Finding Us Again

BLISSFUL UNION 2

Few months after that night, they went about their usual day but this time, they barely talked unless it involved the children. Michael stopped sleeping in the room and started sleeping in Josh’s room.

With their eleventh wedding anniversary coming, Michelle was determined not just to celebrate the milestone but work towards the recovery of their marriage.

The party was scheduled for a week after their high school reunion weekend, and even though her default inclination would have been to decline attending, Michael was excited about the reunion which also marked twenty-one years since their graduation.

Because she hated having to explain to their old classmates that she was the one who married Michael married and not Amelia, his girlfriend for almost the entirety of their school years who just also happened to have been her best friend at the time.

She hated the looks of confusion, surprise, and often even judgment, most of them unable to mask their contempt over her ‘stealing’ her friend’s man. So she avoided those occasions when she could. But since Michael was eager to attend, she reckoned twenty-one years was enough time for everyone to have moved on from the past and accepted what was now reality.

But as she and Michael prepared to leave for the weekend reunion, having sent their kids to her parents house for the weekend, Michelle’s phone vibrated with a message from Kera, as she added yet another dress to her suitcase for more options for the planned ‘Dinner night’ the following night.

Picking up her phone and sliding it active, Michelle was already smiling in anticipation of reading a cheeky message from Kera who could not comprehend why she and Michael would want to spend an entire weekend with people they had barely been in contact with in two decades. But the forwarded post from Kera not only wiped the smile off her face, it blanched it.

Isn’t this Amelia? was Kera's message beneath the i********: post of a beautiful woman holding a suitcase and pouting before a full-length mirror.

Michelle’s heart stalled before accelerating into a frenetic beat. It was her first sighting of Amelia in two decades, her one-time best having vanished with no online presence whatsoever. For years, Morin had searched with every keyword possible, tried all variations of Amelia’s name in every search engine, every social media platform, but with no luck.

Amelia had disappeared into thin air...save for the one and only time she did re-emerge. Goosebumps formed on Michelle’s arms as she remembered the email she received months into her and Michael’s marriage from a sender listed as Hender T, a cryptic email which read..

‘How could you, Michelle? How could you do this? I will never forgive you.’

Distraught, after realizing that ‘Hender T’ was a nickname Amelia used in school, Michelle had typed a lengthy email in response that was both parts defending her marriage to Michael and pleading for her friend’s forgiveness, but the email was not replied to.

After that, as the years went by, apart from the occasional mention by people who knew them in high school, Amelia faded into the background of their lives. Which was why seeing her on her screen, an even more beautiful and glamorous version of the girl she once knew, bottomed out Michelle’s stomach.

But worse than her one-time best friend’s re-emergence was the caption of the picture, which read Reunion Ready.

Reunion Ready?

Amelia was coming for the reunion?

Turning to Michael, who was scrolling through his phone as he waited for her to be ready, she handed him hers.

“Did you know she was coming?”

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Michael was already trying to stem his rising irritation. They should have long been on the road. In the last hour, he had watched Michelle pack and unpack her suitcase several times while exchanging messages and calls with Wendy, the planner of their eleventh anniversary party, a party he thought not just unnecessary but a damned waste of money. Finding out just how much money Michelle was spending on the party had confirmed that, indeed, his wife danced only to the beat of her own drum. Because it made absolutely no sense.

Taking the phone from her, nothing prepared him for the image he would see on her screen. It took a few seconds for recognition to set in, time having dulled the memory of those angular features. But as the pixels on the screen took form in his brain, as he recognised the smiling woman as the first girl he fell in love with, a smile formed on his face as he stared.

Tall, slender, and with bright, fair skin that still glowed almost reflective, she looked exactly how he remembered. Even though her face was contoured and glossed in places it was once bare, even though the fingers of the hand that held her phone were pointy and red where they had once been short and plain, even though her breasts were rounder and her hips curvier, she was still the same Amelia he had fallen head over heels in love with as a twelve-year-old boy.

“You look like dog who has just seen a bone after years of starvation,” Michelle’s retort snapped him out of his reverie.

He looked up to see her glowering at him. “Well? Did you know she was attending?” She pressed.

It was only then he saw the Reunion Ready caption on the post.

“How would I know? I haven’t heard of or from her in years, as you’re well aware,” he retorted in response as he handed Michelle back her phone.

“You’re sure you’re done undressing her with your eyes? Should I be worried?”

He looked at her, not even knowing if she was serious or joking.

“That’s not funny,” he muttered, rising to his feet. “What you should be worried about is all the money you’re throwing away on a pointless party.”

“There’s nothing pointless about eleven years of marriage, Michael. There is everything to celebrate about being married for more than a decade.”

“There are a thousand ways we could celebrate more than a decade of marriage that doesn’t involve spending over 60 million.”

“Don’t worry about the budget, Michael. Leave that to me. Let’s just focus on celebrating the occasion with the people closest to us.”

He glared at her, wondering if she ever took the time to listen to herself, if she realised just how patronizing and emasculating her words often were.

“Let’s just leave,” he said, picking up his bag. “As it is, we are far behind time.”