Archive of Our Own ^beta

Beth sits by the windowsill, forehead leaning against the glass like she’s the protagonist in a cheesy rom-com. The rain comes down in sheets outside; more and more common as they get closer to Christmas. The edge of the window seat digs hard into her ass, pillows missing, stolen in Danny’s efforts to build a pillow fort earlier in the afternoon. Annie had made fun of her for this little hideaway when they’d first moved in:

You really are the perfect trophy wife, now all you need is the wine glasses and yoga pants.

It had felt like a complement at the time, and Beth doesn’t really understand how anymore.

Maybe that’s because it turned out, she wasn’t a very good trophy wife after all.

Turns out, she’s a lot better at lying than she’s supposed to be, a lot better at violence than any mother had the right to be. It’s not that surprising, her knack for bullshitting her way through everything, the way her brain runs constantly, planning, making sure those plans don’t fall through. It had worked for her as mom, had worked even better during her stint as a money launderer. It was just how she’d always been—and that’s hard to admit. Hard to accept that she could’ve done this even before Dean, before Amber and before the debt. That she’d always been built this way, always been able to find the less than correct way to do things.

She hears Emma squeal from upstairs, high pitched and giddy, almost drowned out by the dreary November weather. It’d been almost seven months; six months, two weeks, twelve days. An entire summer had gone by, thousands of cupcakes baked, a few dozen playdates planned, everything that was expected of her. Her birthday had come and gone, the only present came from Annie, a bottle of wine that her sister had mostly drank herself. Dean’s long gone, and she only talks to him when he comes to pick up the kids, a polite nod and a hello, the awkwardness that comes with talking to someone you’d spent twenty years married to and then suddenly you’re just not. She feels stagnant, and the empty hole in her chest feels gaping wide most nights.

She doesn’t know exactly what she’s missing, but she misses it like she misses the cigarettes she used to smoke and concerts that belong to a different person. She misses, and that’s the worst part about it. 

She’d gone home, she’d done what she was told, what she was supposed to, tried to fall back into her little cookie cutter facade, and found she didn’t fit anymore, honestly had never fit at all. She was tired of cutting off arms and legs to fit into the hole shaped for someone else. 

Although now she thinks, long after the decisions had been made and swept under the rug, fitting into the wrong box would’ve been better than having none at all. 

So maybe the hole in her chest isn’t really a hole, more a nakedness that chills deep to the bone, rind pulled back and shell cracked open to leave her standing there, scars and all, for no one to see.

No one’s looking, this she knows. Nobody ever looked at her, not her, with the slightly too big curve of her hips and the stretch marks that litter her skin like reminders, like the sticky notes stuck on Annie’s walls, both left by their children. Nobody looks at her, not even to laugh, and it feels cold, like biting winds and frozen sleet pouring down around her shoulders.

She wants someone to look, to see all of her, to see how bare she is, to see it and like it, take the time to kiss every scar and marked burned into her skin, and to make her a new shell, wrap her up in fluffy towels and give her her space back. Make her a place all her own, and to share it.

She wants to be wanted, at the root of everything, and she can’t shake the feeling like she missed her chance.

She sees a sleek black car in her dreams, behind her eyelids when she blinks. Finds a pearl necklace floating around the back of her mind, wonders where they’d gone, if he still has them. As she turns her body away from the window she swears she sees something in the corner of her eye. Beth doesn’t bother taking a closer look, not today. Maybe never again.

She doesn’t daydream, doesn’t get her hopes up.

It’s not hard to leave her spot by the window, leave that flash of black to linger by the side of the road, unseen and unnoticed, nothing but the manifestation of a bad trophy wife’s dream.

She tells herself it’s a nightmare, mostly because she always been good at lying to herself most of all.

—

(And if a pearl necklace shows up hooked around her front door handle, no one but her really needs to know. Not anymore. No one’s looking, and this is hers.)