Page 22 of A Summer of Stars

“Stop badgering me. Why don’t you focus on winning a match before telling me how to practice?”

So I stopped asking.

I was being too overbearing. I was nitpicking his schedule. I wasn’t letting him grieve the way he wanted. I stepped back and tried to enjoy what our marriage was becoming. I’d fly to more of his matches by skipping my own, cheer him on and talk to the press about his hard work and wait for him after his post-tournament rituals.

That summer, one month after our first wedding anniversary, I ended up missing the US Open because I injured my ankle during practice. My excitement for Jeremiah couldn’t be contained, though. The US matches were always his favorite, so it brought me relief to see him pack with a smile on his face rather than a stress wrinkle between his brows. I didn’t plan on going—eight-hour flights weren’t something I looked forward to. But a week into the tournament—me in London, him in New York—I was struck with the urge to see him. To be there when he won another US Open.

My flight landed in New York at tenP.M.I got to his hotel at elevenP.M.I opened his hotel door and found him in bed with another woman at 11:05P.M. With Ava Williams, the newest American tennis player. She was younger and newer and shinier. It made it so much worse.

I ran out the door to search for the elevator through my blurry vision clouded with tears.

“Luna! Luna!” Jeremiah shouted, trying to catch up with me.His grown-out hair was disheveled, and his shirt—a shirt I had bought him for his thirtieth birthday—was wrinkled.

“Leave me alone!” I pleaded, hitting the elevator button repetitively, wanting it to take me away.

He grasped my arms, forcing me to face him. “Luna, please, please just listen. It was nothing, she’s nothing. I was stressed, I had a drink,shekissedme.”

My body was like a rickety air conditioning unit. My entire frame was shaking, tears painting my face. Happiness was an old memory.

“I’m supposed to be yourwife,” I cried. “I thought you loved me. I thought you loved me.I thought you loved me.”

He pulled me into his chest. “I do love you. I love you so much.”

“Then why did you do that?Because that didn’t feel like love.”

I thought of my mother and father. The way he watched her dance in the kitchen and brushed her hair from her face as she spoke. How he’d stay up for her when she hosted an event or large dinner party at the restaurant, slumped on the staircase in the foyer waiting to embrace her. How he’d buy her a new charm for her birthday every year, adding it to the bracelet he had given her for their first wedding anniversary. How he clutched her headstone and let his tears stain the granite, praying for her to come back.

My heart was cut open, and I was bleeding. Blood tinted the taste in my mouth and stained my vision. My eyes were clogged with tears, and my throat was clotted with emotion. I was suffocating but had access to air; I had simply forgotten how to breathe. I wept and sobbed and screamed with grief because my marriage wasn’t supposed to end. It was supposed to be like my mother’s.

I pulled myself out of his grasp and ran down the stairwell, out of the hotel, into the street, and all the way to the train station.

“Dad, I’m coming home,” I squeaked over the phone.

I filed for divorce the next morning.

We had only been married for a year.

Eight months have passed since that night, and his voice simultaneously warmed and chilled the numb heart behind my rib cage. I could still feel the handprints on my biceps from the way he clutched me.

Once he received the divorce papers in the mail, the phone calls began. Calls where he begged for forgiveness. Calls where he cried apologetically. Calls where he screamed at me in frustration for not trying to repair what he refused to admit he maimed in the first place.

I took his calls. I listened. Guilt filled my airways anyway.

Accepting apologies sounded like an easy melody to hum along to. If my father and Walt hadn’t been there with me, I would have fallen for it. But looking at my father and seeing the old wedding band on his finger reminded me of what I wanted.

So when Jeremiah screamed at me, I screamed back.

I called him names. I told him I hated him, told him I should’ve never married him in the first place. Every cruel thing I had been keeping to myself because I had feltguiltyfor leaving our marriage, I let go. I screamed for so long that my throat felt cut up.

I hadn’t expected him to record it and punish me with it for not taking him back.

I knew our divorce would make headlines, and journalists would speculate and look for sources. I assumed that’s why Jeremiah was taking a break from tennis, the same as I was. But heartbreak was the real reason I hid, wrapped in my childhood duvet in Rhode Island. Until Deidra arrived on my doorstep six months later.

“Jeremiah did an interview,” she told me.

“Oh… about returning to tennis?”

She nodded. “And the divorce.”