“We’ve got a wedding.” I kept my eyes shut until the door clicked shut behind him.
And then I opened them in the dark, dry-eyed, and understood that the woman who had loved him was already gone, and that whoever I was now had exactly one thing left to do.
The strangest grief, in the days that followed, was not grieving Christian.
It was grieving the five years — not the man, but the story, the whole edifice of memory I had lived inside and believed.
Because when you learn that a love was manufactured, you do not only lose the future you’d planned; you lose the past you thought you’d had.
Every tender moment had to be re-examined and, one by one, reclassified: the way he’d found me at the gallery, which I’d thought was chance and now understood was casting; the speed with which he’d fallen, which I’d thought was passion and now understood was a schedule; the public declarations, the magazine spreads, the story he told interviewers about the regular girl who loved him before the fame — all of it, I now knew, a script, and I the one actor who did not know she was in a film.
There is a specific vertigo to that.
You reach back for the solid ground of your own memories and find that it was set dressing.
And for a while it made me doubt everything, including myself — how could I have been so blind, what did it say about me that I hadn’t seen.
But I came, in time, to a different and kinder understanding, and it is one I offer now to anyone it might reach.
It does not say anything bad about you that you did not see through a con built by professionals to be unseeable.
My openness was not stupidity.
My trust was not weakness.
They were simply the raw materials a dishonest man chose to exploit, and the shame for that belongs entirely to him.
I loved sincerely.
That the love was aimed at a fiction was his crime, not my failure.
I would rather be a person capable of loving that fully and be deceived than be a person too armored to be fooled.
He took my sincerity and used it.
But he could not make it a flaw.
