"Matt," Phoebe says as she opens the door.
"Phoebe," Matt replies.
Her husband is here. Because if she is being totally honest with herself, he is still her husband. When she sees him, the thought rises automatically: *Oh, my husband is here.* He looks exactly as he always did. He stands in the hallway like he has stood in every hallway she has ever seen him in.
"Hi," Gary says. "I'm Gary."
Matt must be confused, seeing her here with this stranger behind her, this girl in her bed.
"I'm Phoebe's husband," Matt says.
She waits for Matt to correct himself, but he doesn't. She cannot tell if Matt is the one who seems weird next to Gary, or if Gary seems weird next to Matt.
"Nice to meet you," Gary says. He looks at Phoebe, as though trying to send a message with his eyes, but Phoebe cannot pick up on it. Her husband's presence has short-circuited something in her brain. "Well, I should bring my daughter to her room."
They watch silently as Gary picks up Juice from the bed and carries her out the door.
When they are alone, Matt says, "Who were those people?"
Phoebe does not answer. She refuses to explain the wedding people to him. They are hers, not his.
"You're my husband?" she asks.
"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 does not 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 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 toward 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 does not answer. She does not have to say anything. He is technically not her husband anymore. She does not 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 me, 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."
But now it annoys her that he thinks this was all about him. And while he was certainly a large part of it, he was not all of it. This was bigger than him. She knows this now.
"It's not just about you leaving," she says. "It's everything. It's about the way I've been my entire life. I've been so… contained."
"What do you mean, contained?"
"I mean, I just lived my life in such a small way," she says. "It was too small. I was so convinced there was only one way to live my life."
"I liked our life," he says.
"Apparently not."
"I was going through something, Phoebe. But I know that's no excuse. I know I could have handled it differently."
"Ha!" she says. "That's one way to put it. You were awful."
"I know."
"You abandoned me. Christ, you don't have to be with a person forever. But you don't have to abandon them. You were such a coward. I'm so glad I can see that now."
"I was a coward," he says. "I can see that now, too."
"I hated you," she says. "I still sometimes hate you."
Yet she feels glad that he tracked her down. Glad that he worried about her, glad to find out that his love did not disappear. And then she feels shame that she feels glad that a man has stalked her. Then she remembers she is not supposed to feel shame, according to her therapist and Thyme. She is supposed to be kinder to herself, because this habit of tearing herself down every three seconds in her mind makes her feel ashamed. But at least she notices it. At least she is becoming aware of these things now.
"It would kill me if you hated me," he says.
"I don't actually hate you," she says. "Not anymore. I'm feeling better now. I really am."
"Because of that guy?"
"Don't even begin to get jealous."
He knows. He is ashamed about that, too. He is sorry he is jealous, sorry that he left. Sorry that he cheated on her. It was absolutely the wrong thing to do. But he felt like he was drowning and it's no excuse, yet he didn't know what else to do.
"Be honest?"
"I couldn't," he says. "After Mia and I slept together, I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe I had done it. I couldn't imagine a more horrible thing to have done after I did it."
He had been so mad at Phoebe for being depressed and so mad at himself for being mad that his wife was depressed and also not to mention, a little depressed himself, and working so hard not to slip into that deep, dark hole with her, that by the time he found himself alone in a room with Mia, it felt like an opportunity.
"An opportunity?" she screams.
"To be a father," he says. "To be a good partner again. I felt like I was vanishing."
"So did I!" she yells. "Are you fucking kidding me?"
She yells it so loudly, she imagines someone might call, maybe Pauline, and maybe her father, to say, *Calm down, this is too much, you are being too much.* She expects her husband to walk out. But he doesn't. When she is done yelling, she feels calm. She feels sorry, too. She knows what it feels like to be vanishing. She can understand now what he means by opportunity. She feels it every time she looks at Gary.
"I'm so sorry," Matt says. "I'm so, so sorry."
"I know," Phoebe says. "I know."
"She made me feel alive. I just wanted to feel alive again and I didn't know how else to do it. It's a—"
"Terrible cliché."
She hates to hear herself say it. She does not want this thing with Gary to be a terrible cliché. She wants it to be more because it feels like it's more. But how does she know? Her husband thought he knew. Her husband was so certain when he left her.
But now he's here. Now he's sorry. Why would this thing with Gary be any different?
"I understand," she says. "I get it now."
He comes closer to her.
"You look beautiful," he says. "You really do."
His compliments make her feel smaller than she felt all week. She suddenly feels like an entirely different person than the one who just put Juice to bed. In her husband's presence, she feels like his wife again. He comes closer and touches her shoulder. She backs away.
"No," she says. "I understand, but I don't want that. I'm not the same person anymore."
