25. Avery #2
“I wore it because I was happy, and I thought my husband would be happy to see me.” My voice wavers on the last word.
I take a drink before it can become his invitation to offer comfort.
“At the gas station, I bought a banana because every sandwich looked dangerous. The socks were hanging beside the register. Grey, white, and yellow. Four dollars. I held that stupid plastic sleeve against my coat all the way to the car because I had waited so long to buy something for our baby that I thought somebody might take it.”
Declan’s hand moves toward the inside of his coat and stops halfway. The yellow sock stays where it is, and I am grateful in the ugliest way available to me.
“I almost called June,” I say. “She called back, and I let it ring because you were supposed to know first. I worried you’d be hurt if anybody else had held the news before you. While you were with Sasha, I was protecting your place in the announcement.”
“Fuck.” The word is barely audible. He bends forward until his clasped hands touch his forehead and stays down there, letting me finish.
“Avery, I watched June’s name on your phone that morning.
After you left. I thought you had called her before you came, and I was jealous she might’ve known our baby existed before I did. ”
The cruelty of that almost makes me laugh, though nothing about it’s funny enough to deserve the sound. “Of course you were.”
“I had no right.” Declan lowers his hands and forces himself to look at me rather than hiding behind them.
“You had more concern for being first than you did for what I found when I tried to make you first.” I state the fact as plainly as I can, and he has nowhere to move that won’t prove it.
“Yes.” His face gives me nothing easy to fight, only the answer he should have been capable of months ago.
I want him to argue. I want a bad excuse I can tear apart, something easier than watching the ugliest facts arrive in his own mouth. A car door closes somewhere down the block, and Declan’s attention stays on my face through all of it.
“I rehearsed on the highway,” I say. “I tried 'You’re going to be a father,' but it sounded like I was serving you papers.
I chose 'We’re having a baby.' I kept saying it to the windshield until it sounded like us. Then an old song came on, and I sang so badly the driver beside me stared at a red light. I cried and laughed and checked the pocket over my heart every time the road got rough.”
Declan’s face changes at the song, curiosity reaching for a piece of the drive he has no right to enter. “Which one?”
“You don’t get the song.” I hold his gaze until he understands that some parts of the morning are mine because he wasn’t there to ruin them.
He nods, accepting the door I close even though I can see him trying to remember every song I used to destroy in the car. “All right.”
“I imagined your hand on my stomach. There was nothing to feel yet, but I thought you’d keep it there anyway.
I imagined you coming home before midnight.
I thought the baby would make you put your phone faceup and sit at the table while I read the contracts again.
” I hate the woman who believed that, and I love her enough to keep talking.
“I knew a baby couldn’t fix a marriage. I told myself it would make us stop pretending there wasn’t a problem.
That was the hope I carried into the safehouse. I thought I was bringing you home.”
Declan turns his face toward the street. A car passes at the same speed, and he waits until the engine fades before looking at me again. His eyes are wet, and he leaves them that way rather than turning them into an exhibit.
“You used the key I gave you,” he says. “You walked in wearing the shirt you picked for me, carrying the first thing we’d ever made together and the first clothes you bought for our child. You had four words ready. I made you hear Sasha before you got to say them.”
I grip the edge of the chair, feeling the paper towel leave my hand all over again. “You made me throw the test at you.”
“Yes.” Declan looks toward the pocket where he carries it. His hand stays flat on his knee.
“I will never get another first pregnancy announcement. I could have more children and none of them would give me back the first time. When anybody asks how I told you, there will always be a woman in our sheets and three prospects in the hall. You took something that happens once and put her inside it forever.”
He takes the sentence whole, with nothing built around it to soften the landing.
“You laughed in our bathroom. You poured out your coffee. You wore green for me, bought three pairs of socks, sang on the highway, and came to put my hand on your stomach. I took the one time you got to surprise me and made it the way you caught me cheating. Nothing I do later can give you that morning back.”
The answer hurts enough that I stare past him at the winter-brown yard.
I called him here to make him understand, then forgot that being understood by Declan was once the safest feeling I knew.
He could miss what I needed for weeks and then find the exact fact beneath one sentence, and I built a marriage around believing that when he saw me, he would protect what he found.
“I thought the whole morning was ruined,” I say after I can trust my mouth again. “For months, the bathroom came with the bedroom attached to it. The socks at the register came with the yellow one under the bed. I started to believe I had been stupid from the second the line appeared.”
“You weren’t.” Declan answers before I can finish tearing down the woman I was, and I refuse to let even that correction belong to him.
“Correct.” I say it flat, before he can make the answer his.
“That’s the other reason you’re here. You don’t own the hours before I opened that door.
I was happy. The baby was wanted. I loved the baby before I knew one thing about who I was carrying, and I loved you with every fact I had that morning.
None of that was stupid. You lied to me.
I believed my husband. The shame belongs to you, and the woman singing in traffic keeps her morning. ”
Declan’s jaw works while he looks down at the step between his boots. “You’re right.” He says it like a fact he has no power to improve.
“Don’t say it like you’re giving something back.” I set the glass down harder than I intend, water climbing one side before settling again.
“I’m not.” He raises his head. “I can’t give it back. But I won’t talk about that morning like it began in the safehouse again. It began with you laughing in our bathroom. What I did came later.”
I flatten my palm against my coat and hold it there.
Declan watches my face and lets the pause belong to me.
The porch has gone cold around us, and my water tastes like the metal lid from the pitcher, but now when I remember that morning, I can hear my own laughter before I hear Sasha.
The bedroom waits at the end. It no longer gets to take the whole drive with it.
Declan reaches into his coat and brings out a folded sheet, keeping the fold shut against his thigh. The paper is thick, the print visible through the back in wide-spaced lines. “I’ve been working on a letter. It isn’t ready. When it’s ready, may I ask you to hear me read it?”
My first instinct is to say no so quickly the page never reaches the table.
The second is worse: I want to know whether he can read the words he once needed me to carry, and the old part of me is already measuring what standing here to ask must cost him.
Whatever it costs him goes separate from what he owes.
Only the words themselves and the life he builds around them can settle that account.
“You may ask once,” I say. “Asking doesn’t mean I’ll agree. If I say no, you don’t bring it to court, send it through June, leave it with the crib store, or find another way to make me hear it.”
“Once,” he says, folding the page before the wind can lift the corner. “And no means no.”
I stand and take my glass. Declan folds the letter into his coat and leaves it there. He rises when I reach the door, then waits beside the chair while I step inside.
“Declan.” He stops before the first stair and looks back. “The house is secured. Nobody goes there outside the patrol and the team I named. That includes you.”
I see how much the order hurts him. I see it in the way his attention moves toward the road that leads to our old home, the place Sasha threatened because she believes destroying it will destroy him.
He reaches into his pocket, takes out the old garage key, and sets it on the porch table beside the wet ring from my glass.
“It includes me,” he says. He leaves the key where it lies and walks to his motorcycle, and the engine takes him down the street, past the corner that turns toward our house and on toward the highway.