Fox (Regretfully Yours #5)

1. Loves Me Not

LOVES ME NOT

LUCY

Some marriages are made in heaven.

Mine was made in my friend’s diner—where I work as a cook—on one of the back tables after closing time, when Fox and I had sex one too many times without protection, and I got knocked up.

Here are a few truths.

Archibald “Fox” Bennett is out of my league.

That’s not self-pity talking—it’s geography.

I grew up in Antioch, southeast of Nashville, in a neighborhood where the dollar store was the nicest building on the block, and everybody’s daddy worked a trade or didn’t work at all.

Mine laid tile. He was good at it, too, until his knees gave out.

Then he drove for a delivery service until the route supervisor gave him a hard time, and he went all in on the gig economy, delivering groceries and takeout.

He’s still at it and has decided he will keep working until they take his driver’s license away.

Someone, please take my seventy-year-old father’s driver’s license away!

My mama waitressed. Now, she’s retired and goes to hot yoga classes.

My brother Milo fixes cars and has his own garage, a wife, two kids, and a dog. They still live in Antioch in a two-bedroom, two-bath house with a yard.

They throw the best Thanksgiving spread known to mankind, with two kinds of stuffing—one with spicy sausage and one without.

We weren’t poor in any way that left a mark, but we weren’t the kind of people who named their sons Archibald and meant it as a compliment, either.

Fox is from Belle Meade, where the trees look like they’ve been hired and the driveways are longer than my childhood street. Here, people don’t live in houses so much as they live in legacies—all that old Tennessee money gone wide, spread out behind iron gates and boxwood hedges.

The Bennetts have a home (mansion?) that has been in the family since before anyone currently living was born.

Fox’s mother calls it the house, like it’s a concept—an idea you’re meant to be humbled by.

Whatever!

My parents have a house in Antioch.

Two bedrooms, two baths, and a garage door that sticks. They call it the house, too, just not with my mother-in-law’s gravitas.

The first time Fox brought me to the house, I wore my nicest jeans.

I didn’t know. He didn’t tell me, and like a moron, I never Googled him.

I should’ve, but a man who is interested in me and has a name like Fox, I didn’t think he was one of those Bennetts.

That was then, nearly two years ago. Things are different now.

I now know to wear a dress for the house.

I know to call his mother Margaret, never Maggie, and never, under any circumstances, Mrs. Bennett, which she considers an insult to her first marriage and a reminder of her second.

I know that his sister Caroline will find something wrong with whatever we bring to dinner—the wine too sweet, the flowers too fragrant, “the dessert store-bought, Lucy, honestly,” even if Fox is the one who did the buying.

I know his brother David, whose wife is on drugs (hand to God, she is), will be friendly to my face (read as tits). He makes my skin feel like it needs washing every time he looks at me.

Fox says David is who he is, and that’s that, like it’s written in the family Bible: David is a lecherous pig, and we’re okay with it.

I now know all of this. I have learned it the way you learn to navigate a kitchen that isn’t yours—carefully, with your hands always slightly raised, ready to apologize for spilling.

What I haven’t learned is how to stop loving Fox.

Wish I had.

See, that’s the part nobody warns you about.

They warn you about the family.

They warn you about the money, the gap in it, the way it shows up in the small moments—the way he tips without looking at the receipt, the way he books flights the same day he needs them, the casual, unthinking fluency of never having to count.

They warn you that men like Fox don’t end up with girls like Lucy Vidal from Antioch, not in any way that holds.

But nobody warns you that you’ll fall for him anyway. Completely. Without protection, just like that time when I got pregnant—just as stupid, just as sure you’ll be the exception.

We met on a Tuesday at Dina’s Diner on Gallatin Road—a neighborhood eatery started by Dina Caldwell, my best friend since seventh grade.

I have always considered Tuesdays to be the orphan day of the week, not close enough to the weekend to matter, not fresh enough to feel like a start.

They’re also when I use the kitchen after closing to test recipes, which is what I was doing that night—working on a cassoulet I was hoping to make a regular on the menu.

It was nine-thirty at night.

Fox had been at the bar with colleagues, apparently the last of them to leave, and he’d wandered back through the open kitchen door. It was a warm night, and I had left it ajar.

He was both lost and curious, he told me later when he found me elbow-deep in duck confit and white beans.

“That smells illegal,” he murmured.

I should’ve been afraid to have a strange man wander into my kitchen. But I wasn’t.

I was intrigued by the unfairly handsome stranger—tall, dark-haired, with a jaw like an architectural decision. His suit was faintly wrinkled, his tie loosened. He wore a watch that I didn’t know at the time cost more than Dina’s yearly rent.

“It’s cassoulet,” I told him.

“Very fancy.”

“Very not,” I retorted. “It’s country-style French cooking.”

“But we’re not in France, mon amie.” His eyes glinted with laughter. “Is it any good?”

“Oui,” I replied cheekily.

“May I try it?” he mused aloud.

I quirked an eyebrow. “It takes four hours minimum, and it will change your life.”

“Let me be the judge of that,” he challenged.

“Come back in three hours,” I countered.

He came back in one.

He watched me cook.

He talked.

He got me to talk to him.

By the time I gave him a bowl, he had already made me laugh numerous times.