She looks out over the balcony to see if she can find Gary in the darkness, but she can't.
"Neither am I," he says. "Most days, I wake up in Mia's house and I think, *Where the fuck am I?* I am here, with someone else's child, making pancakes on someone else's stove. A fucking electric stove that basically takes an hour to heat up. Mia and I, it's not right. I don't know what I was thinking. I wasn't thinking. I was being selfish, and I made a mistake, and our marriage has been the only meaningful thing of my life, if I'm really being honest about it."
"Then why didn't you call or text or write during that whole time?" she asks.
"I felt like I couldn't," he says. "The break between us was so hard. So official. God, that day on Zoom. Phoebe, that was awful. I cried for hours after. But I couldn't call you. I didn't want to mess with your head. I didn't even know what to say. I wanted to be sure about it when I finally spoke to you. And I'm sure."
"Sure what?"
"That I want to try again."
"Try again?" She laughs. "Are you kidding me?"
"I love you. I always will, Phoebe. What we had. It was the best part of my life."
"But that's over now."
"Don't say that."
"You said that!"
"We were married," he says. "I honestly don't think I realized what it meant to be married until I left. How do you know, until you can look back at what it was? After I left, I could see it so clearly. I saw this beautiful thing that I had destroyed."
He clears his throat. He sits down on the bed.
"But during it, I somehow stopped seeing the big picture. I was thinking so narrowly. I kept thinking everything had to happen a precise way. Like there would be something awful about adopting. Of course we can adopt. Of course we can do surrogates. We can do whatever. If we want a family, we can make it work. We can have a family, Phoebe."
She feels herself softening at the word *family*. The whole gang shows up in her head again—their little family. Their little noses. Their little laughs. Their little fingers, picking strawberries. Always their fingers, always their noses, never their whole faces. When she tries to imagine their faces, all she can see is Juice, throwing up at the table. The bright red chunks of it all.
"How about a drink?" Matt says.
"No," Phoebe says. "I need to go."
"Go where?"
"I don't know," she says. She wants to call Gary. She wants to finish their conversation. But when she looks up, Matt has already poured something amber in the little glasses.
"I should warn you that's like a million dollars," she says.
"Good," he says.
Maybe he is different now, too. She watches him take a sip. They sit on the love seat. Every time he leans forward to get a sip of his drink, their knees touch. She wonders if he is making this happen, if he keeps putting the glass farther and farther away from him on the table so he can touch her. It's like Matt to appear so casual, so effortless, but as his wife, she is the only one who knows how much time and effort he puts into appearing relaxed and easygoing. He does breathing exercises in the morning so he can face the day. He does eighteen drafts of his lecture so it can sound off the cuff. He looks in the mirror and says, *Okay, here we go.*
"Bob is utterly dumbfounded that you took off," he says. "The whole department is truly worried about you."
"They should be."
"They are."
"Good," she says. "They didn't worry about me enough."
"I know."
The more her husband speaks about their life, the more it reminds her he was her husband. He is Matt, who got her a beer on the first date. Matt who wrote her letters from Edgar Allan Poe's desk that month he was in Baltimore. Matt, whose brother used to bury him in the sand and put breadcrumbs around his head for the seagulls. She puts down her drink, reclines, and knows it's him, and yet she stares at her husband like he's someone she's looking at from very far away. He has gained a little weight, now puffier in the cheeks. But it's not just that. He is someone who has fucked Mia now. He parts his hair on the other side. He wears a shirt he must have bought after the divorce. And this all weirdly makes her want to touch him. Like this is really her fantasy now—her husband is a total stranger.
"Remember the eclipse, when I proposed?" he asks.
She nods. They were staring at the sky then, too. She listens to the fireworks in the distance. She feels that same feeling she had when they watched the eclipse, that same intense desire to make it meaningful, turn it into a metaphor. But she can't quite make it work: The fireworks are the opposite of an eclipse, man-made light bursting open into a dark sky. She doesn't know what it means.
He kisses her, and it makes her cry.
"I love you, Phoebe," he says. "I've loved you since the first second we spoke."
She hears the wedding people outside. She hears the fireworks in the distance. She feels the wedding going on without her. She knows that life, real life, is waiting for her on the beach. Yet in here, it is warm. Here is her husband.
He has learned a new way to kiss with Mia. He uses too much tongue. But when she turns away, he rubs his finger down her back. She can feel how he is ready to worship her in this moment if she lets him. She can see the whole thing, how he will spread her legs, how he will enter her, how good it will feel to touch this total stranger, even before it happens. It makes her feel excited and sick all at once. It feels like the worst part of her that wants him. But it has been so long.