I pulled my hand back just enough to sit upright. It wasn't an act of punishment, but she noticed and let her fingers fall to the tablecloth. A waiter approached with a polite question about coffee and took one look at our faces before quietly retreating. I watched the reflection of the chandelier tremble in my water glass, surprised by how quickly my mind began constructing scenes I'd never seen: Amy smiling for photographs beside a man named Peter, choosing flowers with him, perhaps saying she loved him. Images no less vivid for being invented crowded out the actual woman sitting in front of me.
"You told me you'd had a serious relationship," I said. "You didn't tell me there was a wedding." Amy wiped under her eyes with the corner of her napkin, trying not to ruin the makeup she'd put on for our evening. "I know," she answered. "I told myself the relationship was over, so the details didn't matter anymore. Then you and I got serious, and every month that passed made it harder to explain why I hadn't told you in the first place." Her voice lowered. "I knew that silence was becoming its own kind of dishonesty, and I hated myself for it."
I wanted to say immediately that I didn't care about what had happened before us. But I did care, or at least a part of me cared in ways I didn't yet understand. I was hurt that she'd found ways to tell me stories about almost everyone in her life except this man who'd once mattered enough to marry. And underneath the hurt was a childish jealousy that didn't improve merely because I recognized it as childish. I imagined wedding invitations with her name printed next to someone else's, and wondered whether she had kept one somewhere.
"Did you love him?" I asked. Amy was quiet long enough that I began to regret the question. "I cared about him," she said finally. "I loved the idea of being someone who had a clear, respectable future. But I don't think I knew how to separate loving Peter from loving the life everyone told me I should want." She glanced toward the rain. "At the time, I thought that made me a terrible person."
She had met Peter at a fundraiser organized by one of Margaret's friends, when she was twenty-six and uncertain whether she wanted to stay in the corporate public relations job she'd taken after graduation. He worked in commercial real estate and had the unhurried confidence of someone who had never wondered whether a room would welcome him. He was thoughtful in the ways her family valued: he remembered birthdays, bought good wine, and asked Henry about his garden. When Margaret introduced them, she did so with such obvious satisfaction that Amy later joked she might as well have announced an engagement on the spot. Peter laughed at the joke, and Amy took that as a sign that he understood.