28. Maren #2
“Maren.” His voice is wrecked. His hands come up to my face, careful, and his forehead drops to mine, and we breathe each other in.
“Tell me to stop,” he says. “I need you to say it, because I’m not strong enough to be the one who does.”
And that saves me. He hands it to me. After all the years of deciding everything for both of us, he’s standing in my dark kitchen letting me hold the knife.
“Stop,” I whisper.
He stops.
As if the night’s in on it, the power stutters back. The overhead light floods the kitchen, and we both stand there blinking, too visible in it.
Rhodes lets go at once. His hand drops. He steps back until the kitchen island is between us, and whatever’s on his face he schools into careful neutrality.
“Sorry,” he says.
“Don’t apologize.”
“Okay.”
“I mean it.” I set the colander down too hard. It clatters against the counter. “Don’t apologize, because then I have to accept it, and I don’t know what I’m accepting.”
He watches me. Waiting. The patience is worse than if he’d pushed back.
“This is exactly what I was afraid of,” I say, and my voice comes out angry even though I’m not sure who I’m angry at. “You come back. You’re good with Rowan. You start feeling familiar again. And suddenly I’m-”
“Suddenly you’re what?”
“I’m forgetting.” The words rip out of me.
“I’m forgetting how miserable I was. At the end.
I’m forgetting sitting alone in that house in San Francisco waiting for you to come home, and you never did, and when you finally showed up you were so tired you couldn’t even look at me.
I’m forgetting what it felt like to be invisible in my own marriage. ”
Rhodes doesn’t flinch. He takes it.
“I haven’t forgotten,” he says quietly.
That makes it worse.
“Then you know why this can’t happen.” I gesture between us. “Whatever this is. It can’t. I’m not going to be the woman who keeps falling for the same mistake because the mistake has a nice smile and reads bedtime stories.”
“Is that what I am? A mistake?”
“Our marriage was.”
He absorbs that too. I want him to argue. I want him to get defensive, give me something to push against. But he just stands there, calm and infuriatingly patient, like he’s willing to take every hit I want to land.
“Okay,” he says.
“Okay? That’s it?”
“What am I supposed to say, Maren? That you’re wrong? You’re not wrong. Our marriage failed. I did. You left because staying would have destroyed you, and I was too caught up in my own bullshit to even notice you were drowning.”
I stare at him. My chest hurts.
“But I’m not going to apologize for being here now,” he continues. “For trying. You can be as angry as you need to be. I get it. But I’m not going anywhere.”
“And what happens when Boston isn’t new anymore?
” The question bursts out of me, all the fear I’ve been swallowing for weeks.
“When the Livingston House project is over, and the excitement fades, and you’re back to ninety-hour weeks and endless work and whatever the hell else mattered more than me?
What happens to Rowan then? What happens when you get bored with playing house? ”
“I’m not playing house.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know who you’ll be in six months.”
“Neither do you.”
That stops me. I open my mouth, then close it.
Rhodes presses his knuckles to his mouth, and for a moment, just a moment, the careful control cracks. “I’m not going to promise I’ll never disappoint you again.”
“Comforting.”
“I’ll work too late again, miss something, probably piss you off next week.”
“Rhodes-”
“But I’m not asking you to wait quietly while I do it anymore.” He meets my eyes, and there’s something there, not hope, exactly. Something rawer. “That’s the part I got wrong before. I thought if you just waited, I’d eventually get it right. I didn’t understand that waiting was destroying you.”
I feel the tears before I realize I’m crying. I swipe at them angrily, hating him for doing this, hating myself more for needing to hear it.
“I should go,” he says softly.
“Yeah. You should.”
He collects his jacket. His laptop bag. He pauses at the door, and I think he’s going to say something else, something that’ll make this worse or better, I don’t know which, but he just nods.
“I’ll see you tomorrow. For breakfast, if that’s still okay.”
“Fine.”
The door clicks shut behind him.
I stand in my kitchen, surrounded by half-dried dishes and crayon drawings and all the evidence of a life I built alone. My hands are shaking. My throat is tight.
Because there’s something I can’t say to him. Something I can barely admit even to myself.
I’m not afraid that Rhodes hasn’t changed.
I’m afraid that maybe he has, and I still can’t trust it.
My phone buzzes on the counter.
Nora: How’s Boston daddy doing?
I stare at the message. My sister, three thousand miles away, checking in like she does every night. Waiting to hear that Rhodes screwed up. Waiting to be proven right.
I start to type: Same as always.
Then delete it.
I type: I almost kissed him tonight.
I delete that too.
Finally, I type: Fine. Going to bed.
I put the phone face-down and finish the dishes alone.
When I finally crawl into bed, I can still feel the ghost of his hand at my waist. Still smell cedar and soap on my shirt where I leaned too close.
I stare at the ceiling for a long time.
Tomorrow he’ll come back. He’ll make breakfast and read to Rowan and be exactly the kind of father, the kind of man, I always wanted him to be.
That’s the part that scares me.
Not that he hasn’t changed.
That maybe he has.
I don’t sleep.