No. I wasn't like them.

I wouldn't tear into anyone in front of three hundred people. I wouldn't turn the Delgados and the Hensons into open enemies.

I would leave with my dignity intact and keep every scrap of the wreckage for myself.

The engagement was off.

The murmuring of three hundred guests rolled toward me like a tide. I had dragged the Henson name through the mud.

My mother cried right there in the ballroom. My father stood rigid, his face dark, and said nothing.

News travels fast.

By the next day, I was the joke of every social circle in New York.

"The eldest Henson daughter, thrown over for some charity case!"

"Three years together, and she still couldn't beat a scholarship girl!"

"I heard she brought that girl into our circle herself."

The talk spread everywhere, so I turned off my phone and shut myself in my apartment for three days.

On the fourth morning, I switched it back on and found that Nigel had posted on social media.

A photo of Constance cooking in a kitchen.

The caption read, An ordinary day, with the person I love most.

I didn't bother reading the comments.

I called my father.

"Dad, I want to go to London for a while. The branch office is short-staffed, isn't it?"

He was quiet for a long time.

"You're sure?"

"I'm sure."

"Then go."

Before he hung up, he said one more thing. "Alma. Your father will always be in your corner."

That was when the tears finally came.

The day before I left, I went to the office to pack up my things.

When the elevator doors opened, I saw Nigel and Constance.

Constance was wearing the Chanel dress I'd left at the apartment, her hair styled exactly the way I used to wear mine, a Starbucks coffee in her hand. She was tilted up toward Nigel, listening to him talk, her eyes crinkled with laughter.

The moment she saw me, the smile froze on her face.

"Alma—"

She shrank back behind Nigel without thinking.

Nigel saw me, and something complicated crossed his face.

He looked me over.

No makeup, a hoodie and jeans. Nothing like the woman who once never let a single hair fall out of place.

"Alma, you—"

He tried to speak, to smooth over the awkwardness.

I cut him off, flat and cold.

"Ms. Henson is fine. We're not close."

Constance's eyes went red again, her voice thick. "Alma, are you still angry with me? I really— I really don't know how to make it up to you—"

"If you want the apartment, Nigel and I can move out!"

I watched her run through that dull little performance and told her the plain truth.

"That apartment is in my name. If you want to live there, consider it a rental. Don't forget the rent."

The color drained out of her face.

Nigel frowned. "Alma, don't talk like that. Constance didn't mean any harm—"

"Neither did I."

I pressed the button to close the doors. I had no interest in looking at either of them any longer.

"Goodbye."

As the doors slid shut, I saw Constance fold into Nigel's arms, her shoulders trembling, as if she were crying.

I closed my eyes.

Enough.

This mess wasn't mine to manage anymore.

So three days later, I flew straight to London.

No one came to see me off.

My mother was crying on the phone, my father was in a meeting, and my assistant, Glenda Coleman, was clearing the rest of my things out of the apartment.

"Alma, that ungrateful little snake Constance walked off with the limited-edition bags you had in the storage room. She took your white mink coat, too!"

Glenda's voice shook with fury through the line.

"Let it go. Call it scraps thrown to a dog."

"You're too easy to push around!"

"Not easy to push around. Just not worth my time."

I watched the clouds drift past the window and answered with a faint, almost amused smile.

Nigel wasn't worth it. Constance wasn't worth it. None of that wreckage was worth it. My life shouldn't be wasted on people like them.

London was quiet.

The branch office didn't demand much. I rose early, ran, went to work, learned to bake, practiced yoga.

Weekends I wandered through museums, or walked the Thames alone for a long, long time.

I grew thinner. And quieter.

The old Alma, the one who could charm a table over three glasses of red wine and walk away with a two-hundred-million-dollar deal, seemed to have died on the day of that engagement party.

There was a colleague at the branch named James, blond, blue-eyed, with a smile like an open sky.

He pursued me for three months. Coffee. Movies. An invitation to spend Christmas with his parents.

I tried.

But when he took my hand, all I could see was Nigel standing by that fountain, saying, "I'm in love with Constance."

The nausea hit at once.

So I turned James down, gently.

I wasn't sure anymore that I could believe in love at all.

Time moved fast.

I learned a great deal in London.

And in the spring of the third year, my father called. "Alma, come home. Your mother misses you."

I thought about it for a long while, then booked a flight back.

On the plane, I scrolled to a message from Glenda.

"Alma!! Nigel and Constance have fallen out!! Do you want the gossip!!"

Three exclamation points.

I raised an eyebrow and replied with a single word. "Talk."

And Glenda fired off a barrage of voice messages, one after another.

I listened to them one by one, and slowly the corner of my mouth curved up.

Who doesn't want to hear their enemy's misfortune?

It turned out that less than half a year after I left, Nigel and Constance had married.

When Nigel married Constance, the whole Delgado family stood against it.

