Free The Brevity of Roses by Linda Cassidy Lewis

she had them in her own shoes! I felt more like I had been invited to be dinner than eat it.”
    “You misinterpreted … they didn’t mean …” Her protest was pointless. He had told the truth. She just didn’t want to believe it. She closed her mouth with a sigh, and Jalal continued.
    “And you could not possibly have misunderstood that Donna’s husband thought he was baiting me when he kept referring to himself as an old Jew?”
    “All right, yes, and that was wrong, but—”
    “Wrong? That was racist , Meredith!”
    “Well … maybe Leo meant it to be a joke.”
    “I see. Like the joke Judith’s husband made about me getting run out of New York?”
    “Gary’s a buffoon, Jalal. No one takes him seriously.”
    He looked toward the ceiling and swallowed hard. For a moment she had the horrifying thought he was about to cry. He closed his eyes. “All right,” he said, “you have contempt for their spouses, but I cannot understand how you consider those women to be your friends in the first place.”
    He had called her stupid after all. She raised her chin, defiant. “Maybe you don’t know me as well as you think you do.”
    Jalal opened his eyes, looking at her in his way that made her feel he knew all her secrets, and her haughty spirit stepped back, confused. “Maybe,” he said, “and if that is so, I do not think I want to know you.”
    She stood silent, too stunned to cry.
    “But I hope the truth is that you do not know yourself, Meredith.”
    At that, her mind became a whirlpool of pleading, fury, and fear, yet she remained mute.
    Jalal threw his keys on the hall table. “I am going to sleep,” he said and left her standing alone at the bottom of the stairs.
     
    The next day, the nineteenth day after they met, Jalal left her.
    Meredith came home from the salon around noon to find the house had become a cold, silent void in her absence. His clothes, his journal— he was gone. Though she spent the rest of the day wrapped in a woolen throw, warmth eluded her. She wandered the house, staring out the windows, but seeing nothing. Jalal had been quiet at breakfast, but she expected that. Stephen had always frozen her out for a while after they argued. Apparently, Jalal’s silence had been the clue, the indication he was about to leave. If she had followed him up to bed after their argument, would he still be there? Why had she sided with her friends? How could she have been so insensitive to his anger, his hurt?
    Lying alone that night, she changed her mind and doubted the argument was Jalal’s reason for leaving. She suspected he had simply grown restless. After all, he had warned her he would leave.
    And you agreed to it, her mother’s voice reminded her.
    Yes. Oh, yes. She was a fool. She was the jester queen who thought she was living a fairy tale , only to have Prince Charming run off to some other woman’s castle. He hadn’t even had the decency to tell her, but slithered out while her back was turned. Still, he had warned her. Prepared her. If she were honest with herself, she had known all along Jalal had another woman—or women. Why wouldn’t he? Even so, what if that wasn’t the reason he left at all. What if he had seen through her cool aloof act to the cold, sucking void below. What man wanted that?
    At the first pale of dawn, reason prevailed. Meredith resolved to return to reality and her old routine. Long ago, she had adjusted to a solitary life. Besides, how could she have ever thought they had anything in common? To be honest, Jalal was somewhat immature. And he definitely had issues. She would do well to consider her time with Jalal as a sort of vacation—something delightful, but temporary.
    Let him go .
    She kept her counsel throughout the day, but as sunset neared, and a second night alone loomed, the silence became unbearable, her thoughts increasingly morose. Jalal had stretched the borders of her life. It would take some time before they shrank to fit her