19. Maren
— ? —
Maren
I watch his name light up my screen and I don’t answer.
I’m standing at the sink, hands wet, a coffee mug in my grip that I’ve been washing for the past three minutes.
The water runs warm over my fingers. Outside, the streetlights are flickering on, and Nora’s apartment smells like the Chinese takeout she picked up on her way home.
Normal things. Ordinary things. I’m trying to exist inside them like a person who hasn’t spent the last week drowning.
“You gonna listen to that?”
Nora’s behind me. I didn’t hear her come in, but I can feel her presence now, careful, watchful. She’s been handling me like I’m made of glass, and I hate it, except I’m also grateful because I might actually be made of glass right now.
“No.”
“Okay.”
She doesn’t push. Nora knows when to ask questions and when to just stand there, being a person who loves me. She crosses to the fridge, pulls out two beers, and sets one on the counter next to my elbow.
“You’re growing a human, so this one’s mine.” She cracks hers open. “But I figured you’d want the company.”
I finally set the mug down. Turn off the water. Dry my hands on a towel that’s seen better days.
“I’m blocking his number.”
Nora takes a long pull from her beer. Considers. “You sure?”
“No,” I admit. “But I’m doing it anyway.”
“Okay.”
That’s it. No argument. No gentle suggestion that maybe I should hear him out, that marriages are complicated, that I might regret cutting him off completely. Just okay, and another sip of beer, and my sister’s solid presence in the kitchen while I pick up my phone and navigate to settings.
I find his contact. Rhodes. No last name, no emoji, no photo. Just Rhodes, the way I’ve had him saved since before we were married, when he was just the guy who showed up at my shop three days in a row to buy flowers he didn’t need.
Block this caller?
Yes.
The phone asks if I’m sure.
I’m sure.
I hit confirm and something in my chest releases, like a held breath finally exhaling. He’s gone. Not gone-gone, still out there, still legally my husband, still the father of the thing growing inside me, but gone from my phone, my inbox, my constant waiting for the next call.
“I’m going to tell Nina and the staff not to let him into the back workroom.” I say it out loud, testing the words. “If he shows up at the shop, they can handle him at the front counter like any other customer.”
Nora nods slowly. “And if he wants to talk to you about… legal stuff? The separation?”
“He can leave a message like everyone else.”
“You’re really not going to talk to him?”
“I don’t have anything left to say to him. Not now. Maybe not ever.”
Nora’s quiet for a moment. Then she sets her beer down and pulls me into a hug, the kind that’s too tight and smells like her shampoo and feels like being fifteen again, crying over something I can’t remember now.
“I’m proud of you,” she says into my hair.
I don’t know what I did to earn it, but I hold onto her anyway.
The next three days, I learn what it means to exist without a direct line to my husband.
The first day, he calls from a number I don’t recognize. I get as far as Bellamy Blooms before I hear him say my name, and I hang up and add the number to the list. Nina glances over from the register, worried. I shake my head. Not here.
The next day the emails start. One at seven in the morning, another at noon, a third at four, subject lines like Please read that I drag to trash without opening.
Nora finds me staring at my laptop that night, finger hovering over the filter settings.
“Having second thoughts?”
“No.” But I don’t move my hand.
“You could read them. Just to know what he’s saying.”
“I know what he’s saying.” I close the laptop. “He’s saying he’s sorry, that he can explain, whatever he thinks will make me come back.”
“And you don’t want that?”
I look at her. My sister, who’s been sleeping on an air mattress in her own living room so I can have the bed.
Who’s been fielding calls from worried friends and deflecting questions from our mother and running the shop floor while I hide in the back, unable to face customers who’ve read the gossip columns.
“I don’t want to keep doing this.” My voice comes out flat. Tired. “Every conversation is another argument. Another explanation. Another reason I end up crying while he asks for one more chance. I can’t keep being the wife who waits for her husband to fix things. I need to be something else.”
On the third day, he shows up at the shop.
I’m in the workroom, wiring a funeral arrangement, white lilies, white roses, all that sterile grief, when Nina appears in the doorway looking like she’s swallowed a live fish.
“Um. There’s someone here to see you.”
I don’t need to ask who.
“Tell him I’m not available.”
“He says he’ll wait.”
Of course he will. Rhodes has never met a problem he couldn’t outwait. It’s what makes him good at what he does and a terrible person to be married to, that absolute certainty that if he just stays long enough, pushes hard enough, the outcome will bend to his will.
