The Devil in the Saddle

by Julia London

  Hallie closed her eyes. Why couldn’t men be more like Rafe? Solid, trustworthy men who didn’t need women to take care of them?

  She opened her eyes and looked at her iPad again, and went to her email.

  There was the usual glut of sale notices, daily news bulletins and the like. She scrolled through them, scanning the subjects, seeing nothing she wanted to open until she came to one received two days ago. We Want You Back. It had been sent by the Comeback Center at the University of Texas, her alma mater. Or rather, what her alma mater would have been had she graduated. What the heck was a comeback center?

  She opened the email.

  Dear HALLIE JANE PRINCE,

  Did you know it’s never too late to return to college? Many college students leave school without finishing a degree plan because the demands of work and study can be difficult to juggle, financial obligations may require tough choices, or health issues necessitate taking a break. Whatever your reason for leaving before degree completion, we want to help you finish.

  At the Comeback Center, we will work with you to design a course of study that meets the adult student’s needs and satisfies the requirements for your chosen degree program. Our records indicate you lack eighteen hours toward obtaining a bachelor of fine arts in dance. Call us today to learn how to finish what you started!

  Was this for real?

  Hallie read the email again. She clicked on the link provided, which took her to a page on the University of Texas website. But why were they sending this to her? She hadn’t quit school because of a job or lack of money or health issues. She’d quit because she couldn’t dance her way into an occupation. She was never a principal dancer in all her time there. She never got on with a company. So what was the point of a bachelor of fine arts in dance when she couldn’t use it to dance?

  Out of curiosity, she went back to the UT website and looked at the dance program. As she scrolled through the slated performances for the semester, and information about the degree, something caught her eye. It was buried in a paragraph, but there was a link to UTeach Dance. When she followed the link, she discovered that a person could get a BFA degree that included certification in children’s dance instruction.

  She snorted and closed the link. “Who would I teach? I don’t know any kids.”

  She flipped back to Instagram once more and looked at her languishing account. She hadn’t posted on Instagram in over a month, because she didn’t know how to transition from pictures of a happy bride planning for her wedding to the sad sack she was now—the one who hung out in her room on an unmade bed with empty candy bar wrappers everywhere. The person who prepared dinner for two and then ate both portions. The person who knew just how many times Mr. Creedy’s cows had walked through a hole in the fence.

  Yeah, there was no mystery as to her weight gain and general myopic feeling. And when she looked at her Instagram, she felt only one thing: what a fool she’d been.

  If she were honest—God knew it hurt, but okay, she’d be honest—she’d known for a few months that this thing with Chris wasn’t great. Maybe, if her dad hadn’t died, Hallie would have finally pulled the plug. But her dad did die, and she couldn’t think after his death, not really, and another two or so months had passed before she realized that nothing had really changed. She and Chris were not ideal. But then, it felt like too much to face the fact that maybe they shouldn’t get married. Her grief over her father’s death had made her turn a blind eye to what she knew was true with Chris.

  Rafe said that grief had a way of making people see what they needed to see. Maybe she had needed not to see, and didn’t, until Chris put his business right in front of her, on the bedsheets she’d bought at fucking Saks, thank you.

  Hallie tossed aside her iPad with the happy-not-happy pictures.

  She was sick of the moping around. She was sick of eating to numb herself, of feeling sorry for herself, of the whole damn thing. She wished she could move on to something else, but that was the problem with her life. She’d never really been on her own. She’d never learned how to cope without someone to help her. She was easily persuaded into relationships, and had a bad habit of turning the relationship into her job, her purpose. Where was she in that? How could she possibly know what she was capable of if she never got out and lived life on her own terms?

  Getting out on her own suddenly sounded like a great idea. But how?

  She got up and went into her walk-in closet. It was the size of a study, with double racks for clothes, a center island with drawers for her lingerie. The racks were stuffed full, coordinated by color. Floor-to-ceiling shelves on the back wall were devoted entirely to shoes and purses.

  She had been steadily filling her closet with the clothes she’d bought in preparation for a life as an important surgeon’s wife and a big-money fundraiser on the charity circuit. Chris had once told her she needed to stop looking like she was always on her way to a nightclub, and more like a River Oaks wife. Hallie had been offended by that remark, but Christopher just laughed it off. “You know what I mean.”

  Oh, she’d understood what he’d meant, all right. He’d wanted her to look like a trophy wife, and instead, she was disappointing him by looking like what he must have imagined was a floozy. It wasn’t as if she was dressing provocatively. But neither was she dressing primly. She wasn’t wearing Chanel, she was wearing cute Alice + Olivia. Nevertheless, instead of shoving a foot up his ass like she ought to have done, she’d gone shopping.

  Hallie cringed now as she stared at all the designer togs and frippery in her closet. She imagined it all in one big pile on the floor. Instagram that, bitch.

  Which . . . was not a totally bad idea, come to think of it. She didn’t really have a firm plan, but it seemed entirely reasonable that change needed to start with her view of herself. She needed to get in shape, and she didn’t need these designer clothes.

