22. Things Get Worse Before …
Things Get Worse Before…
AIDAN
Henry was there one moment and running off the next.
Had I messed it up that badly?
Nobody in the room moved or said anything.
Henry’s mom opened her mouth as if she were about to speak, but ultimately zipped her lips.
A new emotion flamed on my face. It was a spiky, painful emotion that lit up my brain and made me acutely aware of the sudden energy shift in the room. I’d later come to identify this as deep, deep embarrassment.
I got up off the floor, brushed the dirt off my pants, and stepped back without looking. My socked heel pressed right onto a wayward Lego. “Mother Goose!” I shouted in pain.
In the space of a second, the room went from congested with awkward silence to bursting with rollicking laughter. I cradled my foot, utterly confused by the incongruous reaction.
“He said a bad word!” Petra shouted, scandalized.
Misha hung her head in her hands, but she wasn’t disappointed in her daughter’s outburst. She must’ve been hiding her own giggle fit.
“Hey! There’s a bad word on my book, too,” said Myles, one of the other kids, who held up a gift from his grandfather, an illustrated collection of Mother Goose stories.
“Oh, now that’s why I said it.” Misha palmed her forehead.
None of the adults could control themselves.
Under the cover of their laughter, I slipped out in search of Henry. Whatever I did, I needed to make it right. Whatever happened, I needed to understand.
He sat hunched over on the curb beside his car, arms hugged across his center because he didn’t have his coat and it was cold. I slipped off my blazer and wrapped it around his shoulders. He flinched before looking up at me. His breath created tiny shapeless clouds in the otherwise clear night.
“I thought there’d be snow,” I said. Very nearly a non sequitur. But the sky had caught my attention. And the breeze felt good on my burning cheeks. I tugged the collar of my turtleneck down.
“You’ve watched too many CMC movies,” Henry said. “It rarely snows in New Jersey in December. In some places, Christmas is eighty degrees and people wear shorts. It’s not all sweaters and cocoa and snowflakes. It’s not always like the movies.”
“Is that what’s wrong? I didn’t do it like the movies?” I asked, looking at him, wishing he’d look back at me.
He guffawed. “You did it exactly like the movies.”
“Isn’t that what you wanted?” I asked as I sat down beside him.
“No, it’s not what I wanted. I didn’t tell you to do that, Aidan,” he said, taking a tone with me I hadn’t heard before. “And you shouldn’t have gone through my drawers and taken the ring without my permission. That’s stealing. That’s a crime.”
Discomfort wedged between us. “Are you okay?” I asked. A hunch formed hazily in my mind that his outburst was not actually about me or the ring or the proposal, but I couldn’t pinpoint another, truer reason.
“I’m fine.” He shifted away from me.
“Why did you run away then like Big on his and Carrie’s wedding day?”
Henry’s hands dipped into the pockets of my blazer, presumably in search of an answer. “Because seeing that ring made me realize I am far from ready to be anyone’s husband.”
“Fiancé comes before husband.”
“Anyone’s fiancé, ” he said, gaze traveling down the empty street. All the town houses were aglow with string lights. Plastic figurines and blowups presided over small lawns, but the merry sights brought no joy to the conversation.
“You wanted to be Cam’s,” I said.
“I wanted to be anyone’s .”
“Just not mine.” I folded my own arms across my body. Upset sat acidic in my throat. I pulled out my phone and showed him my countdown push notifications. “I don’t have much time left.”
“It’s 2025. You don’t need to be married to be in love,” he said. “And you don’t have to be in love to be married. Throughout history there have been lavender marriages and green-card marriages.”
“Marriages have colors?” I asked.
He sighed. “Divorce rates are through the roof. I told you, falling in love is not a surefire set of steps. It’s timing and luck and a whole host of other things we humans can’t control. You just don’t get it.”
“It? What’s ‘it’?”
His sighs morphed into exasperated groans. “Life, Aidan! You don’t understand pain or suffering or loss or heartbreak. You’re perfect! You don’t get that being human is ninety percent bad and ten percent good. You’ve only experienced the ten percent!”
“So you don’t love me?” I asked after a beat.
“How can I love you when you don’t even have a past?” he asked, and my heart slunk down into the nearby sewer grate.
“Hold on. We never did the four minutes of eye contact after the thirty-six questions,” I said. “What if we did that now? We could—”
“Aidan, stop!” he cried, clawing at his hair. “You couldn’t even answer half of those questions! Eye contact or no eye contact. It won’t make a lick of difference. How can I love you when you’re just an idea? Just an ideal . An idea of an ideal?”
