Chapter Eighteen
The Dark Secret—one or both protagonists commonly have a deep wound that may be hidden from those around them. The revelation of the dark secret can bring the protagonists closer or tear them further apart.
My entire world crumbles.
His wife .
That is the last thing I ever expected him to say. That is the last thing I expected to be ... possible.
A wife.
Does he have children? I can’t imagine it.
Or maybe I can. I think of the way his mouth softened into a smile when he watched Emma, Sofia, and Angel running around in the yard. When Emma called him a pirate.
Am I so stupid? Did I miss a thousand obvious signs?
I try to imagine him going to bed with the same woman every night and holding her close, but it makes me sick.
I try to imagine him whispering words of love to a woman, saying vows to her.
Then cheating on her.
This man who exhibited so much heroism the night of the fire. Just a bog-standard cheating husband. It’s so not how I think of him that I feel like someone has taken a massive rock and thrown a hole through the fabric of my reality.
I feel torn.
It makes my bruised chest feel raw. No longer an old wound, but something new.
I look at his sculpted face, his green eyes. There is a woman who loves that face. There is a woman who has experienced those green eyes lighting up when they look at her.
My guilt is paralyzing for a moment. Then I feel horrendously jealous. Horrendously, horribly jealous.
“You’re . . . you’re . . .”
“My wife is dead.”
The words are flat. Final.
Like death, I guess.
He had a wife. She loved him. He loved her. She’s dead.
These are the new things about him that I know, and I hate them. I saw it on his face at the diner. This deep loss. The kind that leaves you blank, forces you to start over, but I didn’t imagine a loss like this.
I feel hollow. I already know there’s nothing insightful or deep to say to something like this. I already know that the void grief leaves is so vast and empty there are no incantations you can fling down into the pit that will begin to fill it.
“I’m sorry,” I say, because there is nothing good enough, so I might as well say that.
There were so many times I wished people would say something that simple, that easy to me.
That instead of trying to make me feel better they could just say sorry .
That instead of telling me I could try again, that there was probably a reason it had happened, they would have just said sorry.
Because they don’t have to be sorry, and it doesn’t fix anything. But neither do platitudes.
Neither does silence.
When your own pain makes other people so uncomfortable they can’t even look at you, it’s unbearable. And I don’t want to do that to him.
He nods. He doesn’t say it’s okay .
It isn’t okay. Of course it’s not.
He’s grieving. That’s why he’s like a wall of bricks sometimes, and why he’s emotional and raw at others.
“When?” I ask, the word a whisper.
He says nothing again. Like he’s helpless to find words.
I’m devastated to see how sharp it is still.
He is better than he was three years ago. I’ve seen it.
I also know that grief goes in waves. That sometimes the tide rolls out and you can see all these beautiful things left behind. Sea glass and seashells on the seashore. That sometimes the waves come back in hard and leave you breathless, drowning.
That sometimes you’re blindsided by the realization of just how far away you are from the life you were supposed to have.
I understand that.
Finally, he speaks. “It’s been three years.”
“The summer I first started running the motel ...”
“It had been nearly four months.” I don’t know if he’ll remember any of this tomorrow. Or even in ten minutes. I want to give him something, because I intruded on his space, and he gave all this to me.
When his guard was down.
I feel bad about it now, because I didn’t imagine it was something like this. I didn’t think about him being a man lost in after . And I should have.
I know what it’s like to have been an entirely different person before . How did I miss it in him?
“You know I had ... I had a relationship that imploded. I needed to get away. But it wasn’t just him. It was ...” I swallow hard and I look at my cake.
“I lost a baby,” I say. “A girl. Just three weeks before my due date. We ... had a nursery. It was really beautiful. Pink.” I touch the pink fabric on my swimsuit cover-up. “I like pink.”
He still says nothing, but I don’t find it a hard or uncomfortable silence. He isn’t silent because he is afraid of my grief. In LA I was surrounded by that kind of silence. Like people were afraid if they spoke too loud, they would break me. Like there could be anything worse than losing your child.
