"What? No 'congratulations'?" she asked her sister as she flaunted the huge diamond ring on her hand.
"I'd feel a lot better if I knew you really loved him," her older sister said respectfully in reply.
"I love him," her younger sibling said in a way that sounded like she was trying to convince herself it was true.
"Can you tell me why?"
Her sister sat there staring at her as she tried to think of how to respond.
Monroe Hastings had turned 36 a month ago and three weeks later had gotten engaged to one of the most prominent trial lawyers in the Seattle area, and had the three-carat 'Hearts on Fire' diamond ring on her hand to prove it. Her fiancé, 44-year old Peter Bentley, had given her the rare diamond ring known for its perfect symmetry, perfect proportions, perfect polish, and perfect alignment as more as a statement of who he was than a symbol of his love. Monroe didn't know diamonds, she only knew it was big. Very big. Her sister, Bacall, had a pretty good idea, and assumed it had to be well over $10,000. In reality, it was worth a lot more than that, but it was indeed very big.
Both she and her sister, along with their younger brother, Dean, were the children of parents more enamored with old music and movies than either work or money. All of them had been given the last name of an actor or actress from the past as in Lauren Bacall, Marilyn Monroe, and James Dean, respectively.
As such, the three siblings grew up poor, having very little in the way of nicer things. What they did have, however, were looks. All three of them, from 38-year old Bacall to 33-year old Dean, were very attractive people, and that had given them a leg up in a world that required them to scrap for everything they had.
Monroe knew her sister was onto something, but she had no interest in facing up to it let alone admitting Bacall was right. She 'loved' Peter enough to marry him, although she knew she was nowhere near to being truly in love with him. And so far at least, she'd done a very credible job convincing herself that didn't matter.
After all, she'd married once for love, and those two years had been the happiest of her life only to have it all come to an abrupt end leaving her close to being financially destitute.
So as she thought about it, Monroe was willing to admit that perhaps her love for him wasn't as...perfect..as her new diamond, but it was close enough to 'good enough' for her, and at this stage of her life, that seemed more than reasonable.
She'd 'sown her wild oats' until she was 27 when she met someone who turned her entire world upside down. David Hastings was unlike any man she'd ever met before or since. He was not only her equal in terms of physical attraction, he was her 'superior' in virtually everything else from education to athletic ability his ability to make money to, well, pretty much everything. He'd been enough to cause her to give up her endless search for happiness when she realized she'd found it, and more, in loving him.
She'd literally been swept off her feet in a matter of weeks and six months later said 'I do' then willingly settled into a life she'd always dreaded before meeting this amazing man. Monroe found herself loving staying home and waiting for her handsome husband to return to her and the dinner she'd prepared for him each night. Never in a million years could she have imagined loving being so thoroughly domesticated after being the antithesis of domestication for as long as she could remember.
Three weeks after celebrating their second anniversary, Monroe learned she was pregnant, and both she and her husband were thrilled beyond words to know they would be having a child. Money wasn't exactly tight, but they also weren't exactly rolling it. The again, money was the last thing on their minds as they started planning for the birth of the baby.
And then, two months later and without warning, he was gone; taken in an instant in a massive collision of cars on I-95 during one of the foggiest mornings anyone could ever remember. Four other people were killed that morning with another dozen being injured in varying degrees after a tractor-trailer plowed into the long line of parked cars invisible in the heavy fog until it was too late.
The fog began abruptly, and was immediately heavy and thick giving drivers little time to react. Although the semi had slowed considerably, it still hit the first car doing 60 miles per hour. David had been in the car just ahead of it. Like the three passengers in the car behind him, he died instantly as the sudden, unexpected force of the impact broke his neck.
By the end of that day, Monroe found herself single again, pregnant, alone, and barely able to get by, even with whatever help her parents could offer. She and David had had more than enough money to live on comfortably, but they had virtually nothing in savings, and neither of them had even considered a life insurance policy. And why would they? They were both in their 20s and were invulnerable and knew they'd live forever.
David had changed her to the point where she no longer had any interest in ever returning to her former life of endless one-night-stands and the inevitable loneliness and emptiness that came with it. And yet the loneliness she now felt in her life without him often seemed even worse as all she wanted was to feel that kind of warmth and security again. And yes, while she still occasionally dreamed of being loved like that as well, she'd pretty much given up ever finding it. With Peter, she was getting all of the security she needed, and at least some small portion of the love she craved. It might not be romantic love, but it was love or at least it seemed like it was.
Their son, David, Junior, was now eight years old, and Monroe had scraped by, somehow managing to keep a roof over their heads and food on their table. Most of the time, however, they barely scraped by.
Had it not been for an advertisement Peter's law firm was running on TV every hour of the day for weeks, she'd never have met him let alone become engaged to the multi-millionaire attorney. The firm was filing a class-action suit against the makers of the braking system used in the semi that had crashed into and killed her husband. They were seeking victims of any such crash, and Monroe called the office the first time she saw it. They were up against the statute of limitations, and Monroe was the last victim added to the lawsuit before filing it with the court just before the legal deadline.
After a junior partner did an 'intake interview' he introduced her to the senior partner who would be heading up the class-action suit. He'd been utterly taken with her beauty from the moment he saw her, and although he was nowhere close to being as attractive as she was, he offered a different kind of 'attractiveness' Monroe decided was something closer to an 'appeal'; an appeal consisting of power and confidence rather than dashingly good looks or the kind of warmth David had offered.
It wasn't what she'd dreamed of, but she consoled herself with the belief that physical attraction and the giddy kind of love she'd experienced with David was now much less important to her than the certainty of financial security she would have with Peter for herself and her son the rest of her life.
Somewhere along the line, she'd heard the saying, "The search for perfection is often the enemy of good enough", and with the understanding that Peter was definitely much closer to 'good enough' than anything approaching perfection, she stopped looking and even hoping and agreed to marry him.
So she'd said 'yes' to a first date as soon as he asked, and she'd recently said 'yes' to his proposal. So no, she wasn't head-over-heels in love with him the way she'd been with David, but Monroe was willing to forego some of that passion for the stability that came with marrying a powerful, wealthy man like Peter Bentley. And at 36, Monroe was acutely aware the only reason she could catch the attention of a man like that was her looks, and she knew they knew wouldn't last forever.
That meant that at some level, at least, there was a tacit understanding that went back as far as human history wherein younger, attractive women and older, wealthy men often ended up together for reasons other than pure love. Then again, her marriage to David aside, she sometimes wondered if 'pure love' even existed or if it was something one found only in romance novels or Hallmark movies.
