Husband, Are You Going to Divorce Me Today

I woke to the sound of rain against the window and the warmth of his hand in my hair. For a moment, I forgot everything. The charity gala, the champagne, the way his mouth had found mine in the elevator. I forgot that I was Eleanor Vance, wife of Nathaniel Vance, heir to the Vance Hotel Group, and that I had spent the last three years being the perfect wife for a man who had never once looked at me the way he had last night. I shifted closer, and his fingers stilled. Then I saw it. The strand of white hair tangled around his knuckles. Not silver. Not gray. White. Bright, unmistakable, wrong. My breath caught. I had been dyeing my hair for years. Every three weeks, a touch-up. Every six, a full color. No one knew. Not my mother. Not my sisters. Certainly not Nathaniel. The woman he had married had chestnut hair that fell in soft waves down her back, the kind of hair that photograph well at charity events and board dinners. This woman had white hair. White as bone. White as the hair I had woken up with one morning when I was twenty-two, six months after my father died, six months after I stopped being able to pretend that everything was fine. Nathaniel's hand withdrew. I watched him through half-closed eyes. He sat up, the sheet pooling at his waist, and looked at me. Not with disgust. Not with confusion. With something worse. Recognition. As if he had always known there was something wrong with me and had finally found the proof. "I..." I started, but I had no words. What could I say? That I had lied to him from the first day we met? That the woman he proposed to, the woman he married, the woman he brought to every Vance family dinner, did not exist? He stood. He didn't look at me again. He walked to the bathroom, and the door clicked shut behind him. I lay there, counting the seconds. One. Two. Three. The rain kept falling. My heart kept beating. I kept waiting for him to come back out and demand an explanation, to yell, to do something. Anything. Instead, twenty minutes later, I heard the front door open and close. He was gone. I got up. My legs felt unsteady. I walked to the bathroom, avoided the mirror, and turned on the shower. The water was too hot, but I didn't adjust it. I stood under the spray and tried to think. He knew. He knew something, at least. He knew I wasn't what I appeared to be. And he had left without a word. At nine, my phone buzzed. A text from Nathaniel. Nathaniel: My mother wants to see you. Eleven o'clock. Don't be late. I stared at the screen. His mother. Margaret Vance. The woman who had never quite approved of me, who had looked at me at our wedding as if she were mentally calculating the cost of annulment. If Nathaniel had told her something... I typed back. Eleanor: I'll be there. Then I sat on the edge of the bed and tried to figure out what I was supposed to do. I had no idea what he had seen, what he thought, what he planned to tell his mother. I had no idea how to prepare for a conversation I didn't understand. But I knew one thing. I couldn't let them destroy me. Not without a fight. I stood up. I walked to my closet. I pulled out my armor: a pale blue dress that brought out my eyes, low heels that made me look taller than I was, a string of pearls that had belonged to Nathaniel's grandmother. I did my makeup carefully, methodically, as if I were preparing for a board meeting instead of a possible execution. Then I drove to the Vance estate. The house sat on a bluff overlooking the Pacific, all glass and white stone and angles that were supposed to look modern but just looked cold. A housekeeper let me in and directed me to the conservatory. Margaret was already there, sitting in a wicker chair with a cup of tea in her hand and a look on her face that made my stomach drop. "Sit down, Eleanor," she said. I sat. The chair was uncomfortable. I had the feeling that was intentional. "Nathaniel came to see me this morning," Margaret said. "He told me something rather... unusual." I waited. I had learned long ago that silence was often the best defense. "He said he saw something last night that made him question certain things about you. He was vague. He said he needed to think. But he asked me to speak with you." She set her cup down. "So. What is it that my son saw?" I could lie. I had been lying for years. I could tell her that he had been drunk, that he had imagined things, that whatever he thought he saw was a misunderstanding. I could keep the mask in place. But Nathaniel had seen the white hair. And he had left. And he had called his mother. The mask was already cracking. "I've been dyeing my hair," I said. "Since before I met him." Margaret's expression didn't change. "Dyeing it what color?" "Brown. Chestnut. The color of a woman who looks like she belongs in this family." She was quiet for a long moment. Then she said, "What color is it naturally?" I met her eyes. "White." She blinked. Once. Twice. "How long?" "Since I was twenty-two." "That explains the... coloring. But it doesn't explain why you lied. Or why you felt the need to." She leaned forward. "What are you hiding, Eleanor?" I had a choice. I could tell her the truth. I could explain what had happened to me, what I had lost, what I had spent years trying to outrun. Or I could keep the mask up, and let her wonder, and hope that Nathaniel's silence lasted long enough for me to figure out another way. I chose the truth. "I had a breakdown," I said. "After my father died. I was in a hospital for six months. When I got out, I couldn't look at myself in the mirror. So I started dyeing my hair. And then I started pretending that the hospital never happened. That the woman in the mirror was someone else. Someone normal. Someone whole." Margaret's face was unreadable. "And you never told Nathaniel." "No." "Because you thought he wouldn't marry you if he knew." "Because I knew he wouldn't." She sat back. "You're probably right." She picked up her tea again. "But that's not the problem." I waited. "The problem," she said, "is that you lied to him. And now he doesn't know who he married. And he's asking himself whether everything about you is a lie." She took a sip. "So I'll ask you again. What else are you hiding?" I thought about my mother, who had never forgiven me for being weak. My sisters, who had written me off years ago. The trust fund my father had left me, which I had never touched, which no one knew about. The fact that I had a degree from an art school in Portland and a portfolio that could have taken me to New York if I had ever had the courage to show it to anyone. "There's nothing else," I said. "I've been pretending to be someone I'm not. But that's the only lie." Margaret studied me. I couldn't tell if she believed me. "Then here's what's going to happen," she said. "You're going to tell Nathaniel the truth. All of it. Tonight. And then he's going to decide what he wants to do." I nodded. "But before you do," she said, "I want to show you something." She rose and walked to a cabinet in the corner of the conservatory. She pulled out a leather folder and placed it on the table between us. "What is this?" I asked. "My mother's medical records." She sat back down. "She had what they called a nervous breakdown in 1962. She spent eight months in a sanatorium in Switzerland. She came back, dyed her hair, and never spoke of it again." She tapped the folder. "She was also the most competent woman I ever knew. She ran this family for thirty years. No one ever knew." I stared at her. "I'm telling you this," Margaret said, "because I don't think you're weak. I think you're afraid. And fear can be cured. Weakness can't." She stood. "Go home. Talk to my son. And Eleanor?" "Yes?" "Fix your hair before you do. If you're going to tell him the truth, tell him all of it. But don't let him think you're ashamed of who you are. That's a worse look than white hair." I drove home with the folder on the passenger seat. I had no idea what I was going to say to Nathaniel. But for the first time in years, I had a plan.