I was the one who played bad cop to Jean-Marc’s good cop. I was the one who moved. He got to stay behind. He got to keep the friends. Even better, he got the great Waterford glasses—a complete set, minus the eight white wine I have, which he doesn’t miss since he has twelve red—so he ought to be having parties.

“It takes time to settle into a new place,” he says, his accent suddenly becoming thicker, more Gallic. The guy knows when to play his French-foreign-hero card. “You have to be patient. Give it time.”

“Yeah.”

“Starting over is never easy.”

I nod, not that he can see, and scrub my face dry.

“It was the same for me,” he adds. “When I left Paris, came here, everything was so different. I felt like a fish out of water.”

Oh, shut up.

Jean-Marc’s a professor of French literature at Fresno State, the local university. When we met at the Daily Planet in Fresno’s Tower district, I fell for him hard and fast. I loved everything about him: his Frenchness, his style, his incredible accent. He was so different from anyone I’d ever met, so interesting, so romantic. Our dates were like something out of a romance novel—champagne (French champagne, not Napa Valley sparkling wine), intimate little restaurants (Continental cuisine, of course), expert seduction with real French-kissing.

“What went wrong?” I repeat, growing angry all over again. Why did you stop loving me?

He sighs, a heavy Gallic sigh. “I don’t know, Holly. These things happen.”

Do they? Why? How?

I used to phone him more often, a call every two or three weeks under the auspices of checking in, and every call is like this. We have conversations of nothing. I ask hopeless questions, and he has no answer; he gives me no help. I’m desperate. And he’s a stranger.

It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. I’m still shocked. Mortified. I was always the good girl. I was the one who worked so hard not to make mistakes. I was the one who made sure everyone else was happy first. But here I am in a drafty apartment in a city that feels strange, trying not to fall apart.

No one told me this part. No one talked about what happens after the happily-ever-after.. Fairy tales usually conclude with “The End,” but in my case, there was another page that said, “The Beginning Again, Part II.”

Part II.

How awful.

I know Olivia says I must get out, meet people, start dating, but dating again scares me to death. What do I tell people? What do I tell them about myself?

A Cancer, born in the year of the rat, I like sushi, Italian food, movies, travel, and hiking. Oh, and I’m divorced.