“Then he can wait at the front counter until we close.”
Nina hesitates. “He’s asking to come back here.”
“No.”
“He says it’s important.”
“Nina.” I set down the wire cutters. Look at her. “He doesn’t get to come back here. He doesn’t get to decide what’s important for my schedule. If he wants to buy flowers, he can buy flowers. If he wants to talk to me, it can wait until I’m ready. Those are his options.”
She nods, relieved to have clear instructions, and disappears back toward the front. I hear muffled voices, Nina’s high and nervous, Rhodes’s low and controlled, and then silence.
He doesn’t leave.
I know because I can feel him out there, the way I’ve always been able to feel him.
Like a storm system on the horizon, all that pressure and potential energy.
For years I found it comforting. The knowledge that Rhodes was nearby, that his particular gravity was holding me in orbit. Now it just feels suffocating.
I finish the funeral arrangement. Start on a wedding centerpiece, blush and ivory, romantic and hopeful, for a couple who probably thinks they’ll be different from all the other couples.
Maybe they will. Maybe they’ll pay attention to each other, carve out time, remember that the person you married is more important than the person you’re building something with.
Or maybe they’ll end up like us.
At 6:30, I’m packing up to leave when I see him through the workroom window.
He’s standing outside the back door. Not knocking, not demanding entry. Just standing there, shoulders hunched against the November cold, breath fogging in the streetlight glow. He looks, tired. Diminished, somehow. Like the week has taken pieces of him I didn’t know he had left to lose.
I should walk out the front.
Instead, I move toward the glass.
He sees me. Hope flickers in his expression, or the ghost of it. He steps closer, close enough that I can see the shadows under his eyes, the tension in his jaw.
“Please open the door.”
I don’t move. I’m holding my bag, my coat over my arm, and I’m not moving.
“Maren.”
His voice is muffled through the glass. Distant. Like he’s already somewhere I can’t reach.
“Go home, Rhodes.”
He shakes his head. “Not without talking to you.”
“Then I guess you’ll be standing there all night.”
“I don’t care. I’ll stand here until you let me explain.”
Explain. Like there’s some combination of words that’ll undo the past three years. Like if he just explains clearly enough, patiently enough, I’ll suddenly understand why I spent so many nights alone in a house that was supposed to be ours.
“Rachel lied.” He says it through the glass, breath fogging, desperate. “She never, we never slept together. She saw the freckle months ago when I changed my shirt after spilling coffee. That’s it. She weaponized it because she wanted you gone.”
I stare at him.
Part of me, some small, tired part that still remembers the man who showed up at my shop eleven years ago, wants to believe him. Wants the affair to be a lie, wants his body to still be mine, wants this one small thing to be salvageable.
But another part of me is so exhausted that I don’t even care.
“I heard you.” My voice comes out flat. “Rachel lied. You didn’t sleep with her.”
“Yes.” Hope flares in his eyes. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
“Okay.”
He waits. I don’t say anything else.
“Okay?” He frowns. “That’s, Maren, this changes things. She lied about the affair. I never cheated on you.”
“I know.”
“Then why are you-”
“Because I don’t care anymore, Rhodes.”
The words fall out of me like stones into deep water. I watch them hit him, watch them sink in. His face does something complicated, confusion, then pain, then a kind of terrible understanding.
“You don’t care if I cheated?”
“I don’t care if another woman, whether it was Rachel or someone else, is the reason our marriage ended.
” I’m so tired. I’m so goddamn tired. “I cared for three years while you made me feel crazy. I cared while you defended her at a gala full of people who were all whispering about us, while I sat alone in our house wondering if I was enough.”
“You were always-”
“Don’t.” I hold up my hand. “Don’t tell me what I always was. Tell me what you did about it.”
He’s silent. The cold seeps through the glass between us.
“I’m done letting another woman and your company consume every conversation about our marriage.” I pull my coat on, slow and deliberate. “I’m done explaining why it hurt to be ignored, done asking you to choose me when you’ve already made it clear, a thousand times, that you won’t.”
“I’d choose you.” His voice breaks. “I’m choosing you. Right now.”
“No, Rhodes. You’re choosing not to lose me. That’s different.”
I reach for the light switch.
“Please.” He presses his hand against the glass, palm flat, like he could reach through it if he tried hard enough. “Five minutes. Just five minutes.”
“I gave you eleven years.”
The lights go off.