18. Stephanie
— ? —
Stephanie
“You’re a coward.”
Gina’s voice crackled through my phone speaker as I paced the length of my apartment.
I’d thrown these clothes on at five in the morning to catch the first ferry off Nantucket, and I still had them on, the fabric stale with salt air and panic.
My feet had worn a track in the rug hours ago.
I couldn’t seem to stop moving. Moving was the only thing keeping me upright.
“I’m not a coward. I’m strategic.”
“You snuck out of bed while your ex-husband was sleeping and ran away on a boat. That’s not strategy. That’s fleeing the scene of a crime.”
“There was no crime,” I said, and even I heard how thin it sounded.
“The crime was almost-happiness. You panicked and ran from it.”
I stopped pacing. My reflection stared back at me from the dark television screen, and it wasn’t a flattering portrait.
My hair had given up somewhere around Hyannis.
Mascara had migrated south of where mascara was supposed to live.
My dress carried every wrinkle of a two-hour ferry ride spent hunched against a window, pretending to sleep.
I looked every inch a woman who had run.
Because I was.
“What was I supposed to do?” I demanded. “Cuddle my ex and kiss him good morning?”
“YES!” Gina practically shouted, and I had to pull the phone away from my ear. “That’s exactly what you were supposed to do! Clearly he’s not just ‘some ex.’ You still have feelings for him, girl. Admit it.”
I opened my mouth to argue. Closed it again.
I couldn’t argue. Not anymore.
That was the whole problem, wasn’t it. For three years I’d built a very tidy little story about myself.
I was the woman who had survived Kevin Coleman, the one who was over him.
I’d folded the grief up small and filed it somewhere I never had to open, and I’d told myself the drawer was empty.
This weekend had proven the drawer was full to bursting.
The second I’d seen him standing in that grass, the second our eyes had met across a burning lawn, BOOM.
Everything I’d shoved down came roaring back up with a force that terrified me.
I’d deceived myself into thinking I was over him.
I wasn’t.
“I really think he’s my soulmate,” I whispered. The words felt dangerous out loud, and I glanced at the door, half-afraid saying them might summon him. “And I’m not sure I’ll ever get over him.”
Gina’s voice softened. “Then why are you running?”
“Because I don’t know how to trust him again.
Because last time I trusted him, I almost died alone on my stairs while he ate dinner with investors.
” My voice cracked on the last word, and I hated it, hated how quickly the memory could still take my knees out from under me.
The cold of the step. The phone screen lighting up and then going dark.
The certainty that he’d come, and then the slower, worse certainty that he wouldn’t.
“Because loving Kevin Coleman nearly destroyed me, and I don’t know if I can survive it a second time. ”
“Have you considered that maybe he’s changed?”
“He says he has.”
“And you don’t believe him?”
“I don’t know what I believe.” I sank onto my couch, and the exhaustion hit me all at once, the kind that lived in the bones.
I pressed the heel of my hand against one eye.
“I made a point of not asking anything about his life these past three years. For all I know, he’s returning to a girlfriend right now. ”
Gina gasped. “You think he CHEATED on her? With you?”
I grimaced at the ceiling. “No. He’s not a cheater. That was never our problem.” I rubbed my eyes until color bloomed behind the lids. “Maybe he doesn’t have anyone. I don’t know. I don’t know anything about his life anymore, and I don’t know if I can let him in again after everything.”
“You won’t know until you talk to him.”
“I know. I just-” I sighed, and the breath came out ragged. “I need to think. And I need to log in to work before my boss murders me for taking a personal day.”
“Fine. But promise me you’ll actually consider what I said.”
“I promise.”
We said goodbye and I hung up, and the sudden quiet of the apartment pressed in on me.
I sat there staring at a water stain on the far wall I’d been meaning to fix for a year.
My body was wrung out. My mind refused to slow down.
It kept looping back to him, offering up fragments I hadn’t asked for.
Kevin’s face. Kevin’s hands. His mouth against my ear at one in the morning, telling me he’d never stopped loving me, the sand cool beneath us and the tide close enough to touch.
I shook my head hard, willing the images loose, and grabbed my laptop.
