She, after all, came from the right schools and the right family and still felt like everything was a struggle. He made it look so easy. When he flirted with her at a poorly attended school-sponsored mixer, one of U of C’s periodic attempts to pretend they encouraged their high achievers to have social lives, she was smitten. Maybe it could be easy for her, too.
Her parents were not smitten. The guy she’d been dating, the one they now referred to derisively as “the painter,” had actually been their preferred choice. He was a swimmer, a straight-A student in economics, and, more importantly, he came from an old-money North Shore family with a mansion overlooking Lake Michigan. The fact that he’d minored in visual arts and dedicated meaningful time to his painting hobby became a source of ridicule only after Holly had dumped him for Jonny. Jonny wouldn’t start going by “Jonathan or Jon, Jack to my friends” until he began his residency, when he’d suddenly announced the change and stuck to it without a single slipup, even going so far as to pretend not to hear when people addressed him as Jonny.
At the front of the room, the board had by now approved the minutes, stated the agenda, and moved on to the proposed budget for the coming year. A stooped man with a permanent glare she recognized from previous meetings was out of his seat before the president finished speaking.
“What I want to know is, why are we wasting money on solar panels for the community center when we can get electricity from ComEd for six cents an hour?” he groused. “It’s going to take ten years to pay off the investment, and I’m guessing we’ll have to replace the suckers by then.”
Involuntarily, Holly glanced over at Theresa Yadao, who was looking right back at her. This was going to take a while, and despite their entrenched opposition on the bridle path, they at least had this annoyance and delay in common. Holly wondered whether she should give a wry grin, and was just about to, when Theresa looked impassively away.
Bitch, she thought.
Her mom and dad had not been overly proud of their daughter’s doctor-in-training boyfriend. “We’re already going to have one doctor in the family,” said her mom. “Why do we need two?” They remained suspicious of Jonny-turned-Jonathan through his MD, even his PhD, seeming to think for years that he was out to glom on to their family name—never mind that the name wasn’t worth much in actual cash anymore. Only after Jack had quit practicing medicine to found Cancura, immediately making headlines and earning a handsome profit, did they finally stop holding him at arm’s length and embrace him like a son.
By then, however, there were fewer and fewer embraces between Holly and Jack.
She never shared details about his dalliances with her parents, never confided her worries that his dubious personal ethics might extend to his professional life. If anything, she defended him more vigorously, wanting them to believe their initial assessment was wrong. Wanting it to be wrong.
And they had been wrong about his designs on their family. If only they hadn’t been so right about his character.
After the rehearsal dinner and against her better judgment, Holly pried the story out of her bridesmaid, who had dated one of Jack’s groomsmen and was still close enough to get the scoop. Holly naively thought it would have been a stripper or a hooker or something equally cliché and grotesque that could nonetheless be overlooked in the context of peer pressure and the bachelor party ritual. Apparently, however, in one of the many bars they’d drunkenly trawled that night, Jack had taken the initiative to hit on—and disappear for the rest of the night with—a random Rush Street “skank.” Or maybe not a skank, maybe a perfectly nice but equally drunk girl, the word deployed in an effort to spare Holly’s feelings.
And how had she felt? Angry, upset, embarrassed, certainly. But when she thought about calling off the wedding at Fourth Presbyterian, the reception at the Ivy Room in the historic Tree Studios (to which she and Jack would be transported by horse and carriage)—all of it paid for by her parents at a cost they could then scarcely afford—she couldn’t help but feel she was overreacting. It wasn’t the right time to confront Jack. He’d been drunk, savoring a last night of freedom. Guests had already arrived from all over the country.
And so she let herself be carried along, wanting to believe a certificate of marriage and two gold rings would change everything.
And it had. He’d been a model spouse until Ava was born. Maybe even Paige. He was too busy getting Cancura up and running—with Holly often at his side—to get into much of anything else. It wasn’t until they’d moved to Barrington Hills and she’d stepped back from both Cancura and full-time medical practice, embracing the role of three-quarter-time mom, that she’d started catching him in lies about where he had been. New Orleans when he said he was in Houston. DC when he said he was in Atlanta. But what then? Burn it all down for her own hurt feelings? Holly discovered she was more pragmatic than that.
She also had her limits.
Finally, it was time for the board to