And then, he looked at me over that bowl of cassoulet the way I had always wanted someone to look at me. Like I was the most interesting person he’d ever met.

We talked until two in the morning over cassoulet, a baguette I’d made that afternoon, and a bottle of Saint-émilion Grand Cru from Dina’s small wine cellar, which I curated.

Four months later, I was pregnant.

I did not trap him, though I know the Bennetts have their own version of events, the one where Lucy Vidal from Antioch showed up in their son’s life with a plan and a borrowed dress and a womb she weaponized.

I know that version exists.

I have seen it on Margaret’s face—the careful, polite blankness she arranges herself into whenever my name comes up, like she’s composing a response to a slight she refuses to acknowledge out loud.

The truth is simpler.

We were careless.

We were, and I know how this sounds, especially now, happy.

We were at the beginning of something, I was certain, spectacular.

When I told him, I expected him to go pale, to stammer, to ask me what I wanted to do. Instead, Fox looked at me for a long moment, then he said, “Okay,” and declared, “I think we should get married.”

He said it calmly and with such certainty that I never doubted that he loved me, even if he hadn’t said the words to me.

And that is how stupid I was.

We got married at the courthouse with Dina, my parents, my brother, his wife, and Fox’s oldest friend—going back to college—Percy as witnesses.

My family wanted the works, but it felt wrong to have a big wedding when his own family wouldn’t be present.

His family wouldn’t understand, he’d assured me.

I agreed.

That’s when I shouldn’t have married him, but I was in love.

Stupid!

After the wedding, we had dinner at Rolf and Daughters because Fox loves their pasta, and then we went to our new home, his place in Germantown, and that was that.

The Bennetts found out three days later.

Margaret called it unfortunate.

Caroline called it a situation.

David smirked and said, “Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?”

Fox ignored them all and asked me to do the same.

At eighteen weeks pregnant, I lost the baby.

I don’t talk about that part.

Not with Fox, not with anyone except Dina, and even with Dina only sometimes, only when the weight of not talking about it becomes heavier than the weight of the words.

It was a girl.

I had known right away.

I looked at that small, blurry flutter on the screen and knew, the way you know certain things without being able to explain how, and I had called her something in my head—not out loud, not officially—just a name I gave her in the private room of myself where I kept the things that were too tender for air.

I don’t say that name anymore.

What I will say is that I stay married because I want to. Because I love my husband.

I loved him in the gutted, hollow months that followed her, when Fox and I moved around each other like we were both made of something breakable.

I loved him when I suggested a few months ago that maybe it was time to think about expanding our family.

I love him now.

I love him, I think, the way you love a home—not because it’s perfect but because you’ve already planted things there, because you feel safe there even with its flaws, because you’ve learned it.

Fox stays, too.

I think it’s because he loves me.

I am wrong about that.

I find that out on a bright April day when the Bradford pears are holding their blossoms, the skies over Cumberland are clean and bright.

I love this time of year. It’s perfection.

In a few weeks the heat will arrive and stay, and the air will thicken into something you wear rather than breathe, but right now it’s seventy-two degrees and the dogwoods on the plaza outside Fox’s building are doing something frankly embarrassing in terms of beauty as I walk past the Arcade and through Printer’s Alley, because I always take the long way when the weather lets me.

I carry a bag from Dina’s.

I made cassoulet: duck confit, pork, and white beans.

I called his secretary to confirm he was in, but told her not to tell him I was coming because I wanted to surprise him on the anniversary of the first time he ate my food on the fateful night we met.

I take the elevator to the fourteenth floor.

Fox’s assistant, a young woman named Haley, who has always been kind to me, looks up and smiles conspiratorially when she sees me. I told her we are celebrating an anniversary of sorts.

“He’s in the conference room,” she tells me, her eyes on the bag in my hand. “But I think he’s—he might be wrapping up.”

I smile. “I’ll just set up in his office.”

She nods. “Can I help with anything?”

I lift the bag, shaking my head. “No, I’m all set.”

As I walk to his office, which is right next to the conference room, I hear Fox’s voice, and warmth runs through me. His tone is low and unhurried, which is the way he talks when he’s comfortable, when he’s among people he doesn’t have to perform for.

I wonder who he’s meeting with?

“I don’t love her. I don’t think I ever have.”

I stop. Freeze.

“She’s good people, Fox.” That’s Percy.

Percy Hale is Fox’s oldest friend, the one who stood at our courthouse wedding and took the photo on his phone that is one of the few good wedding photos I have.

“I’m not saying she isn’t. I know she is.”

Who are they talking about? I think. But I know. A sick feeling spreads through me.

“So then what—“

“Percy.” A pause. “I married her because I’d gotten her pregnant, and that was the right thing to do. And then after she lost it, I couldn’t exactly—“ Another pause. “I stayed out of guilt. That’s the honest answer.”

The bag from Dina’s is still in my hand.

The dogwoods outside are still doing their embarrassing thing.

Fox’s voice continues, patient and certain, explaining to his friend like I’m a decision he made under duress and has been managing ever since.

I stand in the hallway of the building that bears his family’s name, in the life I built around a man, and I know—fully, finally, with the specific clarity that only comes when there is nothing left to misunderstand—that I have been alone this whole time.

I just didn’t know it.

Stupid!