11. Kevin
— ? —
Kevin
She was in everything I saw and did, every breath I took, every beat of my stupid, hopeful heart.
I sat at the tiki bar nursing a drink I wasn’t tasting and watched her play volleyball in the pool.
She’d landed on Hugo’s team, and she was laughing, spiking the ball over the net with a whoop, her wet hair slicked back off her face.
Her smile was wide and real, nothing held back in it, the smile I used to be able to earn and had spent three years learning I no longer could.
She looked like she didn’t need me at all.
Which was exactly what I deserved.
I knew the exact shape of that laugh. I’d married it.
I’d spent the first years of us doing anything to earn it, and then somewhere in the middle I’d stopped noticing when it went quiet, and by the end I couldn’t have told you the last time I’d heard it in our own house.
Therapy kept circling back to it. Never the big night, always the thousand small mornings before it, when I’d walked past her at the counter with my phone already at my ear and told myself there’d be time later.
There’s always a later, right up until there isn’t.
The ice in my glass had melted down to slivers.
I turned it in my hand and didn’t drink.
Across the deck she came up out of the shallow end, wringing water from her hair, and a cousin made her tip her head back and laugh, and I felt the old pull in my chest, the one that had never once quit in three years no matter how hard I’d worked to starve it out.
Harry was on the other side of the net with a cousin who was pointedly not Jordan.
Jordan was still up at the station getting his pupils checked by the nurse.
I didn’t feel sorry about that. He’d been sitting too close to her, fingers walking along the end of her lounge chair, and I’d watched it happen from the field with the ball at my feet and made a decision I’d cop to in therapy later.
Okay, fine. Maybe I felt a little sorry. The guy probably hadn’t earned a soccer ball to the skull.
But only a little.
The bar smelled of cut lime and spilled rum and the coconut sunscreen half the party had bathed in.
My father had strung paper lanterns along the thatched roof for tonight, and they swung a little in the harbor breeze, waiting for dark.
It was a good weekend. My mother turned sixty in a place she loved, surrounded by everyone she’d made, and I was determined not to be the storm cloud parked at the edge of it.
I was managing that about as well as I managed everything where Stephanie was concerned, which was to say not at all.
“A penny for your thoughts?”
I turned. My mother was sliding onto the stool beside me, her sundress somehow still pristine in the heat, her smile already knowing more than I wanted it to.
“Mom.”
“Kevin.” She took my hand in both of hers, thumbs settling over my knuckles. “You’ve been staring at that pool for twenty minutes. Want to tell me what you’re thinking about?”
I went for a casual shrug and didn’t quite land it. “I was thinking about the pool.”
“The pool.”
“Yeah. It’s a nice pool. Good dimensions.”
She hummed, not buying a syllable of it. “The pool, or the woman in it?”
Touché.
I scratched the back of my head and felt the heat climb up my neck. “Maybe.”
She laughed, low and fond. “You’re about as subtle as a brick through a window, darling.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“What’s your plan, Kevin?” The lightness dropped out of her voice. “I know your father told you she was coming.”
“Hey,” my father called from behind the bar, where he was murdering a cocktail with far more enthusiasm than skill. “That was last minute.”
“I was already on my way here when he told me!” I protested.
My mother rolled her eyes toward the sky. “Whatever. We’ve talked about this. I know how you still feel about her.” She squeezed my hand again. “My question is, what are you going to do about it?”
I looked down into my glass and watched the ice shift and settle.
What was I going to do. That question had been chewing on me for three years, ever since she’d walked out of our bedroom and then out of my life, ever since I’d signed those papers with a hand I couldn’t keep steady and watched the door close on the only thing that had ever mattered.
“Beg her on my knees to take me back?”
My mother’s face didn’t move. Not amused.
Tough crowd.
“I don’t know, Mom.” I dragged a hand through my hair. “I just. She seems happy. I don’t want to ruin it.”
“And?”
