ONE
“I just don’t understand what happened.”
Emma Moskowitz lay face down in her parents’
office as they talked above her inert body. The carpet irritated her sensitive
cheek, but getting a rash was the least of her worries at the moment. She was
used to rashes. What she wasn’t used to—at least not yet—was the staggering
pain of betrayal.
“He didn’t explain why he was doing this?”
her father, Alan, asked for what had to have been the fifth time in as many minutes.
Instead of verbally responding, Emma let out a
long groan to signal that she wasn’t yet in the mood to psychoanalyze why her
carefully planned life was falling apart. She was still very much in the maybe
I could just lie here for a few years and then die stage of grieving. That
stage wasn’t talked about nearly enough. It was important.
“What did she say?” Alan looked to Emma’s mother,
Debbie, for an interpretation of what could best be described as an
animalistic, guttural moan.
“I don’t think she wants to talk about it just yet,” Debbie offered,
despite knowing this explanation likely wasn’t going to appease her type-A
husband.
“Can I have some water?” Emma interjected, finally moving
into a seated position from a full-body sprawl. She wasn’t entirely confident
that she was capable of drinking anything yet, but she thought she owed it to
her family to try. She knew her mom hated seeing her in pain and her dad hated
not having a clear solution to offer. Now that he was retired, Alan wasn’t
sure what to do with himself. Emma didn’t want her recent upheaval to become
his newest pet project (along with pickleball, online poker and brewing his own
root beer). Despite her mother’s endless complaints of being smothered by her
loving husband, Alan was the busiest retired person Emma knew. And as a couples
therapist, she knew quite a few. Having a recently retired spouse was the new
seven-year-itch—except this version of an itch appeared to be an overwhelming
desire to be left alone. Emma wished with all her might that she was someone
who wanted to be left alone instead of being herself: a person who as a child
found a way to play “wedding” at every single playdate.
“Do you want bottled or from the tap with ice?” Debbie
asked as though the right form of H2O could fix a broken heart.
“Doesn’t matter.” Emma sighed for effect. “Nothing matters
anymore.”
Through a brief exchange of eye contact, Alan and Debbie
mutually agreed it wasn’t safe to leave their youngest daughter by herself. So
Alan went to retrieve the requested water, while Debbie did her best to sit on
the floor, ignoring her numerous knee issues and bad back. Her hand hovered
over Emma’s leg; she was unsure if physical touch would cause comfort or alarm.
“I am so sorry this is happening to you,” Debbie
whispered.
Emma thought about all the other times in her life that her
mother had said this. There was the time Emma fell off a chair when she was six
and broke her collarbone. The time in her early twenties when her “best
friends” planned a weekend trip without informing or inviting her. And there
were the far too many times Emma had been unceremoniously dumped by a variety
of men.
Although her present situation technically fell into the
latter category, Emma felt that having her fiancé walk out on her for no
apparent reason warranted its own classification of suffering.
This time was different than when her college boyfriend
left her to date a high-schooler. Or when her adult boyfriend left her for a
college student. This felt like the sort of pain you couldn’t get over with a
laugh and a puff of medical-grade marijuana. This felt like the sort of pain
that changed you forever.
Alan returned with both a cold glass of ice and a plastic
water bottle. When Emma didn’t move to take either one, he set them on the side
table and declared, “I think I should call him.”
“Call who?” Debbie asked with the cautious optimism of
someone who hoped her husband wasn’t a total moron.
“Ryan! Maybe I can talk some sense into him. Or at least
get some answers.”
Fear overtook Emma’s nervous system at the mere thought
of that conversation occurring. She reached out and grasped her father’s ankle
to let him know she meant business. “Please do not contact him. He won’t tell
you anything useful,” Emma pleaded. “All he told me is something is missing and there is no point in
working on it because it can’t be fixed. I just need to move on.”
Debbie and Alan looked at
Emma with a mixture of compassion and concern. Emma couldn’t blame them—not
after showing up the previous evening crying and shouting “It’s over! He left
me!” before abruptly passing out on the couch to avoid her feelings. Emma felt
a pang of guilt that she’d left her parents with such confounding uncertainty
for almost ten hours. She knew more than most that not knowing was a special
form of torture. It was time to fill them in.
