"Not easy to push around. Just not worth my time."
I watched the clouds drift past the window and answered with a faint, almost amused smile.
Nigel wasn't worth it. Constance wasn't worth it. None of that wreckage was worth it. My life shouldn't be wasted on people like them.
London was quiet.
The branch office didn't demand much. I rose early, ran, went to work, learned to bake, practiced yoga.
Weekends I wandered through museums, or walked the Thames alone for a long, long time.
I grew thinner. And quieter.
The old Alma, the one who could charm a table over three glasses of red wine and walk away with a two-hundred-million-dollar deal, seemed to have died on the day of that engagement party.
There was a colleague at the branch named James, blond, blue-eyed, with a smile like an open sky.
He pursued me for three months. Coffee. Movies. An invitation to spend Christmas with his parents.
I tried.
But when he took my hand, all I could see was Nigel standing by that fountain, saying, "I'm in love with Constance."
The nausea hit at once.
So I turned James down, gently.
I wasn't sure anymore that I could believe in love at all.
Time moved fast.
I learned a great deal in London.
And in the spring of the third year, my father called. "Alma, come home. Your mother misses you."
I thought about it for a long while, then booked a flight back.
On the plane, I scrolled to a message from Glenda.
"Alma!! Nigel and Constance have fallen out!! Do you want the gossip!!"
Three exclamation points.
I raised an eyebrow and replied with a single word. "Talk."
And Glenda fired off a barrage of voice messages, one after another.
I listened to them one by one, and slowly the corner of my mouth curved up.
Who doesn't want to hear their enemy's misfortune?
It turned out that less than half a year after I left, Nigel and Constance had married.
When Nigel married Constance, the whole Delgado family stood against it.
His mother even threatened to take her own life, saying Constance was low-born and unrefined, no match for the Delgados.
But Nigel had set his heart on it. He said Constance was the only person he would ever love, and he'd cut ties with the family before he gave her up.
In the end the Delgados gave way, on one condition: no wedding, just a signed certificate.
Constance cried over that for days. A woman only marries once, she said, and she wanted a proper wedding.
It broke Nigel's heart, so he paid out of his own pocket for a small wedding.
It couldn't touch the ten-million-dollar spectacles their circle was used to, but it counted as effort.
For the first three months after the wedding, Nigel paraded their love across social media every single day.
Constance learned flower arranging, baking, piano, and Nigel actually had the nerve to caption a post calling her "my hidden treasure."
But it didn't last.
Once Constance moved into the Delgado estate, the trouble started.
She wasn't used to the rules of high society.
She didn't greet her elders, she picked up her fork before they did, she barked at the staff.
Eve Delgado was furious. She called her out in front of the whole family for having no upbringing.
Constance ran back to her room in tears and complained to Nigel.
Nigel, aching over his darling, turned around and had a screaming fight with his mother.
Eve laughed, cold and short, and mocked her own son for his stupidity.
"You said you loved her for being so simple and innocent. Just you wait! There'll be plenty of days you can't stand how little she knows!"
"Let me tell you something, Nigel. Innocence is cute in the slums. In this family it's an embarrassment."
Nigel took it.
He swallowed his pride, coaxed Constance for the better part of a month, and finally she agreed to start learning etiquette.
Eve had a sharp tongue but a soft heart, and she even hired a private tutor to teach her.
But after the better part of a year, Constance still managed to wear the wrong thing to the events that mattered.
