After You Broke Me, I Became a Star

When Mrs. Hargrove came to talk some sense into me, she looked around the room and her brow furrowed tight.

She opened her mouth, seemed about to ask something.

The words made it to her lips and died there.

She pulled up a chair and sat beside the bed.

Only then did she try again.

“Nanette, you know Nelson lost his memory. You two have been husband and wife for so long — you can't let something like this come between you.”

“It's just amnesia. Give it a couple of days. It'll probably clear up, and then won't things be good again?”

She smiled gently.

She brought up the time I'd scraped together everything I had and gone all the way to the provincial capital alone, just to buy Nelson new books — then spent every last cent and had to walk for hours to get home.

It was dark by the time I made it back.

She mentioned how I'd nearly dropped to my knees begging when he fell sick.

In a downpour, I'd hauled him to the hospital on a borrowed bicycle.

Came home drenched and filthy myself.

Everyone in the village knew how good I'd been to him.

But had he ever been good to me?

I asked Mrs. Hargrove that. No bitterness, no heartbreak in my voice.

Just stating a fact, the way you'd talk about the weather.

“Mrs. Hargrove, I'm really just tired.”

She didn't push further. Just let out a long, slow sigh.

The second round of persuasion came from my parents.

Unlike Mrs. Hargrove, they walked in with accusations already loaded.

One line — “Instead of figuring out how to win Nelson back, you're sitting here moping — what good does that do?” — and whatever willingness I had left to talk shriveled up.

All I felt was suffocation.

“Nelson is such a catch — young, handsome, and now he's gotten into Capital University. His future is wide open.”

“If you don't hold on to him, what happens to us? What happens to your brother?”

“We always said you had no brains and we were right. It's just amnesia, not a divorce. What's there to be upset about?”

They went on and on.

They valued Nelson more than their own daughter. That much had always been clear.

I managed a thin, bitter smile.

Didn't argue.

I just remembered how, whenever I'd fought with them before, Nelson had stood right there on their side, piling on one cutting remark after another, and at the end, pressing my head down and making me apologize.

He carried a grudge against me, and he took every chance he could to grind me further into the dirt.

But in my parents' eyes, Nelson could do no wrong.

The only one at fault was me. It could only ever be me.

I lowered my gaze to the plans Bernice and I had drawn up together, hidden under the quilt, and said quietly:

“Then let's divorce.”

“What?”

Both of them shot to their feet, livid.

“Nelson is the first person from this village to get into college. If you dare divorce him, don't bother calling us Mom and Dad ever again.”

A serious threat.

And yet, even as they stormed out with fury on their faces, I never gave in.

When Bernice came in silently carrying a warm bowl of brown-sugar poached eggs for me, she looked so pained, so careful, that I couldn't help but laugh.

“What are you laughing at? And here I am worrying myself sick over you.”

She huffed, her eyes going red at the edges.

“Nanette, everyone is telling you to back down. If you're going to regret this, now's the time.”

I wouldn't.

I knew that much.

Spend a lifetime ground down by Nelson's baseless suspicion, or let myself go and start over.

The choice was clear.

My decision to divorce Nelson was far more certain than my decision to marry him had ever been.

But he dragged his feet, never once agreeing.

Even when I brought it up myself, all I got was that suspicious glare of his, and the words would die in my throat.

In his version of things, I was always scheming — no telling what I was plotting next.

Then Joan Fox showed up in the village, dusty and disheveled, looking for him — and Nelson was overjoyed.