Someone Else's Shoes

by Jojo Moyes

They do not have husbands who stay in their pajama bottoms till midday and look hunted whenever their wives mention maybe having another go at that job application.

Sam is at that age, the age where all the wrong things seem somehow to stick, fat, the groove between her eyebrows, anxiety, while everything else—job security, marital happiness, dreams—seems to slip effortlessly away.

When she returns, they have all gone.

Sam seems to be distracted by this group

There are some advantages to being an American woman over forty who no longer has any fucks left on the shelf, and he can see it. It is the first thing she has felt glad about all week.

This is fake leather, its plastic covering already peeling at the seams, and what should be a brass “Marc Jacobs” tag has tarnished its way to a dull silver.

“How many of the decisions you make each day are because you actually want to do something, and how many are to avoid the consequences of not doing it?”

Sometimes Sam feels she has been so conditioned to be useful every minute of every day that there is almost nothing she does in which she is not simultaneously keeping

Do men hear this constant inner voice, telling them constantly to strive to be better, to be productive, to be useful?

“Maybe you have to think about all the things about your old life that you didn’t enjoy and say, ‘Okay, so here is an opportunity to start again. Perfect freedom. No ties. Maybe this is the dream.’

Maybe one day you will even be happier than you were.”

“With no money, no home and none of my things? That’s the biggest bunch of Hallmark greetings-card self-help crap I’ve ever heard.” She inhales angrily. “Perhaps. But if you cannot change your situation, then yo...

Strength—real strength—is not doing what someone asks you, necessarily. Strength is turning up every day to a situation that is intolerable, unbearable even, just to support the people you love. Strength is being in that terrible room hour after hour even though every cell in your body is telling you it’s too much for you to cope with.” Phil is crying hard again now, but over

There is a shorthand in women this age, Sam realizes. There is none of the sharp elbows of their twenties and thirties, not an ounce of competitiveness. By their late forties

fifties, they’re all survivors, of death, divorce, disease, trauma, of something.

“I have been unhappy, Cat. You’re right. For a long time. Your dad doesn’t see me any more. Most days I’ve felt like I don’t even exist. It’s hard for you to imagine now, while you’re young and beautiful and everyone notices every move you make. But I seem to be invisible, these days, and when even the man you love doesn’t see you it’s . . . well, it’s pretty soul-destroying. I needed to feel like a different version of myself—and the shoes, I guess, were a part of that. It’s hard to explain. I’m not even sure I can explain it to myself. But I’m sorry you’ve been caught up in it.”

“when we’re low, it can be easy to see everything through a prism of negativity. Human beings are remarkably bad at understanding other people’s motivations, even

when they know them terribly well. We write all sorts of inaccurate stories in our heads.”