33. Maren
— ? —
Maren
Six months later, I still haven’t gotten used to finding Rhodes’s running shoes next to mine by the door.
It’s such a small thing, two pairs of sneakers tangled together on the shoe rack, evidence of a life being built in fragments.
His favorite coffee mug in my cabinet. A razor in my bathroom that isn’t mine.
The navy sweater draped over my reading chair because he keeps forgetting to take it to his apartment across the river.
We don’t live together. That was the deal.
Separate homes, sharing Rowan, slow and careful rebuilding.
But the boundaries have gotten porous in the best possible way, his things migrating into my space, my things appearing in his sleek Boston Harbor apartment where a rocket cup now sits next to expensive whiskey glasses.
This morning, Rowan is at the kitchen table eating rocket crackers, the purple box, obviously, while I pack for our weekend.
Rhodes is flying in tonight. He’s been in California for two weeks handling some infrastructure issue at one of the older properties, and Rowan has been asking every single day if it’s “Daddy’s day” yet.
“Mommy, can I bring Mr. Zorp to Daddy’s house?”
“You can bring Mr. Zorp anywhere you want, baby.”
“And my space book?”
“Yes.”
“And my digger truck?”
“If it fits in your bag.”
He considers this deeply, his face scrunched in concentration.
He turned four in June, and he’s gotten so big since.
More words, more questions, more personality emerging every day.
And Rhodes has been here for all of it, every space-fueled monologue, every bedtime battle over scratchy socks, every milestone I used to witness alone.
They have their own routines now. Rhodes cuts his apples into perfect cubes because Rowan declared anything else “wrong squares.” They watch nature documentaries together on Saturday mornings while I sleep in.
Rhodes has learned to do the voices for all of Rowan’s bedtime books, even the terrible rhyming ones about construction vehicles.
It’s not perfect. Nothing is. But it’s real.
My phone rings just as I’m zipping Rowan’s overnight bag, and Rhodes’s name flashes on the screen. I smile without meaning to.
“Hey. You at the airport?”
There’s a pause that tells me everything before he says a word.
“Mare.” His voice is tight. Careful. “I’ve got a problem.”
I set down the bag slowly. “What kind of problem?”
“The Santa Rosa building, the one we’ve been renovating for the boutique hotel conversion. The crew found damage that wasn’t in any of the original surveys. We’re talking potential collapse risk to the adjacent properties.”
“Jesus.”
“I’ve got emergency contractors coming in an hour. City inspectors. Legal. If I’m not here to manage this-” He stops. Takes a breath. “I’m not going to make the evening flight. But I’ll be on the first one tomorrow morning. I swear.”
This is the moment. The one I’ve been bracing for without admitting I was bracing for it. The moment where the work becomes more important than the promise.
Except it’s not that simple, is it? Buildings collapsing into neighboring properties isn’t a power move. It’s an emergency.
“Okay,” I say, and I’m surprised by how steady my voice sounds. “Morning flight. That’s, okay.”
“Are you sure? Because I can try to-”
“Rhodes. If there’s actually a building that might collapse, you need to be there. I understand.”
“I’ll call Rowan before bed. I’ll explain.”
“Okay.”
We hang up, and I stand in my kitchen for a long moment, testing my own reaction. Am I disappointed? Yes. Am I spiraling into the old patterns, the clock-watching, the quiet resentment? I don’t think so. Not yet.
The morning flight slips to noon. Noon slips to four. By the time I’m wrestling Rowan through the nightly sock negotiation, a text lands. Weather delay in San Francisco. Earliest now is tomorrow. I’m so sorry, Mare. I’m trying.
I stare at it a long time.
And there it is. The exact shape of the thing I swore I’d never live inside again.
Rowan asleep down the hall. Me alone in a too-quiet kitchen with a glass of wine I don’t want, watching the microwave clock, feeling myself shrink back into the woman who waits and says she’s fine and keeps a private ledger of every disappointment until it’s long enough to leave over.