Work. Focus on work. That was what I needed, the familiar comfort of historic preservation, of old buildings and older stories. Problems I actually knew how to solve, unlike the one currently living rent-free behind my sternum.
I opened my email and scanned through the usual chaos. There were meeting requests stacked on project updates, and a chirpy reminder about the office birthday party I’d missed while I was busy falling apart on an island.
And one email from my supervisor, flagged urgent.
I clicked on it.
My stomach dropped straight through the floor.
The preservation firm had assigned me a major summer commission on Nantucket.
An abandoned nineteenth-century clinic was being restored into a women’s health and pregnancy-loss center.
The project was fully funded by a private charitable foundation, and my supervisor was thrilled, positively giddy in her phrasing, to announce that I’d been specifically requested to lead the restoration team.
The foundation’s name sat at the bottom of the email in polite black type.
The Coleman Foundation.
What the actual fuck?
I grabbed my phone and called Kevin before the wiser, more cautious part of me could clamp a hand over my mouth.
He picked up on the very first ring.
“Hey.”
His voice did things to me it had no right to do. Even now, even furious, even fully convinced he was orchestrating my entire life from behind a curtain, that one syllable pulled my chest tight.
“Are you trying to chain me to that island?” I demanded. “Why would you interfere in my job?”
A pause. “What?”
“The clinic restoration. Your foundation. My firm. Did you seriously think I wouldn’t notice?”
“YOU WORK FOR THAT COMPANY?”
The shock in his voice was so raw and so genuine that it stopped me mid-breath. I’d braced for a smooth deflection, some charming half-confession. This was neither. “Yes? What? You didn’t know?”
“No!” Another pause, and I could hear him moving, hear his breathing change. “Fuck. This is going to be way creepier now than it was five minutes ago, but… open the door.”
Goosebumps rushed up both my arms. “What?”
“Open the door.”
I walked toward my front door slowly, the phone still pressed to my ear, my socked feet silent on the floor. My heart pounded hard enough that I could feel it in my throat and in the tips of my fingers where they closed around the knob.
I opened the door.
Kevin stood there, phone still to his ear, half-buried behind a massive bouquet of orchids that threatened to swallow him whole.
My favorite flower. Pale and delicate, the kind most men never thought to buy.
How did he still remember my favorite flower after everything, after three years of silence I’d built brick by brick?
He hung up and slid the phone into his pocket.
“I swear I didn’t know you worked there,” he said immediately, before I could get a word out.
“Are you stalking me?” My mouth was hanging open, one hand still on the door.
He grimaced. “Maybe? Hugo gave me your address.”
I stared at him. At the flowers crushed against his chest. At the way he kept shifting his weight from one foot to the other, this composed, brilliant man reduced to a nervous teenager on my welcome mat.
“You ran,” he said quietly. The sadness in his eyes reached in and pierced straight through my anger, deflating it. “You left without saying goodbye.”
“I had to work,” I whispered, and even I didn’t believe me.
He lifted an eyebrow. “So the fact that I ate you until you were screaming my name in the middle of that beach at one in the morning and then you spent the rest of the night cuddling your ex-husband had nothing to do with you running away this morning?”
My face BURNED.
A door opened down the hall. My neighbor stepped out, keys in hand, and her eyes went wide at the tableau of Kevin, his flowers, and my flaming cheeks.
“Shut up!” I hissed, grabbing his arm and yanking him inside before he narrated my entire orgasm to the second floor.
“Hey,” he smirked as I slammed the door behind us.
I realized too late what I’d done. I had him pressed against the door, the orchids crushed between our bodies, both my hands flat on his chest. I’d caged him in with no plan for what came next, torn between kissing him and killing him, unsure which impulse was winning.
I cleared my throat and stepped back a careful foot.
“It might have had something to do with that,” I admitted. “Last night. I haven’t forgiven you, okay? We were both drunk and horny and it didn’t mean anything.”
He shook his head. “Don’t make excuses for me, gorgeous. Yes, I was tipsy. But I knew exactly what I was doing, with who, and I enjoyed the hell out of it.” His eyes held mine, steady and unashamed. “I’ve been dreaming of it since the first time I ever saw you.”
