4. Now This!
NOW THIS!
LUCY
Fox comes home at seven.
I hear the garage door, then his key, then the sound of him setting his bag down in the entry hall—a thud, brief, routine—next are his footsteps on the hardwood, and he appears, the way he always does, slightly loosening his tie, looking at whatever I’m cooking with the expression that is the closest thing to uncomplicated warmth I reliably get from him.
“Smells good.” He kisses me softly. He does this every time he sees me after a while, or when he leaves me for a while. I used to find it endearing. Now, I don’t know how to feel.
“Lamb ragu.”
“The good one?”
“Is there a bad one?”
The corners of his mouth lift up.
He goes to the wine and looks at the label. “Nice! It’ll go well with the lamb.”
He pours two glasses and brings one to me without asking. It’s an act of domestic fluency that I have loved about him, but am now cataloguing with the attention of a woman who is trying to figure out what is real and what is habit.
“Long day?” I ask—another habit.
“Long enough.” He leans against the counter and looks at me. “Thanks for the cassoulet.”
My throat is all but closed up. I don’t know how to do this, how to unravel this marriage that means so much to me with my own hands.
“You’re welcome.”
He frowns. “You’ve been busy. Cassoulet and now the lamb! When did you start cooking?” He knows this dish, like the cassoulet, is one of those long and slow burns.
“Early.”
“Did you go into Dina’s?”
“No. I took the day.”
He raises an eyebrow—he knows I don’t take days—but doesn’t push it, which is on brand for him. He asks questions up to a point and then retreats if I don’t volunteer more information. I used to read that as a sign of respect for my autonomy—now, I wonder if it’s disinterest.
We eat and talk like we always do.
He compliments my food. He’s good about such things. My husband notices my efforts and never makes me feel like I’m not appreciated.
He talks easily about his work—tells me about a musician who insisted their greenroom include a gold water bowl for their dog, because the dog had allergies.
Fox is quite the storyteller.
Well, he did tell me a story about how we were going to be married forever, and I bought it, hook, line, and sinker.
He’s pouring the second glass of wine when I say it. “You know why I made cassoulet today?”
Fox looks like I dropped a puzzle in his lap. He smiles cautiously. “Am I missing an important date, sweetheart?”
“It’s the anniversary of the night we met.”
He recalibrates and takes my hand in his. “So it is, Luce. I’m so sorry I forgot.”
I pull my hand away from his and straighten like I’m preparing to leap off a diving board.
“I overheard what you said to Percy when I came by this afternoon.”
The silence that follows is a specific kind—not empty but very, very full.
I watch Fox go still like he’s deciding something, that characteristic composure that I have admired and envied and now, tonight, find I have no patience for.
“Luce—“
“Don’t.” My voice comes out steady, which surprises me. “Don’t do that thing where you figure out what to say before you say it. I’ve been doing that all day. I’m tired of it.”
He regards me thoughtfully, and his face shifts, rearranging itself into a resting stoicism. I know him, though. He’s preparing for what I’m going to say. I have unwittingly, over time, learned the difference between Fox’s real expressions and his managed ones, and this one is managed.
“How much did you hear?” he asks gently.
Which is, I realize, not the same as I’m sorry.
“Enough.” I set the napkin on the table.
He doesn’t look away, which I’ll give him credit for. Whatever Fox is—and I am in the process of revising that answer from the ground up—he is not a coward about being caught. He holds my gaze, nods—like a man receiving a verdict he already knew was coming.
“Okay.”
It’s the same word he used when I told him I was pregnant.
The same word he used when I told him I wanted to keep the baby.
The same word, I understand now, that Fox uses when he has decided to absorb a situation rather than respond to it—a word that sounds like an agreement but is actually management.
“Is it true?” I ask through a very tight throat. “What you said to Percy. Is it true?”
“You’ll have to be more specific, Luce.” He’s not being cavalier. He’s not prevaricating. He’s organizing.
“Why did you marry me?”
Fox looks at the table, at his wine glass, at some point slightly to the left of my face, and then he looks at me directly. “Because you were pregnant.”
“Would you have married me if I weren’t pregnant?”
“No.”
One word. Four walls of it, solid all the way around.