The old Maren would sit in this chair and let it curdle. She’d smile through one more phone call and add tonight to the list.
I’m so tired of that woman.
So I do the one thing she never did, not once in eleven years.
I open my laptop and book two seats on the first flight to San Francisco. Then I go wake up my son.
“Rowan. Baby.” I sit on the edge of his bed and rub his back. “Wake up. We’re going on an adventure.”
“Is it morning?” he mumbles into Mr. Zorp.
“Not yet. But we’re going to go find Daddy.”
That opens his eyes. “On a PLANE?”
“On a plane.”
He is, for the first time in his short life, fully and instantly cooperative.
We’re wheels-up by six-forty. Rowan presses his face to the window for twenty minutes and sleeps the rest of the way, drooling on my arm, Mr. Zorp crushed under his chin. I don’t sleep at all. I spend the whole flight rehearsing things I already know I’ll say wrong.
I don’t text ahead. If I warn him, he’ll tell me not to come. He’ll say it’s chaos, that it isn’t safe, that I should stay where things are calm and let him handle it. And the entire point, the thing I’m flying three thousand miles to prove to both of us, is that I’m done being handled.
The Santa Rosa building is a gorgeous old wreck strangled in scaffolding and orange fencing, and the street out front is chaos, trucks and hard hats and a man from the city with a clipboard and a frown.
A taxi leaves us at the tape, Rowan on my hip, both of us rumpled and jet-lagged and wildly out of place.
And in the middle of all of it, no jacket, sleeves shoved to the elbow, hair a complete disaster, is Rhodes.
He’s bent over a set of plans on a truck tailgate, and for a moment I just watch him, because this is the thing I flew across the country to see with my own eyes.
He isn’t drowning, isn’t vanishing into the crisis the way he used to, like the work was a place he could hide from his own life.
He points at something, says a few words, and then steps back and lets other people carry it out.
Trusting them. The thing he swore he’d learned and I never quite let myself believe.
Then he looks up, and he sees us.
For one whole second he doesn’t move, like his brain can’t make the two halves of his world fit in the same frame.
Then Rowan shrieks “DADDY!” at a pitch that turns every hard hat on the block, and Rhodes is already moving, crossing the lot at a flat run, and he catches our son out of the air and folds him in and looks at me over Rowan’s head like I’m something he dreamed.
“What are you doing here?” It comes out cracked straight down the middle.
“You said next time we could come to the chaos.” My voice isn’t as steady as I want it. “So here we are.”
He says something low and fast to the man with the clipboard, hands Rowan off to a woman in a Calloway vest who our son immediately begins briefing on the structural weaknesses of a rocket, and then it’s just the two of us on a cracked sidewalk in the hard California light, a building trying to fall down behind him.
“Talk to me,” he says. “Is he okay? Are you-”
“We’re fine. Nobody’s hurt.” I make myself hold his eyes. “I came because last night I sat in my kitchen and felt myself turning back into her. The one who waits. The one who says she’s fine and keeps the real list somewhere you can’t see it, until the list gets long enough to leave over.”
His face goes very still.
“I promised myself I’d never be her again.
So instead of sitting in that chair and letting it rot, I got on a plane.
Because I’m scared, Rhodes. Every time a flight slips or a call runs long, there’s a voice in me that says this is how it starts.
This is how I lose you the slow way. One reasonable delay at a time. ”
I brace for it. The old reflex, the part of him that hears a fear and reaches for a rebuttal, that tells me I’m being unfair, that this is different, that there’s a building that could kill someone.
It doesn’t come.
He takes my face in both hands, right there in front of his entire crew, plaster dust and all.
“You’re not her,” he says. “You want to know how I’m sure?
She never would have gotten on the plane.
She’d have stayed home and waited for me to fail so she could finally be right about me.
You came to fight for it instead.” His thumbs move over my cheekbones.
“That’s the difference between her and you. That’s everything.”
“I don’t want to be the woman who waits.”
“Then don’t. Come to the chaos, every single time. I’d rather have you standing in the middle of my worst day than safe and quietly hating me from three thousand miles off.”