“And I’m not sure she wants me back.” The words scraped going out. “I’m happy if she’s happy. That should be enough.”
I looked back at the pool. At Stephanie laughing as she dove for a ball and missed it by a mile. At the whole bright life she’d built in the empty space where I used to be.
“You look like a lost puppy, son,” my father said, setting down his shaker.
“Lando,” my mother warned.
“What? He does. Sitting there all moony-eyed, sighing into his drink.”
I wasn’t sighing. I was breathing. Not the same thing, and I intended to defend it.
My mother turned back to me, and her face softened. “Why would you ruin her happiness? ENHANCE it. Make her HAPPIER.”
“Mom.”
“Don’t think you’ll end up ruining everything, or you WILL, in fact, do that.” She caught my chin between her fingers and turned my face to hers. “Give yourself a little credit, Kevin. I’ve seen how hard you’ve worked on yourself these past few years. You’re not the same dumbass you were.”
The words landed somewhere deep, in the spot I’d been carrying since the night everything came apart.
I thought about the therapy. Twice a week at first, back when the guilt curdled into a thing that wanted to hurt me.
Those months I couldn’t eat or sleep, couldn’t look in a mirror without meeting the man who’d let his wife lose their baby alone on a staircase while he chased a signature over dinner.
I’d stepped back from running the company day to day.
Handed the machine to people who loved running machines, and gone back to being a doctor.
One clinical shift a week, my hands on actual patients, remembering the eighteen-year-old who’d chosen medicine because he wanted to be in the room when it mattered.
I’d closed the account tied to that dinner and cut Jennifer Nathaniels and her investors loose entirely.
I couldn’t take a cent of that money now, not with what it had cost me.
Every time her name crossed my desk I felt the stairs under my feet again.
So I scrapped that version of the clinic and started over clean, funding it myself through the foundation, building the thing I’d actually set out to build before I let it turn into the excuse that kept me from home.
I’d built systems and protocols so that no one I loved would ever have to lose to my work the way Steph had. My phone carried emergency overrides now, a short list of names that could break through anything. My assistant knew that certain names meant drop it all, no exceptions, no callbacks, go.
And I hadn’t dated. Hadn’t touched another woman in three years.
It had nothing to do with earning Steph back or paying down some penance I could cash in later.
Picturing anyone else just turned my stomach.
It would’ve meant handing off a part of me that still had her name on it. Whatever she’d kept of me, she’d kept.
Locked in my suitcase back in the cabin was the notebook my therapist made me keep.
Every missed dinner. Every feeling I’d waved off.
Every promise I forgot the second I made it, every call I let ring out.
Page after page of it, each failure paired with a note on what the better man would have done instead.
I’d memorized the whole thing. Every word of it.
And under the ink on my chest, over my heart where the notebook couldn’t reach, was the other thing I carried.
A name in plain black letters, and hers beneath it, because the child we’d lost had been going to have both of us and now had neither.
She didn’t know it was there. She’d have to be a lot closer than the width of a pool deck to find out.
Some nights that was the only prayer I had left in me, that she’d get close enough one day to read it.
“I’ve been trying,” I said quietly. “To be better.”
“I know you have.” Her hand moved from my chin to my cheek, warm and steady. “That’s why I think you have a chance. The man you are now? He’s someone worth taking a chance on.”
I leaned into her palm the way I had at seven with a scraped knee, at seventeen with a broken heart.
Then she pinched my cheek. Hard.
“Ow! Mom!”
“But if you DO go back to your stupid self and hurt her again, I WILL kick your damn ass, darling.” Her eyes had gone fierce. “The amount of tears she spills is equivalent to the amount of slaps you’ll get. And don’t think it’s just me.”
“I know. Hugo.”
“Hugo has been salivating over you since you arrived.” She shook her head, mournful. “You should really try to make things right with him too, darling. I hate to see you fighting.”
I thought about Hugo. My best friend from freshman year, the guy who’d dragged me home one summer and introduced me to his little sister and made me swear on my life I’d never so much as look at her. The guy who’d broken my nose in our driveway three years ago.
