20. Geo
— ? —
Geo
Val’s dress rehearsal for the spring showcase is at Westbrook Academy, and I arrive forty-five minutes early because parking is a nightmare and because Val made me promise three times that I wouldn’t be late.
Harrison is already there.
He’s standing in the wings of the small auditorium stage, trapped between a rack of tutus and what appears to be a malfunctioning fog machine. Around him, children cycle through their positions while Miss Renata shouts corrections in a voice that could carry across a battlefield.
“Geo.”
He spots me and waves me over, relief flooding his face. “Thank God. I’ve been stuck here since the fog machine started. If I try to leave, I’m taking the whole rack down with me.”
He gestures at the tutus. The tutus don’t look stable.
“How did you even get back here?”
“Val wanted me to see her entrance from backstage. I didn’t realize there was no exit strategy.”
I squeeze past the fog machine and join him in the narrow space between the tutu rack and the wall.
We’re pressed close together, there’s no other option, and I can feel the warmth of him through his jacket, can smell his cologne, can hear his breathing in the relative quiet of our little corner while chaos swirls around us.
This close, there’s nowhere polite to look.
Up, and I get his jaw, the stubble along it, the small muscle that jumps when he clenches it.
Straight ahead, and I get his throat, the collar of his shirt open one button too many, the notch of his collarbone where I used to press my mouth in another life.
His forearm is planted against the wall above my shoulder, holding the tutu rack at bay, and I have apparently developed an entire personality around this man’s forearms in the span of ten seconds.
My mouth goes dry. My pulse goes stupid and obvious in my throat. I press my thighs together in the six inches of space I have and pray to God he can’t tell.
This is a children’s ballet rehearsal. There’s a bumblebee crying behind you. Get it together.
I don’t get it together.
“We’re going to be here for a while,” I say. “The full run-through takes ninety minutes.”
“I figured.”
He shifts slightly, and his shoulder brushes mine. “At least the view is good.”
“You’re not watching the stage,” I say.
“Neither are you.” He says it easy, but his eyes drop to my mouth and come back up, and he has the grace to look wrecked about it. “This is the best I’ve been trapped anywhere in a long time, and I’m being an absolute gentleman about it, which I’d like noticed.”
“Are you?”
“Barely. It’s costing me.” My stomach drops at barely, the good kind.
On stage, a small child in a bumblebee costume has started crying because her antennae won’t stay on. Miss Renata is trying to soothe her while simultaneously cueing the next group. It’s absolute pandemonium.
“Val told me your bird flew to the moon,” I say.
Harrison goes very still, the way a man does when he’s been handed a gift and suspects a trap.
“She said three times,” I add. “Three trips to the moon and back. She reported it to me like a war correspondent.”
“She was listening.”
“She made a laminated card about it. She’s been holding that card in front of strangers for a month.” I keep my eyes on the stage. “So did they? Actually?”
“Over a lifetime, yeah.”
He blushes. “There’s a follow-up. If you want it.”
“I didn’t ask for a follow-up.”
“I know. I’m mentioning that one exists.”
The fog machine coughs.
“Fine,” I say. “Give me the follow-up.”
“They go back to the same spot. Not the same beach, the same spot. Even when the coastline’s moved and the whole place looks like somewhere else.
” He’s not performing it. He’s just telling me, quietly, in a corner, with a tutu rack digging into his shoulder blade. “They still land where they landed.”
“And nobody knows how.”
“Not one person on this planet.”
I don’t say anything for a second. Neither does he, which is new, because the old Harrison would have filled it.
This is the man I married. The one underneath the poster and underneath the man who forgot a recital, who gets stupid about a fact and can’t hide it and never could.
I lost track of him somewhere between the tours and the label parties and the full-time performance of being Harrison Hubbard’s wife, and I had assumed he was gone, and it turns out he was just in a corner behind a tutu rack the whole time, waiting to be asked one question.
I hate how much I want to ask him another one.
We stay in the corner for the rest of the run-through, and he doesn’t go back to the birds, and I keep waiting for him to.
He asks what Val’s been eating, since she has apparently declared war on anything green.
He tells me Miss Renata called him Mr. Hubbard in a tone that suggested a parking violation.
He does an impression of the fog machine.
I find myself leaning toward him. Responding before I decide to respond. Laughing at a joke about a fog machine that isn’t even that funny.
And then I catch myself.
I catch myself enjoying this.
