you left reality. You can’t believe—if you hold on to it just right—that your newfound freedom will ever again disappear.
    Those first weeks with Griffin, I was happy. I wasn’t just a little happy. I was so happy that I could almost forget that somewhere underneath was still a terrible pain. That the happiness was so intense—at least, in part—in response to the pain being incredibly touchable before, and now not.
    This led to two things that changed everything.
    The first thing was that I got sent away on assignment for “Checking Out” to Ischia—a small, glorious island on the Tyrrhenian Sea in Italy. I spent five incredible days getting lost in the romantic gardens of La Mortella, staring at the volcanic slopes of Monte Epomeo, studying honey making with a beekeeper in Forio, eating that honey straight from her finger.
    And when I was on my way back to Los Angeles, I had a feeling I couldn’t remember having in a long time: I was excited to come home.
    Yet when I actually got to my home—to the place that had been my home in Los Angeles—I didn’t feel excited anymore. I didn’t feel excited and I didn’t feel relaxed. I felt something else. Something closer to dread. It took me a minute to realize why. Nick had been there.
    It made sense that he would come during a time he knew I’d be away. He had my schedule on his calendar, I knew that—I had put it there.
    My problem wasn’t that Nick had come to the house. It was his house too. The problem was that he had wanted me to know he had been there. I looked around the kitchen, trying to figure out how I knew this, when I saw it on the kitchen table. He left his coffee mug there. The one I had bought him at Disneyland, a July Fourth weekend a few years back. We’d trudged out there to visit with friends of his from back East who were vacationing with their small kids. It turned out to be a great weekend, one we commemorated with the stupid, enormous mug, a photo-booth photograph of us computer generated on the front. His arms were wrapped around my neck, my mouth in kiss formation—the two of us laughing, glowing, in picture form.
    He loved that mug. And he had chosen to take it out of the cabinet and put it on the table. Not to use it—it was unused. But just to take it out and leave it there, for me to find.
    I ran my fingers along the mug’s rim. My first instinct was to figure it out. Why? What did he want me to know? Was he trying to say he wanted his things? That his trip to another land was turning out to be exactly where he wanted to stay? Or, was he saying his trip away from me was moving closer to over, and he was wanting to come back again? Would I be willing to make that voyage easier for him? Would I be willing to walk him through it—whatever it was that he needed most to feel good about starting over again?
    My phone vibrated and I looked down to see I had several missed calls—two from Griffin and one from my editor, Peter. I moved toward the window and looked out over my backyard as I listened to Peter’s message.
    It always comforted me to hear his voice and picture him, bald and sweet-faced, racing around Manhattan while speaking to me. His message was several minutes long and it seemed like the main purpose was to inform me that our parent company was in the process of being bought out by an even bigger media company. “I just wanted you to hear it from me, so you wouldn’t worry too much, my love,” Peter said, the New York street noise in the background. “The new publisher is a gentleman of the highest order, and ‘Checking Out’ is one hundred percent safe. They couldn’t be happier. I, on the other hand, am growing quite irritated. My novel is at an impasse, and I had to hear from Nick that you two split? If I may quote Steinbeck here, ‘One can