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There is a table that sits in her new kitchen, on the opposite coast from the entire social and professional network she has built since she left California after her masters. It sits just right in the sun of the mid afternoon, the sort of thing that drew families into settling into a neighborhood where at least one parent would be home at three in the afternoon to enjoy it with children.
It’s the exact sort of table she doesn’t need.
C.J. rattles around in the cavernous house alone, day after bitterly sunny day. There are rooms that sit empty, doors they’ve never had to open. There are chairs that sit empty, spaces at the table they’ve never had to fill.
There are dark swirls in the grain of the wood of the table, bright scarlet stitching in the cushions of the chairs.
She cannot get them out of her mind.
She sits at the table in the morning, a different seat each day. There is no way to define a seat that belongs, not when there are no other points of reference to work off. Their tea goes cold as they trace the curls of Toby’s hair into the table, as the hazel of Andy’s eyes reflect off the milkless brew.
The tea has made her pause, utterly unable to move, one too many times.
She takes her tea with milk, now more days than not.
In the cupboards there is one dish of each type. One mug, one glass, one set of cutlery. Everything is plain white, unadorned. Nothing like the menagerie of mismatched mugs, plates, and bowls that still sit in boxes in one of the many spare rooms. Nothing, certainly, like the wedding china and coordinated dinnerware the Wyatts had given Andy and Toby for the wedding.
Their wedding.
Without them.
They ran out of milk the day before, and have not had the time to pick up a new half gallon. A full gallon was impossible to finish, living alone, and the half cut it close more weeks than not. The tea in C.J.’s hand stared back at her from the plain white mug with the knowing gaze she had moved across a continent to make peace with.
Her feet cannot move. She cannot break the gaze. She is not entirely convinced she isn’t in New York again.
But she had left.
She had chosen this for all of them.
For their dreams, Andy’s most of all.
Never mind that they hadn’t slept a full night since making that choice. Changing time zones, they reasoned.
Never mind that this was the very picture of the sort of house Andy had dreamed of for years.
Never mind that she felt like she was losing her mind.
There are things that are off limits now – milkless tea, too much or too little time outdoors, even glancing for a second at red headed children in the neighborhood. Most of all, the people who know them most thoroughly.
The pain would ease, surely, if only C.J. could confide in the two people who knew them best.
But the house rattles around her, and she stops her own hand every time she goes to dial a number she knows too well. She presses her forehead into the grain of the table.
She knows the five stages of grief.
She knows.
She knows.
She knows.
She just wants to know when acceptance will turn into coping, will turn into healing, will turn into something, anything , other than the ever fraying edges of her sanity.
When it will turn into the ability to drink her tea the way she has for years, before she has to admit that the milk doesn’t even help enough anymore. She might have to switch to coffee soon, if it doesn’t let up.
They felt every inch of the eight weeks it had been since the wedding, since the move.
The three of them had been a poorly kept enough secret that closer friends had been surprised to see C.J. at the wedding. They still remembered every moment of standing next to Andy’s younger sister, watching Andy’s back and Toby’s eyes after the circling had stopped and the readings done, the rings exchanged, and the glass broken.
And their heart with it.
They had been the disposable one, was the way C.J. had parsed it in the months prior. Just by virtue of fact and circumstance, there had only been one logical way to achieve the ends. It justified the means.
Not in Toby’s eyes. Certainly not in Andy’s.
But they had each other. Time would heal.
Andy was destined for far bigger things than the ACLU, and C.J. would be damned if she was what stood in the way of the fulfillment of that destiny. Time would heal. It had to.
C.J. buries the choice of loneliness in sunshine, flowing skirts, mindless work, and less than savory men. She runs as far from what she had fallen in love with in Andy, first, then Toby, as she possibly can. She runs, if she’s honest, even further from the parts of herself she had allowed to blossom during the life-altering, life-affirming experience of loving them both.
She learns her lines word-perfect, and is off book before she is unpacked. She learns the exact sort of girl she has to be to lose herself in sun-soaked water and gossamer-thin fabric, for those sorts of men to flock to her in spite of her height. She becomes the kind of girl who can pass six feet for five ten, whose professional clout and capacity is buried under layers of hedging, fillers, and soft undertones.
For all intents and purposes, she disappears. Mostly, if she’s honest, from her own gaze.
There are no mirrors in the parts of the house she frequents now. It is not hard to make that feel like an accident. A matter of chance, not choice.
It works until it doesn’t, and it doesn’t until she leaves California again.
It is less difficult than she thought it would be to be in their orbit again. She has spent so long missing the brush of Andy’s musician’s fingers through her curls that it hardly stings more just because Andy is nearer, or that Toby is reserved in his affection. What recoils in her stomach is the acrid bitterness of watching them fall apart in front of her. When C.J. chose loneliness, they had never intended to choose all the right actions only for the two people dearest to them to suffer so viscerally they fell away from each other as well.
She holds her tongue when the bickering turns into fighting. She steps away when she sees Toby in the same suit two days in a row more times than usual, smelling of nothing but his own cologne. She turns away, by sheer force of will, when Andy leaves Toby’s office with tears in her eyes.
It is no longer their place, C.J. knows, to interfere. No matter how much they long to fix all of them.
No one has mattered more to C.J., possibly ever.
But they stay their hand.
They watch, aghast, as the marriage falls apart in five short years.
They haven’t been able to drink tea since they left California, milkless or not. They still live out of a kitchen with one dish of each type. One mug, one glass, one set of cutlery, plain white. The menagerie is in the spare room. The wedding china is three blocks away, preparing to be divided with the rest of the assets.
Acceptance still hasn’t turned into healing, but loneliness is a steady state they’ve come to know well.
Andy kisses them, once, years after California. She tastes like the shade of lipstick she’s favored since grad school, Toby, and ginger ale. Her scent, C.J. notes, has changed.
It takes C.J. eight weeks to be caught off guard by the scent on the wrists of an intern in Josh’s office, and two more for them to deputize Donna into finding out what the scent is with little explanation.
Donna has the answer in all of fifteen minutes, to both the question C.J. asked and the one she refused to answer.
Loneliness is a steady state.
Nothing has changed. For everything they can change, they cannot outrun the world, or public sentiment.
Not for an all-too-fickle 85%. Not when there are lives now at stake.
Loneliness is a steady state. It is one C.J. knows well, and they will choose it again, and again, and again.