I knew it was coming—I have known it since the hallway, since I drove home with both hands on the wheel and very carefully did not cry—and it still lands like a bomb going off.
“You never loved me.”
“I never said I did,” he reminds me softly, kindly.
That’s true.
“But I know that you thought I did,” he adds carefully.
Oh, look at this man’s honesty! Now that he’s cornered, he’s spilling it all.
He’s probably thinking, “Her heart is already broken, what’s a few more hits?”
“So, after I lost the baby, why—”
“Luce,” he cuts me off, and I see pain flash across his face. It’s the first genuinely unmanaged emotion I have seen from him tonight. “I’m sorry about the baby and—”
“You married me because I was pregnant, but you stayed married to me, why?” My voice stays level. I am impressed by myself—distantly—the way you are by a stranger doing something difficult.
He doesn’t answer right away.
The silence stretches, and in it I hear our whole marriage—eighteen months of mornings and dinners and small kindnesses that I understood as love, and he understood as doing the right thing, and the difference between those two is the distance between where I thought I was and where I actually am.
“Was it guilt?” I prompt because I can’t stand the tension any longer.
“Yes.” A flicker of compassion crosses his face. “That’s accurate.”
I stand up because I can’t sit any longer. I want to run as fast as I can, away, away, away from here, from everything.
But I’m a grown-up, and as hard as it is to be an adult, you can’t just escape a situation. You have to deal with it.
I pick up my wine glass and walk to the café windows that overlook the large balcony, where I have planted a kitchen garden in boxes.
Tomatoes. Chili. Herbs.
I planted a fig tree. I always wanted a fig tree.
And peonies. Not roses. But simple peonies. His mother said it was gauche. Fox told her it wasn’t her terrace and therefore none of her business. I had felt so safe with him then.
I stare at the fig tree. These are words I can’t say if I look at him. “We should end this marriage.”
Behind me, Fox is quiet for a long while, and then he finally says, “I know. But sweetheart, let’s talk about—”
“Don’t.” I turn around to look at his beautiful face.
“Don’t manage this. Don’t make it tidy. You told your best friend you don’t love me, and you’ve been staying with me out of guilt when I came to surprise you with cassoulet on the anniversary of the night we met.
” My voice cracks, a hairline fracture that I seal immediately.
Fox looks at me from across the table, his composure intact. Mine is hard won. His, I realize now, probably comes easily because he’s getting what he wants—his freedom from me.
He opens his mouth and closes it, and for once since I’ve known him, Archibald “Fox” Bennett does not seem to know what to say.
“I’ll go to Dina’s for tonight,” I tell him.
“This is your home, too, Lucy,” he murmurs. “You don’t have to leave.”
I look around and shake my head. “We can—lawyers, or whatever. I don’t know how it works.”
I pick up my plate and take it to the sink because I am still my mother’s daughter and my mother’s daughter clears the table, regardless. “I assume you know all about the legalities of dissolving a marriage.”
I don’t look at him when I say it.
I hear him exhale.
“I’ll talk to the Bennett lawyer.”
A rough laugh escapes me as I stare at the marble sink. “The same one who wrote the prenuptial agreement?”
“The same one.”
I nod and lick my lips. “Give me an hour to pack up.”
I hear him move and then feel him at my back, his heat, his smell. “Sweetheart—”
“We’re getting divorced, Fox. You don’t get to call me that any longer.” I don’t know how I’m able to speak in full sentences when I’m breaking into a million pieces inside.
I’m losing my man—the love of my life.
I turn from the sink. He steps away from me.
I walk past him and go to our bedroom.
I close the door and lock it for the first time since I moved in. I sit on the edge of the bed, and I let myself do the thing I have not been doing since eleven-thirty this morning, since the conference room.
I cry for the baby girl I lost—the one with the name I don’t say out loud—and I cry for the marriage I thought I had.
I cry because the lamb ragu was genuinely excellent, and I ate almost none of it.
I cry because I am going to have to tell my mother, who never fully trusted Fox but was trying, and my father, who told me at the wedding that Fox seemed like a good man, and Milo, who said nothing but shook Fox’s hand and looked at him the way Milo looks at cars he’s not sure about.
I cry until there’s nothing left, and then I wash my face, and I look at myself in the mirror for a long time.
Okay, Lucy, now what?