A tear gets loose. I let it go. “Your building might actually fall down.”
“Probably not today.” The corner of his mouth tips up. “And if it does, I’d rather watch it come down next to you than close the biggest deal of my life alone. That’s the part I finally understand, Mare. The work was always supposed to be for something. It was supposed to be for this.”
Behind him, the man with the clipboard calls his name. Sharp. Twice.
Rhodes doesn’t turn his head. “Give me a minute,” he says, to me, not to the man, and keeps his eyes on my face.
And that, more than anything he’s said, is the thing that finally cracks me all the way open. The old Rhodes never made the world wait, not for me, not once. This one just did it without even having to think.
“Okay,” I say. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“We came to the chaos.” I swipe at my cheeks with the heel of my hand and almost laugh. “We’re staying for it.”
Across the lot, Rowan has moved on to interrogating the woman in the vest about whether the crane can pick up a rocket, and Rhodes lets out a laugh that sounds like it hurts, disbelieving and wet, and pulls me in hard while his whole company very carefully pretends to be looking at something else.
They get the building shored up by dark.
Nobody dies. Nobody so much as sprains an ankle.
Rhodes signs the last of the inspector’s forms with Rowan asleep and heavy against his shoulder, then drives us to the furnished condo he’s been camped in for two weeks.
We order more food than three people could eat and put our son to bed in a strange room with Mr. Zorp standing watch.
That night, after Rowan finally crashes with Mr. Zorp in a headlock, I find Rhodes in the kitchen, jet-lagged and propped against the counter with his eyes half shut.
“You should sleep,” I tell him.
“I will.” He catches my wrist as I pass and reels me in until I’m standing between his knees. “In a minute.”
Six months in, and my body still lights up when he does this. I know the weight of his hands now, the exact way they settle on my hips. There’s no discovering left to do, and that familiarity is a thrill all its own, knowing him this well and wanting him this much anyway.
“I flew across a country to pick a fight with you today,” I say, because I can’t help pressing on the bruise.
“We did.” He kisses the corner of my mouth, unbothered. “And then we didn’t break. That’s the part I keep coming back to.”
He walks me toward the bedroom without hurrying, pulling my shirt off somewhere in the hall, and I have his belt open before we make it through the door. We’ve gotten good at this. Quiet, quick when it has to be, both of us listening for a small voice down the hall out of pure habit.
Tonight he doesn’t rush, though. He lays me out on the bed like he’s got a point to make and settles between my legs, and I know that look. “We have to be quiet,” I remind him.
“Then you’d better behave.” He drags his mouth up the inside of my knee, then my thigh, taking his sweet time. “Though we both know you won’t.”
His hand finds me first, two fingers pushing in easy because I’m already there for him, and he hums against my hip, insufferably smug. “Six months, and you still get this wet the second I touch you.”
“Shut up and do something about it, then.”
“Bossy.” But he does exactly what I asked, his fingers and that low, filthy patience, working me right to the edge and then easing off until I’m gripping his forearm and threatening to finish the job myself.
“Try it,” he says, delighted. “I’ll watch.” So I reach down, and he lets me get about four seconds in before he swears and pins my hand and takes over, and I’m laughing and gasping at once, and then I’m not laughing at all.
When he finally pushes into me I wrap my legs around him and pull him deep, and he drops his forehead to mine.
We move together, sure of each other, unhurried, and it’s still the best thing either of us has.
“I love you,” he says into my mouth, and this time I say it back before he’s even finished.
I don’t have to brace for it anymore. This time I came to him, and that turns out to be its own kind of coming home.
After, we lie tangled in the dark, his hand tracing lazy shapes on my hip, both of us too wrung out to move. I listen to him breathe and think about how far we’ve come from the woman who used to lie awake in a San Francisco bed, waiting for headlights that never turned in.
This is it. This is the life we’re building. Not the movie version, messier, harder, punctuated by missed flights and difficult phone calls and the constant work of choosing each other.
But real. Finally, finally real.