Chapter Thirteen #2
"You don't have to know tonight what this means for the two of you," she says. "You just have to get through the next hour, and then the hour after that. That's all anybody's asking of you right now, including yourself, whether you're willing to believe that or not."
Wyatt shows up at his usual time that evening, and I watch him clock something wrong the second he sees my face, watch him go very still in the doorway the way he did the morning of the window.
"What happened," he says, careful, already bracing.
"Denise called." I watch it land, watch the exact moment he understands what I'm about to say before I even say it, some old, guilty recognition moving across his face. "March. The visit home. You want to tell me about that, or should I just tell you what I already know?"
He doesn't try to deny it. Doesn't try to soften it.
Just stands there in the doorway, shoulders dropping slightly, the particular posture of a man absorbing a hit he's known was coming for a long time even if he didn't know exactly when, some old bracing instinct in him finally meeting the thing it's been bracing against.
"I should have told you."
"Yeah. You should have." My voice comes out low and even, worse, I think, than if I'd screamed.
"Eight months, Wyatt. Eight months of watching you be honest about everything else, watching you volunteer things before I even asked, and this whole time there was still a piece you were keeping for yourself.
Why? Was it because it made you look worse than 'once, drunk, a mistake'?
Because a man who came home undecided, who spent a whole weekend deciding whether his wife was worth staying for, that's a different kind of cruel than a man who just made a bad choice in a bar. "
"Yes." He says it plain, no hedging, meeting my eyes even though I can see what it costs him.
"That's exactly why. Because 'I chose her over you, twice, on purpose, with a clear head' is worse than anything I'd already told you, and I was scared, still, even after everything, that it would be the thing that finally made you give up on me for good.
So I let you believe the smaller version.
Same pattern I promised you I was done with. I know."
"Do you understand what that weekend actually was for me?
What I did with it, in my head, for eight months?
" My voice rises slightly, the first real heat I've let myself show since Denise's call.
"I used it as proof I wasn't crazy for still loving you.
Every time I doubted myself, every time some part of me wondered if the whole marriage had been a lie from the start, I thought about that Saturday morning and told myself, no, that was real, whatever else happened, that was real, and it was enough to keep going on.
And now I find out I was building my own recovery on a lie the same size as the original one. "
"I know." His voice cracks slightly. "I know exactly what I took from you, finding out that way. I don't have a version of this where I make that better tonight."
"I don't know if I can trust anything you've told me now. Any of it. If this was still sitting there, unspoken, what else is?"
"Nothing. I swear to you, nothing else. This was the last thing.
" His voice cracks slightly, raw in a way I haven't heard from him in this whole ordeal.
"I'm not asking you to believe that tonight.
I know I don't get to ask that. I'm just telling you the truth, one more time, because it's all I've got left to offer. "
I look at him a long moment, exhausted in a way that goes deeper than tired, deeper than anything Dax Cole or Colton Reyes or a rock through a window has managed to reach in three weeks of danger.
"I need space," I say, finally. "Not forever.
I don't know for how long. But I can't have you at my kitchen table again this week, can't have another almost-moment, not with this sitting between us unresolved.
I need to not look at you for a few days and figure out what's actually left of whatever I thought we were rebuilding. "
"Okay." He doesn't argue, doesn't try to talk me out of it, just nods, something raw and grieving moving behind his eyes. "Deuce and the day shift will keep covering the shop. I'll stay clear until you tell me otherwise."
"Thank you."
He turns to go, and something makes me call after him before he reaches the door, some old, exhausted part of me that can't quite let the moment end without saying the rest of it.
"I believed that weekend was real, Wyatt. That's what I can't get past right now. I don't know how to trust any good memory I have left, if that one wasn't what I thought it was."
He stops, doesn't turn around, shoulders tight.
"It was real for me too. That's the part I don't think I can make you believe right now, and maybe I don't deserve to try.
But loving you and still almost choosing to leave anyway, those two things were both true at once, and I hate that about myself more than I've hated anything else in this whole mess.
I don't expect that to fix it. I just needed you to know it wasn't nothing, even while it was also, somehow, not enough. "
He leaves, and I lock the door behind him, and I stand alone in my shop for a long time afterward, the lawyer's business card still sitting in my nightstand drawer eight months later, the divorce papers still unsigned, and for the first time since this whole ordeal started, I let myself wonder, seriously, whether unsigned is going to stay the answer much longer.
I climb the stairs to the apartment eventually, too exhausted to do much else, and I sit on the edge of my bed a long time, phone in my hand, not calling anyone, staring at a contact I haven't fully deleted in eight months despite every reason to.
I think about the compass rose, about coordinates hidden in linework I inked myself, about a marriage built on trust that's now been broken twice in the same specific, devastating way, a story told smaller than it actually was to spare me something that turned out to hurt worse for the delay.
I don't cry again. I've done enough of that for one night.
I just sit there in the quiet, feeling the particular exhaustion of a woman who thought she'd found solid ground only to have it shift again, and I let myself, finally, consider the possibility I've been avoiding for eight months: that maybe some wounds don't heal into something usable, no matter how much good work gets done around the edges of them.