She said: “That she’s kind to her in front of you, and that she looks straight through her when you leave the room.
And that I’d watched it happen four times and I couldn’t prove any of it, and that if I’d said it out loud in your kitchen at Christmas you’d have defended her, and then I’d have had to be right for two years while you stopped inviting me over.”
That is the whole problem, in one sentence, and I have since said it to three different men in three different conversations that were nominally about something else.
The person best positioned to warn you is the person with the most to lose by being wrong.
People have asked me whether it was all an act.
I have thought about this more than anything else, and my answer has changed three times, and where I have landed is this.
I don’t think Pamela Gable sat in her apartment in Denver constructing a plan.
I think she genuinely liked us, in the way you like a house you are considering buying.
And I think that somewhere in the second year, when the thing became real — when there was a date and a venue and a dress — something underneath came up through the floor.
Something that could not tolerate the arrangement she had actually agreed to, which was to marry a man who was going to keep loving somebody else’s memory for the rest of his life, and to be the second most important person in a nine-year-old’s home.
She had said she could do that.
I believe she believed it.