  She started yanking clothes off the hangers until she had an armful. She marched out of the closet and threw the first item on the floor. And then quickly swooped down to pick it up. She wasn’t a heathen.

  She marched the armload to her bed and dropped it, then returned to the closet for the next armload. And again and again and again, until she’d taken out every bit of clothing that even remotely reminded her of being Chris’s wife. Boating clothes, golf clothes, sparkly dresses for fundraisers, sensible suits for business meetings. By the time she was done, she had an impressive pile of clothing.

  She went back into the closet for a pair of wool pants she’d bought in London the time Chris had insisted she come along to a conference he had to attend. With the exception of the cocktail party to welcome participants and speakers, she’d hardly seen him at all. So she’d amused herself in the only way she really knew how—a trip to the Royal Ballet.

  And lots and lots of shopping in Knightsbridge.

  When she took the pants from the hanger, she noticed a vaguely familiar-looking cardboard box on a shelf behind the clothes. The shelf was supposed to be for shoes, but this box was too small for that. She rehung the pants, picked up the box, and saw a copy of her wedding invitation pasted on the outside. Her wedding invitations? She hadn’t remembered putting them in here.

  She carried the box into her room and collapsed, cross-legged, onto the floor. She removed the lid and took out one of four hundred invitations to her wedding.

  Mrs. Cordelia Applewhite Prince requests the honor of your presence at the wedding of her daughter

  Miss Hallie Jane Prince

  to

  Dr. Christopher Drew Davenport

  son of Mr. and Mrs. David Davenport

  on December 31 at seven o’clock in the evening.

  Dinner and dancing to follow.

  Four hundred invitations that were never sent because Christopher had been fucking Dani.

  Surprisingly, Hallie felt nothing but disg
ust as she stared at the crème-colored paper and gold script. How had the box ended up in her closet, anyway? She didn’t remember putting it there, although anything was possible. She hadn’t exactly been herself these last few weeks. Was it Mayrose, the housekeeper? Maybe she thought Hallie would want to reminisce one day. Or maybe she had it in for Hallie because of the candy wrappers.

  Hallie ripped the invitation in half and tossed it onto the floor beside her. But something about the torn invitation caught her eye. That was what Instagram should be about—real life. The day after the party. The hours of heartache, the tedium of existence—regular life. But no, people wanted to see the girl with the perfect life have the perfect wedding. What she wouldn’t give to deconstruct that life now on Instagram. Just tear it all down—

  “Hold the phone,” Hallie said aloud.

  Why not deconstruct it on Instagram? What if she deconstructed a high-society wedding and the illusion of a perfect life? She was a very visual person, a visual learner. What if she showed the real her to the world and to herself, and not the carefully manufactured princess?

  She popped up from the floor and went back into her closet to search through her built-in chest of drawers until she found what she was looking for: a camera. It was left over from the days before phone cameras were really good, a gift she and Luca had gotten for their birthday one year. Luca didn’t care much for his after a couple of weeks of taking funny pictures, but Hallie loved hers. Luca said she had a good eye. She took pictures of everything—people, animals, landscapes. What had happened to that Hallie?

  She spent several minutes checking out the camera, making sure it still worked. When she was convinced it was good to go, she looked around her room for a place to start, and her gaze landed on her reception dress. She’d left it on the chaise since last Sunday when she’d wrangled it off her body, leaving it mangled there, ignoring it and thereby ignoring the horrible drunk evening in which she’d humiliated herself.

  The dress was wrinkled, and there was dirt at the knee area and along the hem. She’d even managed to tear one of the spaghetti straps. It was an ignominious end to a very expensive reception dress. She lifted the camera and took a picture of the dress lying haphazardly on the chaise, then looked at the screen. She liked what she saw.

  Hallie picked up the dress and the camera and went outside, walking along a flagstone path that wended through palms and loquat trees, through azalea and bougainvillea, past shaped hedges, and through a stone archway into the pool area.

  The sun was just going down, the light sort of golden. The Saltillo-tile patio wrapped around the back of the entire house, beneath a lanai, and bled into a vine-covered pergola over more patio. Ceiling fans turned lazily on a gentle breeze. Giant pots of chrysanthemums added color.

  Beyond the patio, down a few steps, was a zero-edge pool, and beyond that, miles and miles of ranchland, as far as the eye could see. It was a beautiful vista, often photographed for publications. When she was a child, a movie crew had filmed here.

  Beneath the pergola, Hallie dragged a chair over from the dining table, climbed on top of it, and pushed half of the dress through the wooden slats and vines above. The dress hung down crookedly.

  She reached up on her tiptoes and rearranged some of the vines of the climbing hydrangea to hang out the sleeves so that it appeared as if the dress had grown into the arbor. She added a garden hose to hang beside it, and a pair of gloves peeking out from the bodice. She climbed down from the chair, then took several pictures from different angles of what looked like an abandoned dress hanging there.

  She returned to her room and uploaded the pictures to her laptop and edited them, added some filters, trying black and white, then a sepia tone. When she was ready, she created a new Instagram page: the Deconstruction of a High-Society Wedding.

  She posted two pictures of her dress and invited her followers to view them.

