The Dinner List

by Rebecca Serle

But as the honesty grew, so did the cruelty. Sometimes I thought we were being honest just to see how deep we could cut.

For someone with a perfect public image, Audrey had a tragic personal life. “I had to dim my light,” she says grimly. “It was not an easy thing to be married to a celebrity. But it’s also not an easy thing to be married to darkness. Eventually I dimmed so far I extinguished.”

Tobias and I knew each other in big ways, sweeping ways, ways that felt eternal and unchanging. Fate. Destiny. The current of life pulling pulling pulling. But in the minutiae, in the day-to-day, in the coffee and poppy-seed bagel and Friends reruns and ballpoint over felt tip, it’s her. She’s always been my in-case-of-emergency person. I never wrote Tobias’s name down. It was always Jessica.

If you love, is there even such a thing as a yardstick?”