“THE PAPER PALACE” by Miranda Cowley Heller

“In my mother’s family, divorce is just a seven-letter word.
Letters that could easily be replaced with I’m bored or bad luck.
Both of her parents married three times.”

Elle is in love with two men: Jonas, her first love from adolescence, and Peter, her husband and the father of her three children. And she is loved back by them.

PETER
“I love him–everything about him.
The way, when he is excited, the tips of his ears flush red. The length of his gait.
The way he steadies me, makes me safe.
His long, elegant hands.
The way he always gives money to beggars, looks them in the eye with respect.
The person he sees when he looks at me.”

JONAS
“He pulls me to him so quickly I have no time to react. Kisses me with the intensity of every day, every month, every year we have loved each other.
It is not our first kiss. That was long time ago, underwater, when we were children–when we said goodbye for the first time, knowing it would not be the last.
But this time when I pull away from him, it is agonizing. Not found, but lost. I pause, stand on the precipice of memory, wanting so desperately to fall into it, knowing I can’t.
Jonas is animal, Peter is mineral.
And I need a rock.”

It would have been easy to judge Elle for loving the two men, but I found her story intriguing and realized her difficulty in choosing with whom she would stay!

ELLE
“And the choice Jonas is asking me to make now.
To leave my wonderful husband. To cause my children pain.
Peter is not vindictive–whatever happens, he would never take them away from me, never create a rift between me and them. He loves us all too much for that. He is a man with backbone.
It is his gravity that holds my orbit steady when I falter.

I am in love with Jonas. I always have been.
I cannot live without him, cannot give him up now, after waiting for so long.

But I’m in love with Peter, too.

I have two choices. One I can’t have. One I don’t deserve to have.”

P.S. I liked her name: Elle. She could be any of us!!!

Kindle, 2022