22. Rhodes #2
“You don’t know anything about my life,” Maren says finally. Her voice is careful, controlled. “You haven’t asked. You walked back in after three years and didn’t ask a single question about where I live, or what I’m doing, or who I’ve become.”
“I was trying to give you space.”
“Or you were afraid of the answers.”
She’s right. She’s always been right about me, even when I wished she weren’t.
“Both,” I admit. “I was doing both.”
I hear her stand up, hear the scrape of her chair against the floor. But she doesn’t come closer. She stays on her side of the room, keeping the distance I created.
“I have a life here, Rhodes. A real one. It’s not waiting to see what you’re going to do.”
“I know that.”
“Do you?”
“I’m trying to.”
When I finally turn around, she’s standing with her arms wrapped around herself, her expression unreadable. The afternoon light catches the escaped strands of her hair, turns them copper and gold.
“I should get back to the flooring samples,” she says.
“Maren-”
“The flooring samples.” Her voice is firm. “That’s why we’re here. That’s the only reason we’re here.”
The rest of the afternoon is professional.
We make decisions about the courtyard tiles, review Patricia’s notes on the courtyard fountain, discuss the timeline for the spring renovation and how it’ll impact Bellamy Blooms’ upcoming events. We’re two colleagues, nothing more.
I don’t ask any more questions about the someone waiting at home.
But I think about it. God, I think about it constantly, the shape of this mystery person, the space they occupy in her life.
Someone she comes home to. Someone she didn’t sleep well because of, maybe - someone who knows what she looks like first thing in the morning, which side of the bed she prefers, how she takes her coffee.
All the ordinary intimacies I threw away.
At four forty-five, Maren starts gathering her things.
“We can finish the fountain discussion tomorrow,” she says, not quite meeting my eyes. “Patricia said the contractor needs those specs by Wednesday.”
“That’s fine.”
“Okay then.” She shoulders her bag. “Goodnight, Rhodes.”
“Goodnight.”
She’s almost to the door when I speak again, the words pulled out of me against my will.
“Maren.”
She stops, turns halfway.
“I hope-” I swallow, forcing the sentence out. “I hope whoever’s waiting for you deserves you.”
Something complicated moves through her expression. Pain, maybe, or guilt. I can’t tell.
“Goodnight, Rhodes,” she says again, softer this time.
And then she’s gone.
I stay at the venue until the light fades.
I sit in one of the folding chairs, surrounded by fabric samples and tile options and all the practical detritus of a renovation that suddenly feels meaningless.
The work was supposed to bring me here. The work was supposed to be the reason I’m in Boston at all, acquiring Livingston House, restoring another historic property, adding another achievement for the company.
But I’m not thinking about work.
I’m thinking about Maren walking through a door somewhere across this city. Dropping her bag, kicking off her shoes. Being greeted by someone who gets to see her tired and soft at the end of a long day.
It lands harder than I have any right to feel.
But if there’s a man across this city who gets her tired and soft at the end of the day, who remembers how she takes her coffee and actually comes home when he says he will, then he’s giving her the one thing I never managed.
I can hate him for it and still be glad it exists. Both can be true. She’s the one who taught me that.
She moved on. Three years is a long time, and she was always easy to love. I’m not going to resent her for being found.
So I do the only useful thing left in the room. I straighten the samples she’ll need in the morning and lock up behind me.
Whatever I’m still carrying, it’s mine to carry now. It stopped being her job to hold it the night I let her walk out the door.
The next morning, I arrive at Livingston House early. Six-thirty. The sun is barely up, and the venue is cold and silent.
I make coffee in the construction trailer, drink it alone, watch the sky lighten through the windows. I’m trying to figure out how to be normal today. How to work beside her without letting the jealousy leak through.
She deserves better than that. She deserves a colleague who can maintain professional boundaries, not an ex-husband who spent last night staring at his hotel ceiling, wondering what time she goes to bed and whether someone else is in it with her.
I’m on my third cup of coffee when she walks in at eight.
She looks better today. More rested. Her hair is neater, her movements more energized. She’s wearing a soft green blouse that brings out her eyes, and I hate how badly I want to tell her she looks nice.
“You’re here early,” she says, setting down her bag.
“Couldn’t sleep.”
She pauses, something flickering in her expression. “That makes two of us. Last night, I mean.”
“You said you were fine yesterday.”
“I was fine. I was also exhausted.” She shrugs. “Both things can be true.”
I nod, staring into my coffee cup. The silence stretches between us, thick with everything we’re not saying.
“Rhodes.”
“Yeah?”
“About yesterday.” She hesitates. “When I said someone was waiting for me-”
“You don’t have to explain.”
“I know I don’t have to.”
“Then don’t.” I set the coffee cup down, harder than I meant to. “You’re right that it’s none of my business. I had no right to ask, and I won’t ask again.”
She’s watching me with that look again, the one that says she sees right through me, always has.
“You’re being weird,” she says.
“I’m being professional.”
“You’re being weird about being professional. There’s a difference.”
I don’t know how to respond to that. I busy myself with straightening the tile samples, which don’t need straightening, which are already perfectly organized because I did that twice last night while trying not to lose my mind.
“The fountain specs,” I say. “Patricia needs them by Wednesday.”
“I know.”
“We should focus on that today.”
“We should.”
“Okay then.”
Maren doesn’t move. She stands there, arms crossed, watching me not meet her eyes.
“You know what I think?” she says finally.
“What?”
“I think that for years, I watched you prioritize everyone else. Your mother, your work, Rachel when she was constantly at your side telling me exactly how much more important she was to your life. And I had to swallow it. Every day, I had to swallow the feeling of being replaceable, of being secondary, of being the wife who was supposed to be grateful just to be there.”
My hands still on the tiles.
“And I think,” she continues, her voice steady, “that maybe it’s okay if you spend a few days wondering what it feels like. To imagine someone else getting the ordinary life you assumed would always be waiting.”
I turn around slowly.
She’s not smiling, not angry. She’s just - honest. Painfully, brutally honest.
“You’re right,” I say. The words come out raw. “It does feel that way. And I deserve it.”
Her expression shifts, surprise, maybe, at the admission.
“I’m not trying to punish you,” she says, quieter.
“I know. But I deserve it anyway.”
We stand there, three feet apart, the morning light stretching between us. I want to tell her that imagining her with someone else is tearing me apart. That I haven’t stopped loving her for a single day in three years. That moving forward and moving on turned out to be different things.
But I don’t.
Because she has someone waiting for her at home.
And I have no right, no right at all, to ask her to choose.
“The fountain specs,” I say again.
Maren watches me for another long moment.
Then she nods.
“The fountain specs.”