“It only lasted twenty minutes.” Emma
moaned as the painful memory hit her again. They had been eating dinner in
front of the TV when she noticed something was off. As soon as she asked about it—expecting to hear that
Ryan’s stomach hurt or his boss was annoying him again—the floodgates opened.
Apparently, he’d been having doubts for months but didn’t know how to tell
her. Emma tried her best to fight for them, but a switch had been flipped in
Ryan’s brain and it was like trying to reason with a concrete wall. Every
suggestion she flung out to try to work on their relationship was met with
steely resistance. It was obvious that once the words were finally out of
Ryan’s mouth, he had no intention of taking them back. He had been set free
while Emma was left crushed and disoriented. Their engagement was
unceremoniously over in less time than it took to watch a network sitcom.
“What were the doubts? Do you know?” Alan asked in a
rather accusatory tone. Despite being retired, he would forever be a lawyer
combing through details in search of a win. He didn’t seem to understand that
social contracts could be broken far more easily and with fewer repercussions
than legal ones.
Emma shook her head. “Unless something is missing is a clarifying answer for
you. Because it’s not for me!” She could feel that she was losing control of
her emotions. Within a minute or two, any attempt at coherent speech would be
usurped by streaming tears and a horrifying amount of snot. She tried to get a
handle on herself as her brain went into overdrive, poking and pinching the
most vulnerable parts of her psyche, her insecurities finding every possible
way to punish her for someone else’s decision.
The entire breakup had felt surreal from
start to finish. Emma hadn’t even fully realized she was experiencing a breakup
until about halfway through. She’d known things had been off between them for
a few months, but it seemed to be more of a Ryan issue than a Ryan-and-Emma
issue. He was unhappy with his job. He was struggling with anxiety. He had less
interest in his hobbies than normal. To Emma, a licensed marriage and family
therapist, it was pretty obvious he was in the midst of a depressive episode. She tried her best to
be supportive while her partner was going through a tough time—and she used
every ounce of self-esteem that came from her newly earned secure attachment
style to not take it personally.
Turns out, she should have taken it personally. Because,
according to Ryan, the issues in his life were not related to anxiety or
depression after all. He was miserable because he was in the wrong
relationship. She was the source of the problem, not him.
And once he realized that, he had to end things right away. Or, you know, once
Emma dragged it out of him on a random Monday night.
As Emma recounted this to
her parents, somehow managing to make it through without dissolving into
incoherent sobs, she felt slightly vindicated by the looks of confusion on
their faces. This was objectively confusing, right? To ask your live-in partner
to marry you and then walk out six months later completely certain that there
was nothing to be done to salvage the relationship? Emma was a couples
therapist, for Christ’s sake! She made a living salvaging relationships and
Ryan wasn’t even willing to try? It was both a personal and a
professional slap in the face.
Emma had a bunch of clients
in far worse situations than hers who’d been tirelessly working on fixing
things for years. One notable client had slept with his wife’s second cousin
for three years and they were still together. Yet Ryan—who only a few months
ago had cried with happiness as he put an engagement ring on Emma’s
finger—insisted there was no point in even attempting to repair whatever he
thought was broken. He had too many “concerns,” so it was best to just move on.
What those concerns were exactly remained a mystery that would likely haunt
Emma until she died in what she anxiously feared would be an untimely and
possibly gruesome fashion.
While on the topic of
unfortunate demises, Emma briefly considered murdering Ryan before news of her
abandonment became public. That way she would be perceived as a grieving
fiancée instead of a rejected loser, which felt much more palatable. While
murder would never be her first choice when dealing with a crisis, her
reputation was on the line. It is one thing to get blindsided by your partner
when you’re a civilian. It’s quite another when you have a master’s in clinical
psychology and make a living giving relationship advice. It was the professional
equivalent of a cardiologist not realizing she was having a heart attack:
mortifying. For the first time, Emma regretted her inability to hide in
obscurity due to her hard-earned success.
Oh, fuck.
“My book deal!”
Excerpted from Save the Date by Allison
Raskin. Copyright © 2025 by Allison Raskin. Published by arrangement with
Harlequin Books S.A.
