Chapter 1 #2
“Before we fall out of love completely and start resenting each other. I couldn’t live with myself if I started hating you. Even just saying that out loud is a fucking nightmare I can’t bear. I … I can’t, Tanner, I just can’t.”
He’s on the edge of the bed now. “Let’s think this over …”
“It’s all I’ve thought about. I’ve thought it over, Tanner, and I’m sure you have, too, even if you won’t admit it. We make better friends. Can’t we be honest with each other anymore and just—?”
“You’re blindsiding me here. Let me gather my thoughts a bit first! Gimme half a chance to fight for us before you decide—”
“I’m not happy anymore.”
The words I shouted before, now repeated calmly.
Yet they sound ten times as loud somehow.
I turn to look at him, despite the high chance of his beautiful, soulful eyes assaulting me back into submission.
But instead I find Tanner staring at the floor with a vacant expression, his brow creased in thought.
I can’t tell if he’s forming another argument or battling heartburn from the tension mounting between us.
It hurts me to say what I said, it really does.
It hurts to see the effect my words have on the man I love.
But it hurts worse to keep it in. I feel like a fate worse than this awaits us if I keep leaving everything unsaid.
If I keep brushing it under. If I take a page from Tanner’s book and just pretend everything is fine.
“Even the kids feel it,” I go on. “I don’t want them to grow up in a house full of my moodiness and my …
my petulance. You should’ve seen the way Marcus looked at me.
Imagine all the other times he’s noticed something off with us.
I can’t do this to them any longer. It’s unfair to them.
” I look at the wall, hearing the hum from the kids’ TV on the other side. “To all of us.”
Nothing more is said for a while.
Then, in a faraway voice that’s barely there, he asks, “What do we tell everyone? What about the holidays? Thanksgiving?”
I could laugh. Thanksgiving feels a million miles away. How this will affect the Strongs’ mountain of holiday traditions is last on my mind when I’m just trying to survive tonight.
“I’ll do it,” I promise him, like it’s a chore I’m volunteering to strike off of one of our countless checklists. That’s so me. “Tomorrow. At our Friday family dinner thing. I’ll tell everyone then.”
He lifts his face. “So soon?”
“If I don’t, I never will. And then what, Tanner?” I sink back against the doorframe. “Then when?”
After too long a moment, I catch a glimmer of resolve in his eyes.
I wonder if he’s finally allowing himself to see the truth of it, too.
It’s a truth I never thought I’d see myself, never dared to even consider, that on a random night of a random week tucked away into nothing-August, I’d be discussing the end of our marriage.
“After the kids leave the table,” says Tanner. It pains me how much like a surrender his voice sounds. “They always do. Dinner, dessert, then can’t seem to get away from the table fast enough to play their games.”
“We’ll tell them after,” I agree, returning to the bed, sitting next to him. “In our own way. Together.”
“Together,” he agrees softly.
Then falls silent again.
I glance at him. “What if this actually saves us? To end this and … and go back to being just you and me? Before the pressure. Before … everything else.”
So much I omit with those two words.
Everything else.
He peers at me softly. “You know I love you, right?”
“Yes. Of course. I love you, too.”
“Like … in the big way?” he goes on. “The way that ain’t no damned thing in the world can come between? You’re the center of my whole universe.”
“Tanner.”
“I just … want you to know that.” He swallows, then takes my hand. “Before we do this.”
I look down at our hands. “Eight good years.”
“Eight good years,” he murmurs back, almost automatically. Then as quickly, he adds, “Are you sure, Billy? Are you totally sure we can’t—?”
I bring my arms around him right then and rest my head on his shoulder. He doesn’t move for a while. Then I feel him gently reciprocate my embrace.
We just stay like that for what feels like hours, our words and thoughts kept inside.
If we have any at all.
Nineteen hours later, in the main house on the Strong ranch where Tanner’s parents live, just a walk down a path from ours on the same property, we’ve finished up dinner.
My parents are three drinks in, laughing way too much and sharing something funny that happened at Biggie’s Bites, our family diner.
Tanners’ parents have a nice buzz going, too—the lively Mayor Nadine Strong, who just wrangled all of us into a sudden selfie mid-meal, and her soft-spoken husband Paul, my in-laws.
Their housekeeper Jacky-Ann is laughing joyously with our kids, who are on their second helping of dessert, Joshua’s nose dotted with blue icing.
Then, as usual, the kids are excused from the table—after Joshua’s icing is wiped off his nose—and up the stairs they go to play on the big guestroom TV, leaving us adults to chat away at the table.
I really hate to kill the buzz everyone’s got going.
But there’s no time like the present.
I rise too quickly, bumping the table on accident and earning everyone’s attention when the plates rattle.
I still lift my glass and tap a fork on it for some reason.
“Mom, Dad … and Mom, Dad,” I repeat for Nadine and Paul’s benefit—then realize with a pang of sadness that I might have just exercised that privilege for the last time.
“Jacky-Ann. I’m sorry to interrupt our festivities.
And good times. But … um …” This is a hundred times harder than I could have predicted.
A thousand times. “There’s not really a …
a great time to say this. Or an easier way … but …”
The wine must have driven the words off like a flock of birds, because my mind is blank, all of the words I’d prepared, taken flight, far as fuck away from me as anything can possibly be. My hands are shaking again, too.
Oh, just fucking say it, Billy. “Tanner and I—”
Tanner rises. “—are renewing our wedding vows!” he then finishes for me, grinning proudly.