First Comes Love by Emily Giffin Read Free Book Online

thankful for, I
did
lose my brother in a tragic accident that rocked my family to the core, either directly or indirectly caused my parents to divorce, and left me with a sole sibling who is some combination of selfish and self-destructive. In other words, I’m entitled to my frustration and deep-seated sadness, regardless of how many positive things have happened to me since that horrific day.
    As an aside, I also appreciate Amy’s forty-something perspective that the thirties are a grind for many, and motherhood isn’t the constantly blissful journey everyone thinks it will be when they attend their pink or blue or yellow baby shower. She swears that things get easier as your kids get older and become more self-sufficient, but she also maintains that no matter what their age or yours, motherhood is hard.
Really
hard. Stay-at-home mothers have it rough; working mothers have it rough; and part-time working mothers, like myself, have it rough, even though the first two camps annoyingly insist that we have the best of both worlds when I think we actually have the worst of each. There. I just did it again. Bitch, bitch, bitch. And I mean that as a noun and a verb.
    To be clear, I love my daughter more than anything or anyone in the world. She is the best thing I have ever done or will ever do with my life. It’s just that taking care of a small child often feels tedious to me, a fact I can admit only to Amy, the person I pay to give me one-hour increments of complete honesty. I can’t tell my husband, who labeled me
unmaternal
in a recent argument. I can’t tell my friends, because it would undermine my perfect Facebook façade. I can’t tell my sister, who desperately wants a child of her own. And I can’t tell my mother, because I know she’d do anything to get back a few moments with her firstborn, even the kind of miserable, exhausting moments that I routinely gripe about. Besides, my mother
needs
me to be okay. The child she doesn’t have to worry about. The only one who hasn’t fucked up or died.
    The more pressing issue, and even more closely guarded secret, is the way I feel about Nolan, my husband of nearly seven years. I’m not sure where to begin, other than at the beginning, with the answer to that question
So, how did you two meet?
Every couple has their canned answer, their story that’s told again and again. Sometimes the husband will take the lead in the retelling; sometimes the wife will. Sometimes it’s a tandem effort, scripted down to the smallest one-liner, suspenseful beat, wistful glance, fond chuckle, serendipitous plot twist.
And then he said this. And then I did that.
And now here we are
.
Happily ever after
.
    Sometimes I wonder if part of my problem with Nolan isn’t our story itself, the how and why we got together. Because even if I stick to the abridged, upbeat, dinner-party version, and avoid maudlin details such as “Nolan was a pallbearer at my brother’s funeral,” we always return to Daniel.
    Growing up and for as long as I can remember, Nolan was my brother’s best friend, although with a four-and-a-half-year age gap, I actually didn’t pay much attention to either of them, at least when I was really little. He was just a fixture, like the tweed sectional in our family room or my father’s workbench in the garage, part of the backdrop of my childhood, one of the many older boys who came to trade baseball cards or throw a football in the backyard or spend the night, sleeping in the trundle pulled out from under Daniel’s twin bed.
    By the time I reached middle school, it was harder to ignore Daniel and his friends, if only because Josie was paying such close attention to them. I remember her carrying on about Nolan in particular, and I had to agree that he was easy on the eyes. With wavy blond hair, bright blue eyes, and the kind of skin that easily tanned, he had such obvious Malibu lifeguard good looks that Daniel teasingly called him Baywatch. He also happened to be