The Last Mrs. Harlow

CHAPTER FOUR: ELIZA'S JOURNAL - ENTRY ONE

The following is transcribed from the private journal of Eliza Rose Harlow. Entries appear as written, unedited, in the first person. - C.A.

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I have decided to start writing things down. Everything. Every detail. Because I am beginning to think that if I don't, there will be nothing left to prove that I was here.

That sounds dramatic. I know how it sounds. I can already hear my own voice saying it and then laughing at myself, the way I do when I catch myself being too much - too emotional, too intense, too whatever the current version of too is. Nathaniel says I have a tendency to catastrophize. He says it with patience and a particular tone of fond exhaustion, the way you'd describe a child who is imaginative but sometimes gets carried away, and I have heard him say it enough times now that I hear his voice in my head even when he isn't in the room. Even when I think a private thought. Even now, writing this in the reading room while he's in Portland and the house is quiet and the only sound is the ocean doing what the ocean always does, which is exactly what it wants.

I am thirty-four years old. I have a degree in literature from Middlebury and a partially written novel on a laptop I haven't opened in eight months and a garden that I tend with a devotion that has slightly alarmed me, recently, when I tried to understand why - and I think the reason is that the garden is the one thing here that visibly responds to attention. You put the care in and the thing grows. The relationship is legible.

I have been married to Nathaniel Harlow for two years and seven months. We met at a charity function in Boston - his world, not mine, I was there because my friend Cara had dragged me along and because I had recently ended a three-year relationship and was going to things I wouldn't normally go to in the specific way people do when they're trying to prove to themselves that they're fine and living their life. He came up to me beside the bar and we talked for two hours and I thought: well, this is unexpected. He was everything I would have said I wasn't looking for, practically speaking - older, established in a world I didn't move in, carrying the weight of old family and old money and all the unspoken complexity that entails. But there was something about him. There is something about him. I want to be fair to that, even now, even as I write this in this room with the feeling sitting in my chest that I've been trying to name for the past several months.

We were happy. I believe that. The first year was genuinely, uncomplicated-ly good - we traveled, we laughed, we talked long into evenings about the kinds of things I had stopped expecting to be able to talk about with a romantic partner. He was interested in me. He asked questions and remembered the answers. He was generous in every practical sense and in some emotional ones too, at least in the beginning.

The shift was gradual. That's the thing that makes it so hard to pin down, so difficult to explain to anyone in a way that doesn't sound like ordinary relationship entropy - the normal, slow cooling that happens to most couples after the first heat of it wears off. It was gradual enough that I kept finding reasons to explain it. He's stressed about work. He's tired. We're both tired. This is just what long-term relationships feel like, and I was naive to expect it to feel different. I catastrophize. I make too much of things.

But here is what I know, set down in plain language without his voice in my head softening the edges:

I feel watched in this house. Not in a way I can point to - not cameras, not anything so clear or so confrontable. Just a quality of attention that follows me from room to room, that makes me aware of my movements, my habits, the patterns of where I go and when. I feel monitored. I feel assessed. And when I try to talk to Nathaniel about this feeling, he listens with such patient care and reflects it back to me in language that makes it sound like anxiety - my anxiety, my issue, my tendency to read threat into neutral situations - and by the end of the conversation I am nodding along and agreeing and feeling grateful that he's so patient with me, and it is only later, lying in the dark, that I realize I have somehow arrived at a destination I didn't set out for. I went into the conversation with a concern and I came out with a diagnosis, and he never raised his voice or said anything unkind.

I keep trying to explain that.

I keep not quite being able to.

His mother doesn't like me. I know this is not an original problem - daughters-in-law and mothers-in-law have been navigating this tension for as long as the institution of marriage has existed, and I am sure there are women who handle it with more grace than I do. But Dorothy's dislike has a particular quality that goes beyond the territorial or the protective. She looks at me sometimes - usually when she doesn't think I'm paying attention - with an expression that I can only describe as knowing. Like she has information about me, or about my situation, that I don't have. Like she's waiting for me to catch up.

