Chapter Two

1

Sylvie did not take her phone when she left Marblehead. She didn’t leave Jonah a note. She threw her grandparents’ bougainvillea painting into her car and drove straight to Hallie’s house in Baltimore, where her friend let her in without hesitation. She said she’d been waiting for this day. She had, it turned out, a lot to say about Sylvie. Apparently, she’d clocked Sylvie’s depression years ago, and the unhealthiness of her relationship years before that.

‘It was textbook,’ Hallie said, by which she meant it met the criteria of psychological abuse she’d learned in undergrad.

Out of gratitude, Sylvie tried to be the practice patient Hallie so clearly wanted, but she couldn’t bear to be diagnosed. Nor was she eager to discuss her emotions, her errors, the insecurity and solipsism that had delivered her to this point. She just wanted to enjoy the ringing quiet of her head without Jonah constantly in it. She conjured his voice daily, of course – hourly; sometimes, it seemed, every minute – but imagining what he’d say if he found her wasn’t the same as hearing his pity and scorn.

After two weeks, she told Hallie she needed some time alone. Hallie said that as long as Sylvie wasn’t isolating herself, she thought getting aplace was a healthy next step. Sylvie thanked her until both girls cried, then started answering Craigslist ads. Within days, she had found a room in a group house, bought the cheapest little square of a phone on the market, and sold both her engagement ring and the Civic, which was registered to Jonah, to a transparently criminal man in the Baltimore suburbs. She called her parents, finally, and was astonished when her mother, rather than scolding, asked, ‘Do you need money?’

‘I’m all right.’

Paul, on the other line, issued a soft grumble. Sylvie could imagine him in his study, her mother in the living room, uniting without providing each other comfort. ‘We’re going to send you some,’ he said.

‘Just this once,’ Carol added sternly, as if Sylvie were insisting. ‘I hope you didn’t close your bank account from college.’

‘No.’ Sylvie knew the money was proof of love, of acceptance. She had expected no such thing. ‘It’s still there. Thank you.’

Between that, the car-and-ring cash, and her savings from the harbor, she could have made it months without a job, but emotionally, that was a non-option. Among the easier lessons Sylvie had learned from Swampscott was that her emotional state deteriorated when she wasn’t employed, and so she found herself part-time work at a museum gift shop, a Pottery Barn, and the kind of wine store that sells $17 containers of almonds and set about making a life.

Sylvie saw Hallie once a month. She wrote Rachel a long apology that led to, if not renewed friendship, a form of intermittent communication – meals when Rachel visited Hallie, text-message catch-ups on birthdays, an occasionalthinking of you– that made her feel better. She learned how to ignore the emails Jonah sent to the address that she, out of spite, refused to change, and how to pick men up fast and get rid of them faster. Everything was easier and more fun, it turned out, if you stopped waiting for people to love you. If you simply refused to let them, it got easier still.

After a year, she swapped the group house for an apartment with only one roommate, a woman named Corinne, who had enough friends not to need Sylvie, but not so many she wasn’t sometimes around to go trawl bars for men or watch an old movie or an episode ofThe Sopranoson a rainy afternoon. Tony and Carmela were among Sylvie’s major companions by then, along with the contents of her neighborhood library’s philosophy section. RereadingThe Sickness Unto Deathwas strangely soothing – more so, certainly, than the romance novels that Sylvie now thought she would never touch again. She’d tried one, and it was a stinging reminder of what an idiot she’d been. As she made her way from comforting old European men to the feminists she’d read about in Swampscott, it occurred to her, as it had occurred to countless women before her, that, in fact, she’d been fooled. By Jonah, yes, but also by a bad system. She was no different from Carmela Soprano. She’d been hoodwinked by patriarchy.

A thought like that could lead a person to lesbianism, or activism, or any number of -isms. For Sylvie, it led to the classroom. During her second year in Corinne’s apartment – they celebrated their anniversary as roommates with Chinese food and a cake – she applied to Johns Hopkins for a master’s in philosophy. Only after she’d been accepted and taken out loans did she remember that Jonah had insisted she liked study