III. What I Thought I Knew
Camille Freeman and I got engaged when I was thirty-five and she was thirty-three, ten years ago now. We’d met at a hospital fundraiser — she was a pediatric nurse, sharp-tongued and warm in equal measure, the kind of woman who made a boardroom feel like a kitchen table.
Nine and a half years ago, six months into our engagement, Camille was diagnosed with early-stage lymphoma. Before she started treatment, her oncologist recommended we consider fertility preservation, since the chemo could damage her ability to conceive later. We went together to a clinic in Meridian Heights and froze a small batch of embryos, holding hands in a waiting room, both of us crying and laughing at the absurdity of planning a family before we’d even finished planning a wedding.
Camille beat the cancer. I thought that was the end of the hardest chapter of our story.
Then, nine years ago, everything fell apart in the space of about three weeks. Camille started pulling away — canceled dinners, short phone calls, a distance in her voice I couldn’t place. Then, one gray October morning, she was simply gone. No note. No explanation. Just an empty apartment and a ring left behind on the kitchen counter.
My mother, Eleanor, had never approved of Camille — thought a pediatric nurse from a working-class family in Rosedale wasn’t the kind of wife a Vance should have. At the time, my mother told me she’d heard, through mutual friends, that Camille had left me for someone else, someone “more her speed.” I was too heartbroken to question it. I buried the grief the same way I’d later bury the grief of infertility — under quarterly earnings reports and eighteen-hour workdays.
I never once suspected my own mother had been intercepting the letters Camille tried to send me that first year. I never once suspected she’d told Camille, in a private meeting Camille never told me about, that I’d already moved on and didn’t want to be found.
