I hadnt known Harry for very long, but my feelings for him felt sincere and strong. When he proposed, practicality hardly crossed my mind; I was swept up in the excitement of being the first among my group of friends to have a wedding, of selecting the dress, preparing for the ceremony, and calling someone my husband. It never occurred to me that meeting Harrys father would shift everything.
Simon, Harrys father, was forty years old and had this air of quiet authority, a sort of handsome wisdom that seemed to pull the world into orbit around him. He was even more attractive than his son. When I first met him, in a dreamlike haze, I stared at him in mute wonder. I dont really believe in love at first sight, but love at first encounterwell, that I could believe. The way he spoke, the way he thought, the way he appeared in the strange light of that afternoon Even now I feel a pulse in my chest recalling it.
He was twenty years older than me, yet that didnt trouble me at all.
Suddenly, I started visiting Harry and his father more often. I pretended it was for Harry, but it wasntsome secret part of me knew the truth. I fooled myself for months, until finally I couldnt hold it in any longer and confessed my feelings to Simon. He was clever and gentle, told me I needed to break things off with Harry. It hurt Harry, of course, but it was better than living with someone who would never receive my whole heart.
So, I did. I vanished from their lives for two years, drifting off into the mist of forgotten faces, until Harry found someone new, a woman who truly belonged to him, and married her in a town where the bells sounded like laughter. Thats when I returned, quietly tracking Harrys updates online, haunting Simons thoughts, orchestrating a chance meeting as if it were a scene from an old English novel. Simon saw through me almost instantly, but he didnt turn me away. We had coffee in a crooked little café, then wandered beneath the shifting clouds.
Now, surreal as it seems, weve been together for seven months. Ive never felt my heart dance like this before. Harry knows nothing, and I hope, in some odd way, that I might someday marry his father. It will be awkward, and absurd, and perhaps embarrassing, but Harry is grown, with his own family, and part of me believes hell find a way to understand. Sometimes I laugh to myself, wondering if I might really become his stepmother, floating through this peculiar dream of English afternoons and impossible love.
