"If you believe that, maybe you are helpless."
"So just because he likes me I'm supposed to change who I am?"
"You're going to lose yourself at times, Amy. It happens to all of us. You just have the opportunity to lose yourself in something bigger, something exciting and new, you and him together. The two of you are just too afraid of admitting this to each other. Now go get ready for work. I’ll fix you a breakfast that will make you forget all about what’s-his-name.”
“Vi, after your heart-attack, I hid all the liquor.”
“In that case, I’ll order out,” Vi said. She winked at Amy. “Do you want your breakfast neat or on the rocks?”
Amy shook her head. Sometimes she didn’t know what to do with Vi. Others, she didn’t know what she’d do without her.
***
Although the DC summer was the hottest on record, the next few weeks passed at a glacial pace. Amy struggled to readjust to life without Ethan. Struggled to adjust to the big house again, to looking up from whatever she was doing and not seeing his face. She didn’t want to admit it, but she missed him terribly. She missed the way he would sing as he showered and the way he ran his thumb across her cheek as he brought her breakfast in bed. She missed the random visits at work and the nights out on the town. No matter where they were, Ethan had a way of making her feel like they were the only two people in the world, that she was desirable and special. Now that he was gone, she just felt completely alone.
At one point Amy had enjoyed plunging into the improvement of her home, but now it all felt like too much. The house was so much bigger than what she needed, and all of the fancy china and silverware she had for parties just seemed so unnecessary. She missed Ethan’s streamlined apartment, his smaller kitchen, and the cozy feeling she got when she spent time with him there, eating dinner or reading or just talking over a bottle of wine.
In particular, Amy struggled to readjust to sleeping alone. She had always had trouble falling asleep, unlike Ethan who seemed to fall asleep the instant his head hit the pillow, but whenever he fell asleep, the rhythm of his quiet breathing and the warmth and weight of his arm over her shoulder had lulled her to sleep. Now that she was alone again, Amy tossed and turned all night, unable to find a comfortable position anywhere in her bed. He was the only man whose absence had ever annoyed her. Even though she was still mad at him, she couldn’t help but smile at that thought.
Despite her best attempts, Vi couldn’t seem to cheer Amy up. She had tried every trick she knew, and a few she claimed to have thought up on the spot, but she just couldn’t seem to make her niece happy. Amy was glad to see that Vi was feeling better, but she couldn’t muster the energy to pretend to feel well herself. Even Callie visited a few nights a week in an attempt to help Amy get out of this rut. Even when Amy was with both of them, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was missing something.
Amy buried herself back in her work hoping to find some relief. But work was no better. In the hot summer months, when Congress wasn’t in session, and the elites were all off on vacation in more moderate climates, DC was a ghost town, with low-level staffers running everything. Staffers alone weren’t important enough to cause scandals. Even though she had long since handed off primary contact with Ethan, Amy had spent years working with the rest of Haven Communications cleaning up his summer scandals, some real, some invented. Now, without him as a client, she had nothing to distract herself from the fact that he was no longer her boyfriend and only technically her husband. She still hadn’t signed the divorce papers. She couldn’t bring herself to do it. She had stashed them in the top drawer of her desk. She couldn’t look at them without bursting into tears.
If she hadn’t given away half of her caseload to Callie, Amy would have had at least something to distract her, but instead, she spent her days staring out her office window wondering what she should do next. She all but prayed for the phone to ring with a scandal, any scandal, big or small, to at least give her some time to stop thinking about Ethan. At this point she was ready to do anything, even if it meant diversifying the kind of work her company did.
More than a month had passed since Amy had told Ethan to get out of her life. She hadn’t heard from him since that fight in his apartment, but she read about his acquisition of Harris Energy in the Washington Post. The headline read: Tech Mogul Bets Big on Energy. Amy didn’t get past the first paragraph before throwing the paper in the trash. “You got everything you wanted, Ethan. I hope you’re happy,” she whispered. She spent a week sitting at her desk wondering whether she should call Ethan and tell him what a lousy, terrible, no-good asshole he was, but she never bothered. Besides, she was worried that when she finally did call him, she’d miss some incoming call, some crisis to take her mind off of everything.