My breath quickened, and I despised how easily he could do that to me.
“So you truly didn’t know about my job?” I asked, grasping for firmer ground.
“I only found your address because I asked. I’ve been giving you space, Steph.
Didn’t ask anyone about your life before today.
” He shifted the mangled bouquet in his arms. “If you want, I can remove myself and transfer oversight to another board member. Even though that clinic… it’s mine. It’s a personal project.”
He paused, and the pause said more than the sentence had.
“I guess you know why.”
A lump rose in my throat and lodged there. Yes. I knew why. A pregnancy-loss center. A place where women going through the worst hours of their lives could be met with kindness instead of a clipboard and a pat on the shoulder.
A place that might have caught me, three years ago, if it had existed.
I took a breath. “We can work together.”
His whole face lit up, and for a second I saw the boy Hugo used to drag home from college.
“With rules,” I added quickly, before that look could do any more damage. “You don’t do surprise visits. You don’t use the project to discuss our marriage. And we’re definitely not repeating what happened on that beach.”
He scowled. “And if I refuse?”
The challenge in his voice caught me off guard, but I recovered fast. “Then I’ll… I’ll expose your audition tapes from when you thought you could get the Spider-Man role at fifteen.”
Those videos were objectively adorable, and I’d go to my grave defending them.
Fifteen-year-old Kevin in a homemade costume, delivering dramatic monologues to a camcorder with a seriousness usually reserved for eulogies.
I secretly treasured every frame. He, however, hated them with a passion that bordered on medical.
He gasped. “YOU WOULDN’T.”
“Try me.” I crossed my arms.
He stared at me for a long moment, weighing whether I was bluffing. I wasn’t, and he knew it. He sighed and set the crushed bouquet down on my coffee table with surprising tenderness.
“Fine. But I’ll add a rule of my own: you can change these rules at any time. And I can use any method to convince you to change them.”
It had the shape of a trap. But it was his rule, not mine, so I let it stand.
“Okay,” I said slowly. “Now would you tell me why you’re here? Besides the apparent stalking?”
He bit his lip. Opened his mouth. Closed it again. I watched him wrestle the words into order, this man who had always been so effortlessly articulate about everything except the one subject that mattered.
“Because you left me,” he finally said. “Again. And I understood why the first time. Why you’d want nothing to do with me. I didn’t even tolerate myself back then. After how I failed you? I hated myself, Steph. More than anything.”
He stepped closer, and I didn’t step back.
“But that was three years ago. And I’ve worked very hard to leave that man behind and become a version that tries, every single day, to be worthy of you.”
I couldn’t speak or move. My whole body had gone still the way a room goes still before thunder.
“So I’m here to let you know.” His voice was steady now, certain, the nerves gone.
“You’re not getting away so easily this time, Stephanie.
I’m not letting you go again. You can hate me.
Slap me. Curse at me. But I won’t let you believe, for one second, that I’m not still desperately in love with you. ”
I was frozen.
He reached out and grabbed my hand. Yanked me a half-step closer. And then, instead of kissing me, instead of doing any of the things my body had braced for, he shook it. Firmly. Up and down, twice, closing a business deal.
“Eager to start working with you, gorgeous,” he said, and winked.
Then he turned and walked out of my apartment, pulling the door shut behind him with a soft click.
I stood there in the sudden quiet, hand still extended into the air, staring at the space where he’d been.
He still loved me.
He still loved me, and he was going to fight for me, and I had absolutely no idea what to do with that information.
The orchids sat on my coffee table, pale and impossible, a little bent but still perfect. I crossed to them and picked up the bouquet and buried my face in the blooms, and beneath the green sweetness of the petals I caught it, faint but unmistakable, the cedar and salt of his skin.
He’d carried them against his chest the whole way up.
My phone buzzed against my thigh. One text, from a number I’d deleted three years ago and somehow still knew by heart. It was a photo. A single grainy still from a camcorder, a scrawny teenager in a red mask flexing at his own reflection, and beneath it three words.
Try me back.
God, I was in trouble.