14. Nina
— ? —
Nina
The pattern emerges slowly.
I start watching for it after the fight - the way Adrian’s doubt has been woven into the fabric of our marriage for longer than I realized.
Small moments I dismissed at the time. The way he’d go quiet when my phone rang at dinner, his fork pausing for half a second before continuing to his mouth.
The way I’d come home late from anywhere and find him at the window, already watching the driveway, already composing his face into casualness by the time I reached the door.
I used to think it was attentiveness. I used to think it was sweet.
How long has he been waiting for me to leave?
***
“It wasn’t just Cole,” he says.
We’re sitting on my porch watching the harbor, two cups of coffee cooling between us.
It’s been three days since the kitchen explosion, and this is the first real conversation we’ve managed.
He knocked this time. Stood on my porch with his hands empty - no groceries, no hammer, no offerings - and said, “Can I sit with you? Just sit. You can throw me out whenever you want.”
I should have said no.
I made coffee instead.
“What do you mean?”
“My doubt.” He stares at the water like it contains answers. “It didn’t start with Cole. It’s been there for years. I just... didn’t recognize it.”
The wind pushes his collar open at the throat, and I look at the exact spot where I used to press my mouth on cold mornings, and then I look at my coffee like it said something interesting.
Not now, I tell my pulse. He is confessing ten years of fear.
This is not the moment to remember what his skin tastes like.
My pulse takes this under advisement and does nothing about it.
“Tell me.”
He’s quiet a moment. His thumb traces the rim of his cup, around and around, a nervous habit I’ve watched for a decade without ever asking what he was nervous about.
Then:
“When you first started volunteering at the hospital - do you remember? After we stopped trying for a baby. You were there every afternoon, and I kept wondering who you were spending time with. Whether there was someone on the staff, some doctor or nurse who was giving you the support I couldn’t.”
“Adrian-”
“I never said anything. I was ashamed of thinking it. But it was there.” He turns to look at me. “And when you went to that conference in Boston and stayed an extra night because your friend was going through a divorce - I checked our credit card statement after. To see where you’d eaten dinner.”
The coffee goes bitter in my mouth. “You thought I was having an affair?”
“I thought I wasn’t enough.” His voice is raw. “I thought you’d eventually realize that you’d married someone who couldn’t give you the life you deserved, and you’d find someone who could.”
I don’t know what to say. Ten years. Ten years of him quietly auditing my movements, cataloging my absences, waiting for the betrayal he’d already decided was coming - and I never saw it. I was too busy performing happiness to notice my husband was performing trust.
“The Cole thing wasn’t the beginning,” he continues. “It was just the moment when all my fear finally found a target. Someone I could point to and say, ‘This is why she’s pulling away.’ It was easier to believe you were unfaithful than to believe I was the reason you seemed unhappy.”
“I was never unhappy with you.”
“I know that now.” He reaches for my hand. I let him take it, and his fingers are cold from the harbor wind, and my traitorous thumb moves across his knuckles before I can stop it. Old habit. Old comfort. I make it stop.
“But for years,” he says, “I’ve been carrying this story in my head about how our marriage would end. And when Cole showed up, looking at you the way I look at you, the story wrote itself.”
“Adrian.” I squeeze his hand, hard. “I have never - NEVER - wanted anyone else. The whole time we were going through the fertility stuff, when you thought I was pulling away, I was just... trying to survive. Trying not to drown. And I didn’t know how to tell you that without making you feel like you weren’t helping. ”
“So you carried it alone.”
“And you carried your fear alone.” I shake my head slowly. “We’re quite a pair, aren’t we? Two people who love each other too much to tell each other the truth.”
“Is that what we are?”
I look at him - this man I married, this man I love despite everything - and I see it now. The fear underneath. The loneliness. The years he spent waiting for the other shoe to drop, watching for signs of the abandonment he was sure was coming.
“How long have you been doubting me?” I ask quietly.
He doesn’t answer right away. When he does, his voice is barely audible.
“I don’t know. Maybe always.”
“Always?”
The word lands somewhere under my ribs and stays there. Always. Our wedding. Our honeymoon. Every anniversary, every ordinary Tuesday, every time he reached for me in the dark - there was a version of him standing behind his own eyes, taking inventory, waiting for me to go.
“I never understood why you chose me.” He pulls his hand away, scrubs it over his face.
“From the beginning. The night we met, at that stupid party in Boston - you were so alive. So bright. You were arguing with three men at once about a painting and winning, and every person in that room was orbiting you whether they knew it or not. And I was... Adrian Moretti. Rich, boring, exactly what everyone expected me to be. I kept waiting for you to see through it. To realize I was nothing special.”
“That’s not how I remember that night.”
“No?”
“No.” I pull my knees up, wrap my arms around them.
“I remember a man in the corner who was the only person in the room not performing. Everyone else was working that party like a job. You were just - there. Watching the whole circus with this look on your face like you’d rather be reading.
” A laugh escapes me, surprising us both.
“I picked the fight about the painting to see if you’d come over. ”
He goes still. “You what?”
“I didn’t even care about the painting, Adrian. It was a terrible painting. I was loud on purpose.” I shrug, and my cheeks are warm despite the wind. “You took forty-five minutes to take the bait. I’d almost given up on you.”
“You never told me that.”
“You never asked.”
The words land between us, gentle this time, but they land. He huffs out something that’s half laugh, half wound.
“Ten years,” he says. “I spent ten years believing I got lucky at that party. That you’d simply failed to notice you could do better.”
“You’re an idiot.”
“I know.”
“No.” I grab his hand back, force him to look at me. “I mean you’re an idiot because you spent ten years assuming you knew what I was thinking instead of asking me. You were so busy being afraid that you never noticed I was choosing you every single day.”
“I noticed. I just... didn’t believe it.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“No,” he agrees. “It’s not.”
We sit there in silence, watching the boats move across the harbor.
The baby flutters - the faint quickening I’ve only started feeling this week - and I put my free hand on my stomach, marveling at it.
His eyes follow the movement, and the hunger in them - not for me, for this, for the family we made and nearly lost - cracks something open in my chest.
“The baby’s active today,” I say.
“Opinions already?” His voice does the thing. The soft, wrecked thing.
“Constant ones. Mostly about my coffee intake. There have been formal complaints.”
He laughs, and it comes out damp, and he looks away at the water until his jaw stops working.
“I can’t promise I’ll forgive you,” I say finally. “I don’t know if I can trust you the same way again.”
“I understand.”
“But I want to try.” The words surprise me even as I say them. “If you can learn to ask instead of assume - if you can show me that you believe in us enough to face the hard conversations - then maybe we can find our way back to something.”
“Something?”
“Something new.” I meet his eyes. “The marriage we had is gone. The trust is broken. But maybe we can build something different. Something stronger. Something where we actually talk to each other.”
His face does something complicated - hope and grief and determination all at once.
“I’d like that,” he says quietly.
“Then prove it.” I squeeze his hand once more and let go. “Not with words. With time.”
“Okay.”
“And Adrian?”
“Yes?”
“If you ever pack a suitcase again, I’ll burn it.”
He almost smiles. “Understood.”
He leaves without asking for anything more. No hug attempted. No lingering at the door. Just a nod from the bottom of the steps, and the sound of his car, and the harbor going gold behind him.
I stand in the doorway watching his taillights disappear, and I realize my hand is pressed to my chest - directly over my heart, like I’m checking that it’s still there.
It is. And it’s beating faster than it should.