I've tried to talk to her. Really tried - not the surface politeness we manage over dinner, but actual conversation. Twice I've made deliberate attempts, found her alone, tried to open something real. Both times she has met my effort with a pleasantness so perfected it functions like a wall. I don't leave those conversations feeling rejected. I leave feeling gently redirected, and it's only afterward that I realize nothing happened at all.

Agnes knows things. I'm certain of it. Agnes has been in this house long enough to have absorbed everything it contains, every history, every argument, every pattern of behavior. She watches me sometimes from across the kitchen with an expression I can't read - not unfriendly, not exactly, but careful in a way that feels significant. She liked me, early on, I think. There was a warmth in the first months that has since become something more cautious, and I don't know what changed because she would never tell me and I haven't asked directly because I'm afraid - and I'm writing that down because it's true and I'm trying to be honest here - I'm afraid of what she might say.

I am afraid in this house, and I don't know yet whether that fear is mine or whether it's been put in me.

That's what I need to figure out. That's what I'm going to write my way toward. Not toward an accusation - I'm not ready for that word, I'm not sure it applies, I'm not sure of anything clearly enough to use a word that large. But toward the truth of my own experience. Toward a record of what is actually happening versus what I'm being gently, persistently encouraged to believe is happening.

Last week, I ran into Mara.

Mara Hendricks was Nathaniel's girlfriend before me - they were together for almost two years in their late twenties, broke up amicably, remain in the same social orbit in the way that people do when they move in a world small enough that avoiding each other would require effort. I have met her perhaps four or five times over the course of my marriage, always in group settings, always entirely civil. She is a litigation attorney, sharp-minded and direct in the way that profession sometimes produces, and I have always liked her, in the abstract, slightly uncomfortable way you like an ex who seems genuinely fine and therefore removes from you the comfortable narrative that things ended for clear and obvious reasons.

I ran into her at the farmers' market in Kessler Point - she was visiting a friend who has a house out this way, she explained, holding a bunch of kale and looking faintly embarrassed by it. We got coffee. We sat at a table outside the café on the main street and talked for an hour, which felt natural and also slightly surprising - neither of us had sought the other out before, it had always been the accidental encounter in a larger group.

She asked how I was.

I said fine, the automatic answer, the one that lives on the surface of me like a reflex.

She looked at me for a moment in a way that felt different from polite inquiry. “Eliza,” she said - just my name, careful and intentional, the way someone says a name when they mean the word to do more work than names usually do. “Are you actually fine?”

I looked at her across the table. The sun was doing something warm and ordinary and the market was busy around us and everything on the surface of the world was fine, just fine.

“I don't know,” I said.

It was the most honest thing I'd said in months.

Mara set down her coffee cup. She looked at the table, then back at me. “There are things I probably should have -” She stopped. Started again. “If you ever need to talk to someone. About anything. I want you to know you can call me.” She said it carefully, deliberately, like each word had been vetted before she let it out. “I mean that genuinely.”

“What things?” I asked.

She shook her head, just slightly. Not refusing - something more like not here, or not yet, or you'll have to get there yourself because I can't be the one to take you there. “Just - call me,” she said. “Anytime.”

I drove home turning it over.

That was six days ago. I haven't called her yet.

I keep meaning to.

I keep finding reasons why today isn't the right day, and I hear Nathaniel's voice in my head when I do it - patient, caring, the voice of a man explaining to his wife that she has a tendency to let things get larger in her mind than they really are - and then I hear my own voice underneath his, quieter but persistent, saying: but what if they're exactly as large as you think they are?

I'm going to call Mara. Next week. And I'm going to keep writing in this book, every day, everything that happens and exactly how it makes me feel, without the edit of his voice or my mother's or anyone else's.

I'm going to get to the truth of this.

I just need to be brave enough to want it.

More tomorrow.

— E.H.

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