By the time I got home I was grateful Bobby wasn’t there. I poured myself a drink and looked at the accumulation of our things—from swap meets and garage sales and secondhand stores in small, remote towns. Things I had haggled for, carried on my lap for long drives, things friends had admired—vintage lamps, oddities, mid-century chairs, wedding china, etc. I didn’t want any of it. What did it mean that things I’d carried for decades no longer held any value to me? I had finally reached the point where I could walk away from it all.

What was next was that we would have to make a list of our things and figure out how to split them up. What did we still want to look at that would remind us of this life together? What did we buy when we were building our life together? There had been things that we did not want to move from apartment to apartment, so the culling had already begun halfway through our marriage. But what about the gifts to one another? There were things that we accepted but actually did not want or like—what was the protocol for splitting up those things? Each of us was supposed to push them onto the other person, and hold it over the other person’s head that our thoughtfulness was never appreciated. It could be one last war waged to prove that we were never the right fit.

I could not imagine where to begin in our one-bedroom apartment and was glad there were no children to split. But, more pressingly, who would leave?

19.

In the weeks after Daphne’s death, May Gray had settled in over Los Angeles, and it took everything I had in me to get out of bed each morning. I’d startle awake, eyes feeling like sandpaper, and stare at the endless gray looming outside my window. Even as May was winding down, I knew I would not be getting a reprieve from this feeling. June Gloom would bring more of the same overcast mornings.

What Nathan had said about not feeling like anything really mattered after doing this work echoed in my head. It felt true now. Though I had no intention of quitting Bethanny’s, I called her and told her I needed some time before meeting a new client. She said she understood. She confided in me that it happened more often than not. That’s why she kept the training rolling, because people were always dropping in and dropping out. She knew she was asking a lot from us and we couldn’t help but be changed.

If I wasn’t going to be a wife, what was I supposed to be?