You Should Have Known Read Online Free

support , and we’ll find a way to forget that we ever knew that. We’ll find a way to unknow that.”
    â€œBut…,” Rebecca said. “People do have doubts. Maybe they just don’t act on them.”
    Grace nodded. Doubts emerged often in her practice: very old, desiccated doubts, saved and preserved and brought forth by very wounded, very sad women. They were a theme with countless variations: I knew he drank too much. I knew he couldn’t keep his mouth shut. I knew he didn’t love me, not as much as I loved him.
    â€œMany people have doubts,” she agreed. “The problem is, few of us recognize doubt for what it is. Doubt is a gift from our deepest selves, that’s how I think of it. Like fear. You’d be amazed how many people experience fear just before something bad happens to them, and when they go back to that moment later, they understand that they missed an opportunity to avert what was about to take place. You know: Don’t walk down that street. Don’t let that guy give you a ride home. We seem to have a highly developed ability to ignore what we know, or suspect. From an evolutionary standpoint alone, that’s fascinating, but my interests are more practical. I think doubt can be an extraordinary gift. I think we need to learn to listen to our doubt, not just dismiss it, even if that means putting a stop to an engagement. You know, it’s much easier to cancel a wedding than it is to cancel a marriage.”
    â€œOh, I don’t know about that,” Rebecca said with heavy sarcasm. “Some of the weddings I’ve been to lately. I think it might be easier to cancel the Olympics.”
    This—without knowing anything about Rebecca’s recently married friends—had to be true. Grace’s own wedding had been small because her family consisted of her father and herself, and Jonathan’s family had chosen to absent themselves. But she, too, had attended her share of insane nuptials.
    â€œLast month,” Rebecca said, “my roommate from college had this complete blowout, five hundred people at the Puck Building. The flowers—oh, my God. At least fifty thousand dollars, I kid you not. And they had all the wedding presents out on a long table in another room, like they used to do, remember?”
    Grace remembered. It was an old rite that, like so many other old wedding rites, had somehow returned in all of its materialistic glory, because apparently the modern wedding wasn’t busy or flashy enough. Her own parents’ wedding at the St. Regis had featured such a display of gifts in a foyer off the ballroom: Audubon silver, Haviland china, and a full set of Waterford Crystal, every bit of which was now in the clutches of Eva, her father’s second wife.
    â€œHalf of Tiffany’s. Plus every gadget Williams-Sonoma ever came up with. Which is a scream”—Rebecca laughed—“because she can’t cook and I don’t think he’ll ever be civilized enough to eat with silver.”
    Grace nodded. She had heard this before, these details, and so many others, from the oatmeal-colored couch in her office. She had heard about the massive search for the pastel-colored mints served at the bride’s parents’ wedding (apparently still produced only at one tiny storefront on Rivington), and the engraved lockets for the bridesmaids, and the precise make of vintage car to drive them to their wedding night at the Gansevoort, and then, at the end of it all, those ten days at the same resort in the Seychelles where some celebrity couple had honeymooned, in a hut on stilts in the vivid blue Indian Ocean.
    Which was where they had had the argument that cast a pall over the entire nuptials and still reverberated here, years later, in front of the therapist who already knew that these two people brought out the worst in each other, and probably always had, and certainly always would.
    Sometimes Grace