27. Maren #3
I nod. Walk him to the door. Watch him put on his coat with movements that are too controlled, too careful.
He pauses with his hand on the knob.
“Maren.”
“Yeah?”
“I couldn’t do this for you.” His voice is low, rough.
“Four years ago. I couldn’t be what you needed.
I know that, know I failed us in ways I’m still understanding.
” He turns to look at me, and his eyes are dark with something I can’t read.
“But I’m not the same person I was. And I need you to let me prove that, even if you can’t believe it yet. ”
He leaves.
I stand in my doorway and listen to his footsteps on the stairs, and I think about all the times I wished he’d choose me the way he’s choosing Rowan.
Why couldn’t you do this for me?
The question sits in my chest, heavy and barbed, and I don’t have an answer.
I don’t think he does either.
But watching him walk away tonight, not storming off, not cold and dismissive, but leaving because I asked him to and trusting that tomorrow I’ll let him come back, feels different from every other time.
It feels like the beginning of something.
I just don’t know if that terrifies me or gives me hope.
My phone buzzes.
Rhodes: What time does preschool start?
I stare at the message.
Eight thirty.
I’ll bring breakfast. For all of us.
I close my eyes.
Okay.
And somewhere in the darkness of my apartment, with my son asleep down the hall and my ex-husband learning to fight for something he never fought for before, I let myself wonder, just for a second, what happens if he actually means it.
The wondering feels dangerous.
I do it anyway.
He asks me out for real on a Thursday.
Not can I come by after Rowan’s down. Not I’ll bring dinner. He calls at noon, while I’m wrist-deep in a funeral spray, and says, “Camila offered to take Rowan on Saturday. Come to dinner with me. A real one, with cloth napkins and no chicken shaped like a rocket.”
“Rhodes.”
“You can say no. I’ll only ask again next week.
” There’s a smile in his voice, easy and certain, nothing like the careful tone he’s been using for weeks.
It’s the voice that once talked a bank into betting on a wrecked building and a kid with no collateral but nerve.
I’d forgotten he had it. “So you might as well get your first no out of the way.”
“That’s very sure of yourself.”
“I’m out of practice. Be patient with me.”
I should say no. It’s the safe answer, the one the woman I’ve spent three years becoming would give without blinking.
“Nothing fancy,” I hear myself say instead.
“Define fancy.”
“If it has a zipper in the back, it’s fancy.”
“Understood. No back-zippers.”
Camila arrives Saturday at six with a bag of rockets and an expression I refuse to acknowledge.
“You look nice,” she says, far too innocent.
“It’s dinner.”
“It’s dinner,” she agrees, and mouths oh my God at Sofia over the phone the second she thinks I’m not looking.
Rowan doesn’t care that his mother is going out. He cares that Camila brought the rocket that roars, and he’s gone, a rocket in each fist, before the buzzer even rings.
Rhodes is on my step in a dark sweater and no tie, and the first thing I notice, the thing that undoes me a little before we’ve said a word, is that his phone is nowhere in sight. No glow in his hand. No glance at a screen. Just him, looking at me like I’m the only thing on his calendar.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi.”
“You wore something with a zipper in the back.”
“I didn’t.”
“I’m going to spend all night wondering.”
“That sounds like a you problem.”
He grins, and it lands somewhere I’ve spent three years reinforcing.
The restaurant is small and warm, tucked down a side street I’ve walked past a hundred times without noticing.
He picked it, I can tell, because it’s the opposite of the places he used to book, the ones with valets and photographers where someone was always waiting to shake his hand.
Nobody here knows who he is. Nobody interrupts.
It’s a corner table lit by a single candle, and my ex-husband giving me the kind of undivided attention he used to save for a deal.
It should feel like a performance. It doesn’t. That’s the problem.
He asks about the shop. Not to fill the silence, but the way you ask when you actually want the answer.
He wants to hear about the Livingston contract and the wholesaler who keeps shorting me on ranunculus.
He remembers the name of the impossible bride I complained about last week, the one demanding peonies a full season out.
“You listen now,” I say, before I can stop myself.
He goes quiet for a second. “I always heard you. I just didn’t listen. Turns out there’s a difference. I learned it the expensive way.”
He’s funny, too. I’d forgotten how funny, because the last few years of our marriage sanded it down to nothing.
He tells me about teaching himself to braid the antennae of Rowan’s stuffed alien off a video, about calling his own assistant to ask, in complete seriousness, whether a three-year-old is legally allowed that much ketchup.
I laugh so hard the couple at the next table turns to look, and I don’t care, and that frightens me more than anything has in months.
Because I know this part. I know exactly how it goes. He charms and he charms and I let myself believe, and then a phone rings.
His phone doesn’t ring. Or if it does, I never find out, because he never once takes it out of his pocket.
He walks me home. Neither of us suggests it. We just start off in the direction of my apartment, close enough that the backs of our hands brush every few steps, and neither of us fixes it.
“I had a good time,” I admit at my door. It costs me more than it should.
“I know.” Not smug, just sure. “So did I.”
He doesn’t lean in. Doesn’t push. He stands on my step with his hands in his pockets and lets me be the one to decide, and it would be so easy. It would be the easiest thing in the world to close the last few inches and find out whether he still kisses the way I remember.
I make myself not.
“Goodnight, Rhodes.”
“Goodnight, Maren.” He waits until I’m inside, until the lock turns, before I hear him go down the stairs. Unhurried. Like a man who has all the time in the world and intends to spend it on me.
I lean my back against the door and press a hand flat to my chest, where my heart is thudding like it hasn’t in years.
Three years of walls. He didn’t knock a single one down tonight.
He just made me want to do it myself.