Page 8 of The Frog Prince

“I’ll pay for it,” I say, hating Cindy, hating Jean-Marc, hating growing up and what it did to me and my heart. I used to like me. I used to believe in me. I used to believe in happy endings. What the hell happened?

Where did Holly go?

What happened to my future?

Why isn’t life more like fairy tales?

I was never going to live in San Francisco. I was never going to wear turtlenecks seven months a year. I was never going to be ruthless and severe.

I was supposed to be charming and fun, lively, entertaining, a cherished wife who’d wait a year or two and then have adorable children.

“You said it was already cracked.” Cindy’s voice snaps.

I take a quick breath and look away to stare down the dim hall that seems to wind forever to the back, where the bedroom and kitchen are. “It was,” and my patheticness just grows. I’m drowning here, I think, and I used to be a good swimmer. I was the strongest swimmer I knew.

“Then forget it.” She turns, walks out, her tiny heinie marching toward the stairs, leaving the door wide open.

I hear her climb the steps back to her apartment, the two-story apartment that dominates mine.Shit.

Shit, shit, shit.

I let the door shut, harder than I’m supposed to, and in my bedroom I throw myself face-first onto my queen-size bed with the girlish headboard. I bought the bedroom set when I left college, when I got my own first apartment and thought it was pretty and grown up, and it wasn’t until I was divorced and forced to use it again that I realized the furniture set was never grown up. It’s a princess wannabe set, with a pale pink princess headboard, the kind of headboard I never had as a kid.

So I bought it as an adult.

For the adult I wanted to be, the adult I was trying to be. Oh, God. I’ve spent my whole life kidding myself.

I thought if I just played my cards right, if I did what I was supposed to do, I’d end up like one of the heroines from the stories my mother read to me as a little girl—beautiful, clever, happy.

Happy.

And it hits me, harder than ever before, that I’ve screwed up, that I’m just possibly the most screwed-up woman on the face of the planet (North American continent, anyway) and that those fairy tales my mother read me (she loved them) and the lessons I take away from them (I loved them) were simply fiction.

I’ve based the most important decisions in my life on fiction. So not-good.

I pick up the phone, dial a number with a never-forgotten area code.

He answers on the third ring. There’s music playing in the background. Voices laughing. “Jean-Marc?” I say, and my voice, which is never particularly strong, wobbles.

“Holly?”

“Hey.”

“I can hardly hear you.”

It’s your music, I want to tell him. But I don’t, because I can see his rambling storybook ranch house, with the set of French doors that are open onto the trellis-covered patio, where guests must be lounging in comfy chairs near the pool. It’s summer in the valley, which means hot. And moonlit. And scented with the unforgettably sweet fragrance of orange blossoms.

I should be there. Iwouldbe there. If he had let me.

I close my eyes. Why am I calling? Why am I doing this? I must like torturing myself. “Do you have a second?”

“Sure. Let me go into the house.”

So he was outside. A rock falls from my throat to my stomach and lands hard.

I can hear him talking to others, his voice muffled as if he’s put the phone to his chest, and then I hear footsteps, a door closes, and a moment of silence. “Holly?”

“Hi.” Be calm, be calm, be calm.