19. Cali
CALI
I wake up in Ronan Akov's shirt with my hair crunchy from chlorine and my heart doing a happy little two-step jig in my chest.
This is not a normal way to feel about a man. I'm a thirty-four-year-old mother of two in the middle of a divorce, and I have no business waking up feeling like a teenager who got asked to prom by the boy she thinks is the one. It's undignified. It's ill-advised.
But my heart just won't stop dancing.
I lie there for a while with my eyes closed, replaying the whole absurd blue evening. I press the shirt collar to my nose. Chlorine, and under it, him. Sandalwood, but darker than Todd's. Not the drugstore version. The real stuff. The good stuff.
Get up, Cali, I tell myself. You have children arriving in three hours and you smell like a public pool.
I peel myself out of bed and pad into the bathroom to start the long project of unchlorinating my life.
And then I stop.
Because the wall is bare.
There's a perfect rectangle of paint two shades darker than the rest of the wall, right where the mirror used to be. The big one, the one that came with the house, the one I've stood in front of every single morning of the last six years.
It's… gone?
My first thought is: someone was in my house.
My skin goes tight all over. I look at the empty rectangle, then at the door, as I listen intently for sounds of an intruder.
But there's nothing. The normal city noise outside the walls.
I walk out into the hall on unsteady legs. Two steps out, I stop and suppress a shriek.
The hallway mirror is gone, too.
Sensing a theme, I pick up speed.
The one by the front door: gone.
Guest bathroom: gone.
The compact-sized magnetic one on the fridge: gone.
By now, I've stopped breathing in any organized way. This is not a robbery. Robbers do not take the mirrors and leave the television. This was somebody with a specific intent and a great deal of patience, moving through my home in the dark while I slept.
I have a feeling I know whose ghosts these are.
I go downstairs to the kitchen and check the little wall-mounted tablet where the camera feeds live. Todd installed these back when he wanted to feel like the man of the house.
I cue up the front camera and scroll back.
And there is exactly what I was expecting: a gap.
The span from 11:52 P.M. to 4:16 A.M is just straight-up missing. As if the hours simply declined to happen. When I check the interior cameras, it's the same. Someone reached into the digital record of my own home and snipped out the exact window in which they walked through it.
"The appropriate response to this," I announce to the empty room, "is calling the police."
The room does not disagree.
"I'm aware of that," I add, because I'm feeling a little bit judged. "I am fully, completely aware that a reasonable woman calls the police."
I open the drawer next to the stove and take out the flour, the baking powder, and the little jug of buttermilk.
Because instead of calling the cops, I'm making pancakes.
Why? Fantastic question.
They didn't touch the kids' rooms.
I checked on my way down, some part of me needing to know before I could do anything else.
Hayden's room was untouched. So was Isabella's.
Her unicorn mirror is exactly where she left it, with the plastic horn glued to the top and the rainbow decals she picked out herself at Target stuck on crooked.
This was a message for me.
Everything he took, he took because it was mine specifically. He snatched away the glass I've spent a lifetime using to make myself smaller—and everything he left, he left because it wasn't his to touch.
He was in my house. And even in my house, in the dark, unwatched, with the cameras blinded, he stuck to his code.
The note is in the bathroom.
I didn't find it right away because I spilled half the pancake batter with my shaky hands and had to start over. But when the batter is done and ready for when the kids get home, I go back up to walk in and examine the bare wall properly.
Which is when I stumble across it. I don't know how I missed it before, because it's taped to the exact center of the empty rectangle. A single folded card, cream, heavy stock, right at eye level.
You don't need mirrors to tell you what I already see.
Ask me, and I'll tell you every day until you believe it.
I read it once.
I read it again.
And the first thing I feel—the very first thing, before anything soft has a chance to get its coat on—is fury.
Because how dare he? How dare he come into my home?
How dare he touch my walls and blind my cameras and stand outside my children's rooms making his little decisions about what stays and what goes?
How dare he decide, without asking me, that I don't get to have a mirror, that the tool I use to run my own morning is his to remove, that my relationship with my own reflection is a thing he gets to redefine while I sleep?
I open my mouth to yell, except there's nobody to yell at, so it comes out as a strangled little noise directed at the empty wall.
And then the fury cracks right down the middle and something else comes pouring through.
Now, I'm laughing.
I'm laughing and it's got tears in it. I have to sit down on the edge of the tub because my knees have quit.
This is insane. It's the single most insane thing anyone has ever done for me or to me, I can't tell which, maybe both, and the line has gotten so blurry that I've stopped being able to see it.
You don't need mirrors to tell you what I already see.
I laugh-cry into the collar of his shirt, which I am still wearing.
I sit there on the edge of my own bathtub and I understand that Ronan has, with a great deal of nerve, made it physically impossible for me to do the thing I did in that hotel room in Phoenix: stand in front of a mirror and take inventory.
Belly, hips, thighs. The stretch marks my children left on their way out.
I simply can't do it anymore. There's no glass to do it in.
He didn't tell me to stop cataloguing myself. He didn't lecture me about self-love, didn't suggest therapy, didn't stand there being disappointed in the way I look at myself.
He just removed the equipment, and left me only one alternative.
Ask me, and I'll tell you every day until you believe it.
I sit there for a while, looking at my phone where it rests on the counter and wondering if I'm ballsy enough to text him. That's what he wants, right? Ask him. Make him my mirror.
But I can't bring myself to do it. Not yet, at least.
Besides, I have other things to do.
My mother is dropping the kids by at eleven and she has that radar that will spot something amiss the second she sees me. If I answer the door looking like I've been crying into a man's shirt, she will know, and then the questions will never stop.
So I need to look like a person.
Which means I need to do my makeup.
Which means I need… a mirror.
I stand in the middle of my bathroom holding a tube of concealer and I turn in a slow, stupid circle looking for a reflective surface. "You ass," I tell the empty rectangle. "How am I supposed to do this?"
With no other choice, I reluctantly pick up my phone.
I flip the camera. There I am, upside down and then right-side up, thumb smearing across the screen, doing my under-eye concealer via a four-inch rectangle propped against the toothbrush holder while it keeps trying to autofocus on the faucet.
My eyeliner takes many attempts and several words my children are not allowed to say.
The left wing looks like it was drawn by a squirrel.
I fix it, and fix it again, and then give up and call it good enough.
When I go downstairs, though, I can't help but bring the note with me. I couldn't quite make myself throw it away and I couldn't quite make myself put it somewhere safe, so it's just there, haunting me.
I keep coming back to the last line.
Ask me, and I'll tell you every day until you believe it.
I read it while the first pancake bubbles, and I go over it so many times that it's not until the smell of char reaches my nose that I realize I didn't flip. Dammit. I scrape the burned mess into the trash can, pour another, and read it again.
It's a dare. That's what it is. He's making me ask. I can almost hear him taunting, Are you bold enough, Ms. Meadows?
He knows I hate asking. I've spent a decade learning to want less so I'd never have to ask for anything and then be told the thing I wanted was too much, too curvy, too dramatic, too crazy. He knows all of it, because he listens.
Now, he's forcing my hand.
It's only when the second pancake also burns that I admit defeat and pick up my phone. I type out three words.
Fine. I'm asking.
Send.