I’d earned that too. He’d stood up for her when I hadn’t, and I couldn’t hate a man for that, no matter how much the memory of his fist still ached in my teeth on cold mornings. He’d been right. That was the worst of it. Every name he’d called me had landed because it was true.
“I’ll try my best.” I pulled my mother into a hug and breathed in her perfume, the same one since I was a kid. “Thank you, Mom.”
“Always, sweetheart.”
I kissed her cheek and turned to my father. “And thanks, Dad. You should really learn how to keep a secret.”
He chuckled, not one bit sorry. “A little advice, if you want to make things right?”
I raised an eyebrow. “What?”
“NEVER keep a fucking secret from your wife.” He leveled the cocktail shaker at me. “Happy wife, happy life.”
I rolled my eyes. But he wasn’t wrong. Secrets had been half of what killed us.
Me, hiding how many hours I was really working, how much I’d let ambition eat.
Her, hiding how alone she’d gotten in a house I was never in.
The two of us smiling across a dinner table and swearing everything was fine right up until it detonated.
I looked back at the pool. Stephanie had climbed out and was wrapping herself in a towel, laughing at Harry, and the sun caught in her wet hair and turned it to gold. She was beautiful. Beautiful in a way that put a hand around my throat.
“Okay,” I said, more to myself than to either of them. “I’ll make things right this time.”
“How?” my mother asked.
“I just-” I pulled a breath. “I need your help.”
Her whole face lit. “Tell me what you want, darling.”
I thought about the three days in front of us.
The dinners and the lawn games and the bonfire, all of it packed into the tight little world of this cabin complex where nobody could get more than a quarter mile from anybody else.
Stephanie was here for my mother’s birthday.
She couldn’t leave without making a scene she’d never make.
And I had seventy-two hours to show her who I’d become instead of just claiming it.
“I need time with her,” I said, slow, feeling the shape of it as I went. “Real time. Not just awkward encounters at the pool. I need her to see that I’ve changed.”
“And how do you propose we arrange that?”
I looked at my mother. At the scheme already kindling behind her eyes, the birthday-planner brain of a woman who’d bent forty years of family events to her will.
“You’re hosting a birthday weekend,” I said. “There must be activities planned. Things that require partners or teams.”
“There might be.”
“And if those teams happened to put me and Stephanie together.”
“That could theoretically occur.”
“And if certain other events required her to be my date, or my partner, or otherwise in my general vicinity for extended periods.”
My mother was nearly vibrating off the stool. “I think that could be arranged.”
“Nothing too obvious,” I warned. “She’ll see through it if we’re not careful.”
“Please.” She flicked the concern away with one hand. “I’ve been manipulating family events for forty years. I know what I’m doing.”
That scared me.
But I was desperate, and desperate men did desperate things, and I’d run clean out of prouder options three years ago.
“Thank you,” I said. “Both of you.”
My mother folded me into another hug, tighter this time, her chin hooked over my shoulder. “We want you to be happy, Kevin. Both of you. You were so good together, once. I have to believe you can find that again.”
I wanted to believe it too. God, I wanted it more than I’d ever wanted a single thing in my life.
My chest cinched down tight as I watched Stephanie start toward her cabin, still laughing, still golden, still completely unaware that her ex-husband was thirty feet away conspiring with his mother to win her back.
I didn’t deserve these people. My parents, who loved me through the worst thing I’d ever done, and my sister, who’d kept Steph close and warm even while I was busy driving her out the door. A whole family that still believed in second chances after they’d watched me waste the first one.
But I’d make myself worthy of every one of them.
Starting with her.
I set down my glass and watched her go. I didn’t cross the deck. Not yet. Some things you only get one chance to say, and I wasn’t going to waste mine blurting it out across a pool.
For now, I let her go back to her family and her laughter. There would be time. I had three days and a lifetime of proving left to do, and I meant to use every hour of both.