The realization is sharp and unwelcome. I’m standing in the wings of my daughter’s school, pressed against my husband in a space too small for two people, and I’m having a good time.
What he’s saying is interesting to me. I’m noticing the way his eyes light up when he hits a fact he finds particularly amazing, and remembering why I fell in love with him.
I hate it.
Two mothers across the stage are watching us. One of them has her phone out, angled in our direction. The other is whispering something behind her hand.
I should step away. Create distance. Remember that this man hurt me, that public reconciliation is exactly what the narrative demands, that I’m giving them content just by standing here.
I don’t step away.
Harrison reaches into his jacket pocket and pulls out a small parcel, badly wrapped in tissue paper.
“I brought you something. I was going to wait for a better moment.”
He glances at the mothers watching us. “Seems appropriate, actually. Witnesses.”
“Harrison, don’t.”
“Just open it.”
I unwrap the tissue paper. Inside is a small jar of honey, the label handwritten: Lavender Honey - Wilson Family Farm.
“You remembered,” I say quietly.
“The farmers market. Three years ago. You bought six jars and rationed them like they were gold.”
He’s watching my face carefully. “They only sell at the market twice a year. I’ve been checking the schedule.”
My throat is tight. This is the smallest gesture. A jar of honey. A thing I mentioned once, years ago, that he apparently filed away and kept track of through everything that happened between us.
It’s the first gift he’s given me that isn’t penance. That isn’t an apology in material form.
It’s just… him, remembering who I am.
“Thank you,” I say.
He nods. Doesn’t push. Doesn’t ask for anything in return.
Miss Renata’s voice cuts through the chaos: “Mrs. Hubbard? Mr. Hubbard? Val’s group is up next if you’d like to find seats in the house.”
We extract ourselves from the wings, navigating carefully around the tutus and the fog machine and the small child in the bumblebee costume who has stopped crying and is now aggressively eating a granola bar. In the auditorium proper, we find seats near the front.
The mothers who were watching us are still watching. Miss Renata pauses by our row.
“It’s so nice to see you both here together,” she says, her voice carrying just enough to reach the other parents. “Are you two back together?”
Harrison looks at me. I look at the stage.
I don’t answer.
But I don’t deny it, either.
The wedding invitation arrives three days later.
One of Harrison’s old bandmates, Derek, the drummer from his first tour, is getting married at a vineyard in Sonoma. The invitation is addressed to both of us, Mr. and Mrs. Hubbard, as if the past year never happened. As if we’re still the couple we used to be.
“You don’t have to come,” Harrison says when he shows me. “I can go alone. Make excuses.”
“Derek invited both of us.”
“Derek doesn’t know the full story. He just knows we had some rough patches.”
“Rough patches.”
It comes out of me flatter than I meant it to. “Is that what we’re calling it?”
He doesn’t answer. Just holds out the invitation, leaving the decision to me.
I think about it. The vineyard. The wedding. A room of industry people who followed the whole collapse online and have opinions about it. The risk of being photographed. The risk of being a headline again.
But also: music. Dancing. Harrison in a suit, the way he used to find me across crowded rooms back when we were first together, like everyone else had gone slightly out of focus.
“I’ll need a dress,” I say.
His face transforms. Hope, relief, joy he doesn’t try to hide.
“I can get it for you.”
“I’ll buy my own dress.”
“Right. Of course. I just meant-”
“I know what you meant.”
I take the invitation from his hands. “We’re going as… what? Co-parents attending a social function?”
“Whatever you want to call it.”
“I don’t know what to call it.”
I look at the invitation, the elegant calligraphy, the vineyard name, the date circled in gold. “I don’t know what any of this is anymore.”
“That’s okay,” he says. “Neither do I.”
The vineyard is beautiful in the late afternoon light, all rolling hills and grapevines and the kind of rustic elegance that probably cost more than our first apartment.
We’re seated at a table near the back with people I half-recognize from the old days, session musicians, a sound engineer Harrison worked with on his second album, a woman who might have been Derek’s manager or his sister or both.
Harrison is in a dark suit that fits him perfectly, and I’m trying very hard not to notice.
The ceremony is short and sweet, Derek actually cries during his vows, which is surprising given that he once told me emotions were “for people who couldn’t hold their liquor,” and then we’re all released into the reception, where an open bar and a band are doing their best to guarantee poor decisions.
“Harrison Hubbard.”