A door squeaked loudly behind us. “Just checking in on the boys,” Henry’s mom called out. “Everything okay?”
“Everything’s fine,” Henry called.
Fine. Fine. Fine. I could’ve cursed the four letters that made up that word out of existence if it forced Henry to say what he meant.
I did not have twenty-eight years of experience in subtext and body language like he did.
I was not a mentalist. I had a finite set of social skills and a finite set of time left to work them in.
I couldn’t sit there letting him answer my questions with other questions.
“Why don’t you boys come inside? It’s cold out here and you don’t have your winter coats on. You’ll catch your death. It’s time for dessert,” she said.
“Henry,” I said through gritted teeth. I needed us to stay out here a little longer. I needed him to talk to me, so I could figure out what to do better, how to be better. For him. For us. For my future.
The message embedded in his name went unreceived because he stood and offered me a hand up. The least peaceful peace offering there ever was. “You go ahead,” I said to his palm. “I’ll be right in after you.”
“Are you sure?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” I said, trying the phrase on for size. I rolled the word around in my mouth.
Henry paused for a second, then slowly retracted his hand. “Take your time.”
On the porch at my back, Henry and his mom spoke in hushed tones.
I paid them no mind. I was too busy chewing on the f, grinding down the n, gnawing at the e, and getting the runaway dot above the i out from between my molars.
It disgusted me, the word, but I suddenly understood it.
“Fine” is the word you use when you’re holding in or keeping out the hurt.
It’s a shield that’s difficult to swallow, but from what exactly? What was Henry running from?
The heat from earlier rekindled in my gut.
At first, I assumed it was the same emotion—embarrassment—resurfacing in a different form, but this sensation flicked too quickly to the surface of my clammy skin for it to be the same.
My fists clenched and my jaw tightened to a point I feared I wouldn’t be able to undo.
I didn’t want to be dressed up in Henry’s clothes and dressed down with Henry’s words.
You just don’t get it, he’d said. But playing it back in my head again, it sounded like he meant You’ll never get it . You’ll never be fully human. You’ll never have a family. You’ll never be loved. You’ll never… never… never.
I wanted to shut off my thoughts. I wanted to scream so loud my throat bled. I wanted to get far away from Henry so I could stop being expected to go where he said to go, do what he said to do, say what he said to say, wear what he said to wear—
The realization flattened me all at once.
An idea of an ideal?
Even in human form, I was still just a mannequin to him.
HENRY
What had Aidan been thinking?
I couldn’t fathom him rifling through my underwear drawer, copping the ring, and bringing it to Alexa’s house for a sheer Christmas spectacle.
“Isn’t that what you wanted?” he’d asked outside.
The question echoed, cuttingly perceptive.
Perceptive. Shit. When had he become perceptive ?
That was the part that was twisting my thoughts the most. Aidan was agreeable, amenable, flexible, moldable.
Wet clay beneath my fingertips. Somewhere, at some point while I wasn’t looking, he’d snuck into the metaphorical kiln and emerged fully baked.
Even if my name was etched into the bottom of his foot, he no longer belonged to me.
Right as I registered this, Alexa swanned by with a tray of baked goods.
The scent of the sugary confections wrenched me from my stupor.
Despite my upset, I was suddenly starving.
And if I had a cookie in my mouth, I couldn’t answer any questions like “What just happened?” or “When’s Aidan coming back? ” or “Aren’t you ready to get married?”
The children remained preoccupied with their various jangly toys as if my epic runaway hadn’t even happened.
Wrapping paper found its way into garbage bags, and the Legos had been properly put away.
Most of the family nursed cups of tea or coffee, and I clung to the nearest wall, breath still raggedy.
The night wound down quickly from there, but Alexa had one last surprise in store.
Before anyone got their Tupperware containers of leftovers or stacked up the folding chairs, Alexa passed red envelopes around to the adults, one per family. I tore into it and found the following:
Alexa Aster and Sid Chambers cordially invite you to an engagement celebration to be held on February 13, 2026, at 127 Anchor Avenue, Ocean Glen, New Jersey.
At the top, a picture of Alexa and Sid from Thanksgiving stared back at me. I should’ve forecasted their engagement from their matchy outfits and Alexa’s fresh manicure. The signs were there. But did it really matter? Why couldn’t I be happy for them?