Chapter 33 #2
I kept my face arranged. I pulled out the chair next to mine again, the other side, and I caught Amelie’s eye and tilted my head at it—here, sit with me—not asking out loud, because asking out loud and being turned down twice in front of everyone was more than I could survive before breakfast.
She didn’t even register it as a choice.
That was the thing that stung the most. She didn’t weigh it, didn’t glance between the open chair beside me and the one beside Kai and pick.
Her body just went to him. She crossed behind the kids and slid into the seat at his side without thought, and his arm came across the back of her chair, easy and certain, his thumb moving once at the bare top of her shoulder, and she leaned an inch into it without knowing what she’d done.
She had broken my heart.
The strange part was how quiet it was. For some reason, I’d always imagined heartbreak as something louder. I expected to fall to my knees with a banshee scream. But nothing dramatic happened. Just the quiet pain.
Was this how my wife felt when I blew her off on our dates?
Was she this sad when I’d made her wait hours for me, all because I’d forgotten to put it in my calendar?
Now, she had left me behind. Not to be cruel.
No, that wasn’t Amelie. It was because I had broken her heart too many times to count, and now, there was nothing left in it for me.
The table settled into its shape as my head spun.
On one side: me. Matt, Marcus, Will, Lucy. Ruby. The magazine. My new life.
On the other side: Kai with my family. Amelie was leaning back beside him, relaxed.
Bella was asking him for more pancakes. August was telling him a story about one of his teachers, his hands more animated than I’d ever seen them.
Jamie was interrupting to correct a detail, vying for Kai’s attention.
They were a family. A whole, sealed, functioning family turned slightly inward toward Kai, its center, the way families do, and I saw myself across from them like a guest who’d arrived at the wrong event.
I tried, all through breakfast, to reach across.
I asked Amelie if she remembered our road trip to upstate New York in college, when our car got stuck in twenty feet of snow, as we tried to find a door back into our own history.
She said “I do” softly, and before she could add more to the conversation, Kai leaned over to whisper something that distracted her, and then the door closed.
I asked the kids about boarding school, which they brushed off with one-syllable answers, enthralled by whatever story Kai was telling them.
Desperate, I even tried to engage Kai in a conversation about the market to show my family I could get along with him if that was what it took to be back in their good graces.
He gave me a cold, two-word answer that left no room for a follow-up question.
I wanted to hate him. Hating him would have been simple.
What I felt instead was uglier—I envied him.
He was living my life and pushing me out of my own family.
And the worst part? He was better at it than I ever was.
He showed up for my family. That was his entire secret, and it had taken losing them to teach me. To humble me.
There had to be something I could do. I was trying to be funny. I was trying to be useful, jumping up to refill juice no one was asking for. Every overture I sent across that table landed in water and sank without a ring.
And the whole time, Ruby was at my elbow.
“You okay?” she murmured, close, her shoulder against mine, her red hair brushing my arm when she leaned in.
She’d worn something low-cut and entirely inappropriate for a brunch with my family, and she kept finding reasons to touch me.
Her hand kept landing on my forearm to make a point, and her fingers kept grazing mine whenever she passed the syrup or salt.
A gesture that I had never examined too closely before, but it was now grating on my nerves.
Why was she openly touching me this way?
My wife was sitting across the table, and this was disrespectful. Did that not register with her?
“You seem somewhere else this morning, Stef,” she said.
“I’m fine,” I said curtly.
“You’re not.” She tilted her head, doing the warm, knowing thing she did, the unsentimental, clear-eyed thing I used to find a relief.
This morning, it was annoying. “Forget them for a second.” Her voice dropped, just for me, under the noise of the table.
“They’re trying to have a conversation like I’m trying to have one with you. Stop shouting across the table.”
She wasn’t wrong about the people across from me.
They were laughing. Easily. And I kept catching the looks Amelie and Kai were exchanging.
Like a secret only they were privy to. They weren’t performing it for my benefit.
It would have hurt less if it had been a performance, if she’d been flaunting their relationship to punish me for what happened in Beirut.
Instead, it was something quieter and far worse.
They had a whole language going that didn’t need any words and left no room for a third person.
It was evident in the way she’d glance up at him mid-sentence, just to check he was there.
The way his eyes were already on her when she did, like they’d never been anywhere else, like the rest of the table, the food, the guests, me, was background noise.
They were lost in each other, and she was looking at him the way I was looking at her.
With love.