“Oh, shut up, it was only one fucking time,” Dave would say, red and angry.

Georgina became an easy joke. A footnote in a story about an epic party. Georgina became someone he had to live down.

32

now.

Here was how it was supposed to go: Ben and I host our first ever dinner party. It is an astounding success, with us basically becoming the epitome of a Richard Curtis couple, laughing with our diverse group of friends around our dining table. Ben would look over at me as I served coffee toward the end of the night, dewy and smiling, and realize I was The One. That this life we’d built was beyond special. That I was beyond special. That he needed to lock this down immediately or risk losing the best thing that had ever happened to him. However, instead, the night before, as we sat on our sofa, discussing what to cook for everyone, he mentioned that the HR lady from college had got engaged.

“That’s nice,” I said, curling my feet up and glancing down at our handwritten menu so my face wouldn’t reveal anything.

“Yeah, for her, I guess.” Ben stretched his arms over his head, and then shrugged, before muttering the words that would undo me. “I dunno. I’m so over the whole marriage thing, but she seemed happy at least.” He leaned over and looked at our shared scrap of paper that was now shaking in my hands. “Do you think charcuterie meats AND bread and dips is too much for a starter?”

The walls of our flat squeezed me in. My breathing quickened in my throat. I tried to suck air into my rib cage to keep my voice steady as I said, “OK. I didn’t know you felt like that.”

“About the bread? Just, aren’t we having bread with the lasagna?”

“No. Not the bread...the whole marriage thing.”

“Oh, that.” Ben looked up at me, shocked, as if he would’ve been more surprised if I’d objected to the lasagna. “I mean, it’s not such a big deal, is it? It’s certainly not something I’ve thought about with us. Don’t you agree?”

The menu fluttered to the floor. My whole world caved in. I wanted to burst into tears, scream, and smack him in the face, all at the same time. I was such an idiot. Such an idiot for thinking he was on the verge of choosing me. I knew what his words meant. I wasn’t stupid. He may as well have said, “It’s not marriage I’m unsure about, it’s you. And I’m wasting all your last fertile years by dithering, until you get too old to conceive, and then, suddenly, I will believe in marriage again, just not with you, but with this hot twenty-eight-year-old.”

“Umm,” I managed, while Ben put a hand on my knee I wanted to smack off. “Umm.”