She will give it to you when the time is right. She will know. Mothers always do.

Amelia DREAM JOB

AS I OPENED THE DOOR to Palm Beach Conceptions only an hour after the most emotional scene of my life, I realized I should have been sitting at one of my friends’ houses, sobbing into a pint of Häagen-Dazs and a glass of rosé. But, damn it, I had been working on getting this interview for more than three months. Crying wouldn’t help. Writing, I knew, would.

I waved to two of the women in the waiting room, who called, “Hi, Amelia.” I’m sure they were wondering why I was here, if Thad and I were trying to have a baby. Even the gossipiest socialites in town couldn’t already know about my new, Thadless life, could they?

The thought gave me heartburn. What if everyone knew? What if I was the only person in all of Palm Beach who had been out of the loop on the truth about Thad? I couldn’t stay here now. I couldn’t bear to stick around knowing that I was the scandal of the week.

Maybe I could go back home to North Carolina. I had a decent amount of contacts now. I could freelance. But I wasn’t sure if I could make enough money freelancing to live. And try as they might, my parents weren’t in a position to help me. Plus, there wouldn’t be any alimony. I’d been the one paying our bills, while Thad “focused on his novel”—which I now knew was code for focusing on Chase.

I couldn’t very well throw Thad out of his own grandmother’s apartment. Even if I could, I’m pretty sure no one wants to sleep in the chintz-filled bedroom where her husband has been having sex with someone else.

All at once, this terrified, vulnerable feeling came over me. But at least I still had my job.

I didn’t have a single friend who still had the same job as when they graduated from college, so I guess that made me a little bit different. But getting hired at Clematis magazine had been my dream. Growing up, the daughter of two very refined Southerners, Clematis had been as much a part of my life as church on Sunday and my grandmother’s pearls around my neck. Clematis was aspirational, a symbol of the person that I might become one day, someone well traveled and well-read. Someone who could speak authoritatively on art and new museum exhibits and the importance of music in society. Someone like my mother.

I had taken early on to investigative pieces. Getting to the bottom of a secret, discovering a sordid underbelly, was my real forte. But I also loved to tell people’s stories. Real stories about life and love, hardship and heartache. About the way that people get back up when they fall down. In fact, my very first piece at Clematis had been about a disgraced young heiress whose father had been caught up in the Enron scandal. In a matter of days, she lost everything, the cushy, beautiful life she’d always known pulled out from under her. Years later, only in her midtwenties, she had begged and borrowed from every friend she had left to launch a makeup line that had sold for millions to Sephora, landing her back on top once again. Storytelling showed me that it’s not our failures that matter; it’s what we do after that counts.