Christopher cheating didn’t break me. It just pushed me out the door.
Half of why was that I found other people’s discomfort with my pain unbearable.
It’s one reason no one here knows this. One reason I’ve never spoken the words out loud.
I’ve never had to.
Chris told our friends while I was in the hospital.
He called my dad to let him know there was no grandbaby after all.
I had never even told my mother I was expecting.
Maybe it had gotten back to her through my dad, but I doubt it.
This is the first time I’ve ever told anyone.
“I don’t know how to get over it,” I say. “I left it behind instead.”
It’s silent in the room for a long moment. He shifts in his chair and picks up the cake. “Well. If you ever figure out how to get over it, let me know.”
That’s honest. I appreciate it.
“I’m starting to fear that getting over it is a myth,” I say.
“Yeah. That sounds about fucking right.”
“Yes, it does,” I say.
I pick up my cake too, and we sit there, painful truths pulsing between us as we eat the most delicious buttercream I’ve ever had in my life.
This is also about fucking right.
Death and cake and a beautiful man whose heart I can never have, and probably wouldn’t know what to do with anyway.
Even though it’s difficult for me to swallow every bite, I do. I’m not sure at this point if it’s my grief or his. His is a surprise. Mine is all too familiar, though I don’t often let it take such concrete shape.
I just think of before.
Before , I wasn’t even sure that I wanted children. Then I was pregnant, and we had decisions to make, and I had decided that I did want the baby.
So much.
Chris said he did too, but sometimes I think he wished he did.
For me.
At least, that was part of the rage I had internalized, and definitely part of the more hateful things I said to him. That he didn’t want to be a father anyway. That this was convenient for him, because what he actually wanted to do was pursue his career and go out every night, and if we had our daughter, he wouldn’t have been able to do that.
He would have left it all to me.
Maybe it was true. Mostly, I think it was me needing to make him hurt the way I did.
We finish eating our cake, and I stand up. Then I extend my hand. “I’ll take that.”
I take the clean plate from him.
He probably wants me to go, but I’m not sure I want to.
“Can I ask what ... triggered this?”
“You just asked,” he says, his words a little fuzzy.
“Sorry. I did. So ... why tonight? Or ... yesterday. Joshua Tree. That’s what triggered this, isn’t it?”
He nods. “Yeah.”
I don’t need to know everything tonight. I take his hand and lead him to the bed.
“Lie down,” I say.
He looks at me. Somehow that look cuts through everything—all the pain, the grief, the long-held secrets—like a knife, and I feel the stirring of desire.
I feel an electric need to move toward him. To take the difficult feelings and turn them into something else. It feels like it would be easy. To take hold of him and let go of the pain. To find ourselves connected, not sitting across from each other with all that distance between us. Not when we both know.
But he is very drunk, and he’s in pain.
He’s also looking at me with absolute, undisguised need. Normally I find him tough to decode, but the alcohol makes it so I can read him.
It makes it so he can’t disguise it quite so well.
I see the desire on his face, open and obvious.
He wants me. Even now. It kills him that he wants me. I’m not the problem. It’s his desire for me.
And how very broken he still is.
“Go to bed,” I say.
To my surprise, he obeys me. He strips his shirt off, revealing rangy, well-defined muscle and dark chest hair. I’m only human, and in spite of the uncomfortable pack of emotions running around inside me, I look at him.
I can’t help it.
I move away from the bed quickly. I hold on to the paper plates like they’re a shield. His eyes are already drifting closed. He really is that drunk, and I can’t get rid of the feeling that the information I got tonight was stolen.
“Stay,” he says, his eyes closed, the word barely audible.
My heart clenches. I can’t deny him. I can’t deny myself.
I lie down on top of the covers beside him, and I put my hand on his chest. I feel his heart beating.
And now I know it’s broken, like mine.