His mother even threatened to take her own life, saying Constance was low-born and unrefined, no match for the Delgados.

But Nigel had set his heart on it. He said Constance was the only person he would ever love, and he'd cut ties with the family before he gave her up.

In the end the Delgados gave way, on one condition: no wedding, just a signed certificate.

Constance cried over that for days. A woman only marries once, she said, and she wanted a proper wedding.

It broke Nigel's heart, so he paid out of his own pocket for a small wedding.

It couldn't touch the ten-million-dollar spectacles their circle was used to, but it counted as effort.

For the first three months after the wedding, Nigel paraded their love across social media every single day.

Constance learned flower arranging, baking, piano, and Nigel actually had the nerve to caption a post calling her "my hidden treasure."

But it didn't last.

Once Constance moved into the Delgado estate, the trouble started.

She wasn't used to the rules of high society.

She didn't greet her elders, she picked up her fork before they did, she barked at the staff.

Eve Delgado was furious. She called her out in front of the whole family for having no upbringing.

Constance ran back to her room in tears and complained to Nigel.

Nigel, aching over his darling, turned around and had a screaming fight with his mother.

Eve laughed, cold and short, and mocked her own son for his stupidity.

"You said you loved her for being so simple and innocent. Just you wait! There'll be plenty of days you can't stand how little she knows!"

"Let me tell you something, Nigel. Innocence is cute in the slums. In this family it's an embarrassment."

Nigel took it.

He swallowed his pride, coaxed Constance for the better part of a month, and finally she agreed to start learning etiquette.

Eve had a sharp tongue but a soft heart, and she even hired a private tutor to teach her.

But after the better part of a year, Constance still managed to wear the wrong thing to the events that mattered.

For the birthday banquet of an old Delgado family friend, she'd worn a white gown, and the sight nearly gave the man a stroke.

The first time Nigel ever blew up at her was eight months into the marriage.

The Delgados were in talks with another family, and the other side had brought their daughter along, clearly angling for a match.

Eve hinted that Nigel could use the opportunity. He turned it down flat.

But once Constance found out, she made his life hell for three straight days.

Was he sorry he'd married her, she demanded. Had he set his eye on someone else.

"That was my parents' idea! And I already said no, so what are you still throwing a fit about?"

Nigel couldn't believe it.

"If you didn't have your own ideas, why even sit down with them? Let her father handle the talks instead."

Constance cried until her makeup ran, sobbing herself sick, gutted right through.

"You regret it. You think I'm beneath those high-society girls!"

"Enough!"

Nigel finally hit his limit and hurled a glass to the floor.

It was their first head-on fight.

After that, fighting became part of daily life.

Constance grew more and more touchy, convinced Nigel looked down on where she came from.

When he took her to banquets, she said nothing the whole night, then came home complaining she'd been treated like a piece of furniture.

When he left her behind, she accused him of being ashamed of her.

"I don't know how she turned into this," Nigel said over drinks with a friend. "She wasn't like this before. She used to be so kind, so gentle."

His friend gave him a long look. "Maybe she always was like this. You just never saw it."

Glenda's voice memo paused there. Then another one came through.

"Alma!! Here's the main event!! Constance got caught in bed with Nigel's chauffeur!!"

I nearly dropped my phone.

What?

"Last month!! Constance said she was going for a spa day, and the paparazzi snapped her checking into a hotel with Nigel's chauffeur!!"

"That driver had been with Nigel for five years!! The photos were crystal clear, the two of them all over each other right in the lobby!!"

"Nigel was out of town closing a deal, and his phone blew up. He didn't even believe it, said the paparazzi were making it up. So he flew back overnight and walked in on Constance and the driver in his own garage…"

"Hahaha he lost it!! He went to swing at the driver right then and there, and Constance dropped to her knees, hugging his leg and crying that she'd only done it because she was so lonely!"

"Nigel was never home, she was rattling around that huge house with nobody to talk to, she said she just needed someone to hold her! God, she actually said that out loud?"

"Now Nigel wants the divorce and Constance won't budge, says she wants half the family fortune. His mother got so worked up she landed in the hospital, and his father's threatening to cut him off entirely…"

"Bottom line, Nigel is a joke now."

I set the phone down and leaned back in my seat.

Beyond the window, London's sky was a dull gray. In a few more hours, I'd touch down in Westport.

Three years.

I'd changed, they'd all changed, and nothing was the way it used to be.

Still, this particular joke, I was happy to hear.

The day I landed in Westport, Glenda came to get me.

She stood at the arrivals gate holding up a big sign that read, "Welcome home, Ms. Henson."

I walked over smiling, and she threw her arms around me and burst into tears.

"You've gotten thinner, Alma."

"And you've gotten fatter."

"Can you not?"

She wiped her eyes and smacked me.

I climbed into the car and watched the city streak past the window, a whole lifetime away from where I'd left it.

Three years gone, and a lot of it had changed. But some things hadn't.