Chapter 53 - The Light We Lost

There are some moments of my life I can picture so clearly, as if I could slip back into the memories and relive them word for word, and then there are long swaths of time—days and weeks—that seem indistinguishable from one another. The months after I went back to work, while Violet was still an infant, are a blur. I was barely sleeping and developing two new shows and pumping breast milk in my office and making sure I spent as much time with Violet as possible. I was barely on Facebook, and when I was it was just to post those obligatory “5 months, 6 months, 7 months” photos. So I missed seeing pictures of you and Alina. I missed the whole development of that relationship. If I hadn’t been so busy, I might have noticed that we hadn’t spoken at all since the reunion, but it didn’t even register. I’d gotten back to a place where you didn’t really matter, the place I’d been in before you called the morning of my wedding.

And then when I was posting Violet’s “8 months” photograph, and liking photos of Julia’s trip to Amsterdam, that little heart emblem popped into my news feed, and there it was. Gabriel Samson is engaged to Alina Alexandrov. There was a picture of you underneath it, with your arms around a beautiful woman with auburn hair, wide-set hazel eyes, and an enormous smile. My stomach flipped. This shouldn’t make a difference to you, I told myself. You’re married, you have a child, you haven’t seen him in more than a year, he hasn’t been yours in more than four years. But it did. It made a difference. In that photograph I saw my “might have been.” I saw the road not taken.

I spent the next hour clicking on your pictures and looking at the two of you on vacation in Croatia. I’d never been to Croatia. Then there you were in China, on top of the Great Wall. And in Egypt, dancing with Alina, who was wearing a belly-dancing skirt made of bright red chiffon and silver coins. I was surprised by how jealous I was of that life. I wanted to climb the Great Wall of China, I wanted to belly dance in Egypt.

You were based in Baghdad again, and it looked like she was, too, working for The Guardian. I clicked on its website and read every article she wrote. And then Googled her name and read her Wikipedia page. Then I discovered you had a Wikipedia page. And your pages were linked, with an update that someone must have recently added mentioning your engagement.

I checked myself. I did not have a Wikipedia page. Neither did Darren. Then Violet started crying, so I shut down the computer. But later that day I e-mailed you a quick note that said: Congratulations!

You didn’t write back.