Chapter Thirty-Four
I SEE HIM ON A TUESDAY, in a break room, on a muted television I'm not even watching.
The film's doing well. Well enough that I'm doing press now, which is how I come to be sitting in a green room in a city that still doesn't feel like mine, half-listening to a business channel nobody chose, when the picture cuts to an interview and my whole body knows him before my brain catches up.
Maximo.
On a screen. In a suit. Being asked about mergers and markets and whatever it is men like him get asked, and answering in that voice, and I lunge for the remote and turn the sound on like a woman possessed because I haven't seen his face in months and I'm apparently still exactly this pathetic about it.
"—one more question, if you'll indulge us. You're famously private. Any regrets you'd share?"
He's quiet for a second. I know that second. I've watched him hold a hundred words behind his teeth in that exact second.
"One," he answers.
"Just one?"
"One that matters." He looks straight down the barrel of the camera, and I swear the man is looking at me, all the way across the country, through a muted TV in a room he'll never see.
"There was someone who deserved my gratitude.
The deepest gratitude I've ever owed anyone.
And instead of giving it to her, I made her feel like she owed me for existing.
" His jaw works. "She's gone now. That's mine to live with.
But if she ever hears this...she was never the debt.
She was the gift. I had that exactly backwards, and it cost me the only thing I've ever been afraid to lose. "
The host says something. I don't hear it.
My hand's gone up over my mouth without checking with me first. There's a paper cup of somebody's coffee going cold in the other one and I've got no memory of picking it up.
I sit in a green room three thousand miles from him and watch the most guarded man I've ever known apologize to me on national television without ever once saying my name, and I think, clear as anything, you stubborn, impossible man.
You waited until I couldn't answer you to finally say it out loud.
And the worst part, the part that undoes me right there under the fluorescent lights, is that a year of fine comes apart all at once, and I understand that I never stopped.
Not for one day. Not for one beat of a heart I was never even supposed to have.