  Fifteen minutes later, no one had viewed her photos. Not a single heart was clicked, not a single comment was made.

  “Okay, well, you’re not doing this for the glory, remember?” she muttered to herself. She paused, shrugged a little. “Maybe for a little revenge though.”

  She shut her laptop, picked up the box of invitations, and took them outside. This time, she walked around the edge of the patio to the fire pit, and upended the box of invitations into the pit. She arranged them so they were clearly legible, then grabbed a fire starter. It was dark now, and it was only in the glow from the round, solar flower bed lights that she could see the invitations. Through the video lens on her camera, it made a very eerie scene. She zoomed in, slowly walked around the fire pit, then zoomed out, and with her fire starter, set the pile on fire. She videoed the edges of the invitations curling black before the entire invitation disappeared into blue flame.

  She posted the video on her new Instagram page.

  And then she boxed up all the clothes she’d taken out of her closet, destined for Dress for Success. She’d helped raise funds for the nonprofit once—its goal was to help women gain economic independence in a variety of ways, including giving them clothing for job interviews and work. She looked around at the boxes and felt good about what she was doing. The last few hours had been cathartic. She was looking forward, and not backward. Rafe had told her to think about what she needed and go for it. For the first time in a long time, she actually had some budding ideas.

  And she couldn’t wait to tell Rafe. She texted him a couple of pictures of the dress and typed, See? New leaf—photographer.

  A few seconds later, the three little dots popped up.

  He posted a thinking emoji. That wasn’t exactly what I meant.

  But still, pretty cool, right?

  The three dots came up again. Thought the dress was a whole lot prettier on you, but I like what you’ve done with it. Pretty cool, leaving it to die up there all alone.

  A tiny little trickle of warmth ran through Hallie. It was never going to hurt her feelings one bit for someone to say she looked good in her reception dress, even it was good ol’ Rafe, and not a new husband.

  She typed: Starting an Instagram page—Deconstruction of a High-Society Wedding. Check it out. Tomorrow, you will discover some new uses for wedding shoes and pumpkins.

  . Now that is something I’ve been waiting for, for a very long time. I’ve got a pumpkin and a shoe over here and I don’t know what to do with them.

  Hallie laughed. She sent back a GIF of the emoji blowing a kiss.

  She did not get a response.

  She put down her phone and looked at her nearly empty closet. She thought about Rafe, stretched out on her bed, reading a book. Was she crazy to wish he was here right now so she could blow that kiss directly at him?

  Was she crazy to think of kissing him again?

  Crazy, all right. Talk about rebound—the first guy to be nice to her after Chris, and all she wanted to do was curl up beside him and hide from the world. That was so like her, and that was part of her problem. Besides, she was pretty sure Rafe Fontana had better things to do than comfort her.

  Chapter Nine

  At six on Saturday morning, Rafe texted Hallie. Get up and get ready to run. I’ll pick you up at 6:30.

  He was not surprised to get her response: WTF?!?!

  He chuckled to himself and texted, Get up. He hit send, then whistled as he got ready to go.

  Hallie was out on the drive when he arrived in his truck. He leaned across the seat and opened the passenger door. She didn’t move, but glared at him with her arms crossed tightly across her body.

  “You ready?” he asked.

  “This is insane. Plus, it’s freezing out here. There is actual frost on the actual pumpkin, Rafe.”

  “You’ll warm up.”

  “Where are we going? I thought this was a running lesson.”

  “It is. But we’re going someplace whe
re we won’t disturb the cows or your family. I anticipate a lot of moaning and groaning from you.”

  She did not disappoint—she groaned, dropped her arms like a child who’d run out of options, and got in his truck. He turned up the drive.

  “When I said I was going to take up running, I didn’t mean in the middle of the night,” she complained.

  “The sun is shining, Hallie,” he said, and pointed at the thin line of light beginning to appear on the horizon.

  “The point is, it’s too early.”

  “You need to train yourself to run before the heat of the day.”

  “I need to train myself to never open my big fat mouth again.”

  He laughed. “I think the odds are stacked against you.”

  “Shut up, Mr. Perfect Army Ranger guy.”

  He tapped her thigh with his fist. “Are you always so grumpy in the morning?”

  “What do you think?” She slumped in her seat and looked out the window.

  “I think you’re definitely a morning grouch.” He was enjoying this. “What if I told you there are donuts at the end of a run?”

  Hallie slowly turned her head to give him an appraising look. “Donuts from Jo’s Java?”

  He snorted and shook his head. “Do I look like an idiot? Of course Jo’s Java.”

  “Okay,” she said. “All right then. Maybe you’re not as annoying as I was thinking.”

  Rafe laughed.

  He drove to the high school and parked outside the stadium.

  “Edna Colley High School,” Hallie said, peering up at the stadium. “My dad paid for that stadium, did you know?”

  “I heard that around town,” he said, and opened the truck door. “Come on. We’re going to the track.”

  She was moving a little slow, and had to jog a little to keep up with him, which Rafe thought was good for her—it would at least get her sluggish, not-a-morning-person blood moving. He walked through a gate and out onto the track and shrugged out of his jacket. Underneath, he was wearing a T-shirt.