I’ve spent my whole life kidding myself.

I thought if I just played my cards right, if I did what I was supposed to do, I’d end up like one of the heroines from the stories my mother read to me as a little girl—beautiful, clever, happy.

Happy.

And it hits me, harder than ever before, that I’ve screwed up, that I’m just possibly the most screwed-up woman on the face of the planet (North American continent, anyway) and that those fairy tales my mother read me (she loved them) and the lessons I take away from them (I loved them) were simply fiction.

I’ve based the most important decisions in my life on fiction. So not-good.

I pick up the phone, dial a number with a never-forgotten area code.

He answers on the third ring. There’s music playing in the background. Voices laughing. “Jean-Marc?” I say, and my voice, which is never particularly strong, wobbles.

“Holly?”

“Hey.”

“I can hardly hear you.”

It’s your music, I want to tell him. But I don’t, because I can see his rambling storybook ranch house, with the set of French doors that are open onto the trellis-covered patio, where guests must be lounging in comfy chairs near the pool. It’s summer in the valley, which means hot. And moonlit. And scented with the unforgettably sweet fragrance of orange blossoms.

I should be there. I would be there. If he had let me.

I close my eyes. Why am I calling? Why am I doing this? I must like torturing myself. “Do you have a second?”

“Sure. Let me go into the house.”

So he was outside. A rock falls from my throat to my stomach and lands hard.

I can hear him talking to others, his voice muffled as if he’s put the phone to his chest, and then I hear footsteps, a door closes, and a moment of silence. “Holly?”

“Hi.” Be calm, be calm, be calm.

“Something wrong?”

God damn it, yes.

You once said you loved me. And you married me. In front of God and my family and everybody.

I see us at my family’s old-fashioned church in Visalia with the marvelous stained-glass windows, the same church I attended every single Sunday from birth until I went away to college. I see us in St. Tropez in lounge chairs on the pier, sunlight glinting madly off the perfect turquoise water, me obsessed with Jean-Marc’s indifference while Jean-Marc is obsessed with Rimbaud’s poetry. I see us stiff and silent, signing the divorce papers at the ugly Fresno courthouse, the building more suitable for a prison than for an office building.

“No.” But I’m going to cry; I’m going to break open fast. Jesus. How can it be so easy for him? How can it—we—have been nothing at all? “What happened?” I ask, and I know I’m a fool, know that this is ground that’s been covered a thousand times without any insight gleaned, but I still need answers, something definitive, something to save me. Make me human again. The truth is, I have to understand how his feelings changed. I need to know what makes love fade, or if it was something I did.

“Oh, Holly.” He sighs. “Are you having a bad day?”

Stupid tears sting my eyes. No, Jean-Marc, I want to scream, not a bad day, just a bad life. I thought you were my Prince Charming, and instead you were a toad. I sniff unattractively, and somehow, thinking of him as a toad, a really awful warty, stinky toad, makes me feel marginally better.. “Are you having a party?”

“Just a few friends over.”

I say nothing. What can I say? I was the one who filed for divorce.