The Half Life by Jennifer Weiner Page A

to return email from her office. When he’d started sleeping in the basement the month before, she’d told her daughter it was because she snored, and when he’d said he was in love with someone else—well, she’d simply ignored him. In love with someone else? It was ridiculous. They were married. End of story.
    â€œIt’s a phase,” she’d said brightly to her best friend, Sarah, who’d looked at her with eyes brimming with unbearable sympathy. After that, Piper had stopped talking about it. Talking about it only made it real, and it couldn’t be. It was a phase, a bad mood, Mercury in retrograde or something like that. Tosh would get a job, he’d move his stuff out of the basement, he’d start wanting to sleep with her again, and everything would be fine.
    Except if that had been true, Tosh couldn’t have left. He couldn’t have piled his suitcase into the trunk of a taxi, crying, and ridden away from her. Yet that was exactly what he had done. All Piper could do was watch him go.
    This isn’t happening
, Piper had told herself. She’d said it over and over in her mind, at increasing volumes, until she believed it. Not happening. Couldn’t happen. Then she’d gone inside, collected Nola from the babysitter, made her dinner and put her to bed. “Where did Daddy go?” her little girl had asked from the cozy depths of her bed (Nola slept with two down comforters, a cotton blanket, and flannel sheets, all of which would be kicked to the floor at some point during the night), and Piper had said, “Business trip.”
    She’d stayed up all night, zipping her toiletries into plastic bags, settling her suits in their dry-cleaner’s plastic into her suitcase, not checking her email, not listening for the phone. She’d shaved her legs and painted her toenails. She’d exfoliated. She’d reorganized her closet, bagging up pilled sweaters and two pairs of maternity pants for Goodwill. In the morning, she’d gotten Nola out of bed, supervised face-washing and toothbrushing and Cheerios with cut-up banana, then walked her to nursery school. Piper’s mother, who’d be staying at the house and helping Tosh look after Nola while Piper traveled, would pick Nola up at noon and take her out to lunch and maybe a movie. At two o’clock Piper would call for a cab of her own and head to the airport and then Paris. By the time she got home from the trip, she kept telling herself, everything would be fine. Tosh would have realized how much he missed Nola and missed her. Her mother would of course agree to stay an extra night to give them a chance togo out to dinner and maybe even spend the night in a nice hotel, and there, on anonymous high-thread-count sheets, she and her husband would make everything all right again.
    In the airport, the line inched forward, and the man in front of her was still intent on conversation. “You from here? Philly?” he asked. Piper nodded. “You like it?” he persisted, and she nodded again. She supposed she should be flattered that a man, any man, thought she was worth an effort. Dressed for work, with eyeliner and high heels, her hair twisted on top of her head, she could still get away with a sexy-librarian look. In the mirror, plucking her eyebrows, she could see the signs of age—the deepening fan wrinkles in the corners of her eyes, the odd age spot, and still the occasional zit. She was forty, with a four-year-old, a full-time job, and an unhappy and unemployed husband (whose defection she would not, could not acknowledge), and sometimes she felt every day of her age and more.
    Tosh, of course, didn’t seem to have aged a minute. His nut-brown skin was smooth, his hair still glossy, his body firm, the muscles supple, visible whenever he moved. Tosh was a sculptor; he worked with his hands, with his body, heaving blocks of stone, while Piper, deskbound and increasingly,