For nine years I’d done a fairly good job of building these myths, but now I was feeling helpless, raw with need, and utterly abandoned by the two people who were supposed to love me most in this world. And I was beginning to fear that Jack, the man I wanted so much to love and be loved by, was going to screw me over—that I would be mistreated the way my mother and her mother had been. And if my father had found someone else, how much easier would it be for Jack?

Then the thoughts I’d so effectively pushed away since first falling for Jack began to resurface. He was rich. He was famous. He was a celebrity. Women all over the world lusted after him. Why would he stay with me when he had all those options?

I thought of all the women he’d starred with, the women he’d kissed and touched and seen nude take after take—and would continue to kiss and touch and see nude if he continued acting. And why wouldn’t he continue? And how could I ever come close to competing with their sculpted bodies and perfect faces? It was too much. I’d never make it.

I slid further under the sheets and dissolved into tears as the roots of my fears were finally laid bare. The bottom line was that I couldn’t compete, and I didn’t trust him to love me forever. One look at the marital statistics of celebrities proved the point; he came from a culture that discarded marriage like yesterday’s newspaper. The fact that he was a Christian now didn’t ease my fears. He was only human; he’d never be able to resist the seduction of the women he was surrounded by.

I fell asleep as dawn was breaking, exhausted from thinking and crying, with visions before me of my mother’s face the day my father left.

JACK

I DIDN’T HEAR from Grace for a week.

The day after our explosive dinner I called and left her a message, and then forced myself to find something else to do besides calling again and again until she answered. I prayed for God to calm my anxiety when she didn’t call back by that evening, or the next day. Tuesday I called in the evening, a time when she was almost always home, and again got her machine. I realized that the issue was not that she wasn’t home, but that she wasn’t answering. I was hurt, but tried to remember that she was obviously in the throes of some family flashbacks that were eating away at her, and that this probably had nothing to do with me. It worked for a while.