21. Rowan
— ? —
Rowan
I drop Elise at a hotel downtown.
She chose it because it’s neutral ground, nowhere near the places our family goes, nowhere with a memory attached.
I wanted to argue. I wanted to tell her to come home with me, let me take care of her, prove I could be the thing she needed.
But that isn’t what she asked for, and I promised myself I’d give her whatever she asked for even if it took me apart.
“I’ll call you,” she says, climbing out. “When I’m ready.”
“Take your time.”
“I mean it, Rowan. I will call.”
“I know.” I make myself smile. “I’ll be here.”
She leans back through the window and kisses me, soft and quick, gone before I can hold on to it.
Then she’s through the hotel doors with her one suitcase, and I sit in the car wondering if I just watched the best thing in my life walk away from me.
***
The first week is hell.
I go back to my apartment, the half-finished place I’ve never bothered to make into anything, and try to remember how to have a normal life. Work. The gym. Dinner with friends who don’t know a single thing about what happened at that cabin.
Normal doesn’t fit anymore. It’s like putting on clothes from a life I’ve grown out of. Everything pulls in the wrong places.
My phone stays quiet. She said she needed space and she’s taking it, and I tell myself that’s healthy, that it’s exactly what she should be doing. I tell myself a lot of things during those long empty nights.
***
Simon finds me on a Thursday.
I’ve just come out of a bar off Wren Street where I met two friends for a drink I didn’t want, and he’s on the pavement outside like he’s been waiting, and one look tells me he’s been drinking a great deal longer than I have.
“There he is.” His voice carries down the empty street. “The hero.”
“Simon. Go home.”
“Home.” He laughs, and it’s wet and unsteady. “That’s funny. You want to tell me where that is? Because the lawyers have everything frozen, and my own mother’s barely returning my calls, so I’d love to know where home is.”
“You’re drunk. I’ll get you a car.”
“I don’t want a car.” He steps into my path. Up close he’s a mess, unshaven, his collar wrong, his eyes wet and furious. “I want you to say it. To my face. That you’ve been waiting for this since the day I brought her home.”
“This isn’t the place.”
“You took her.” He’s not shouting yet, but it’s coming. “My wife. My brother took my wife, and everyone’s acting like I’m the villain…”
“You cheated on her for a year, Simon.”
“And you wanted her the whole time.” He shoves me, both hands, and I go back a step into the brick. “Don’t you stand there being decent at me. You wanted my marriage dead and you got it. Say it.”
“I’m not going to fight you outside a bar.”
“Course you’re not.” His face twists. “You never fight for anything out loud. You just wait. You wait and you watch and you let it fall into your lap.”
And then he swings.
It’s clumsy and telegraphed and I could step out of it easily, and I don’t, because some part of me thinks he’s owed one. It catches me on the cheekbone and snaps my head sideways and I taste blood where a tooth cuts the inside of my mouth.
He doesn’t swing again. That was the whole of it, apparently, the one punch, and now he’s just standing there breathing hard with his fist still closed, looking at what he’s done like it happened to somebody else.
“Feel better?” I ask.
“No.”
“No. It doesn’t work like that.” I straighten up. My face is already going hot and tight. “Go home, Simon. Wherever that is tonight. You’ve had your shot.”
He stares at me another second. Then something goes out of him all at once, the fight and the drink and whatever brought him here, and he sits down heavily on the curb with his head in his hands.
I get him a car. I stand on the pavement with my cheek throbbing until it comes, and I put him in it, and I don’t say anything else, because there’s nothing left to say that either of us could stand to hear.
***
He comes to my office two weeks later, and for a second I don’t recognize my own brother.
He’s wearing the same shirt he had on at the cabin.
I know because there’s still a faint watermark near the hem from the flood, and he’s buttoned it wrong, one side riding higher than the other, like he dressed in the dark and didn’t check.
He’s thinner. You can’t lose real weight in three weeks, but grief hollows a face fast, and his is all shadows now, the cheekbones sharp, the eyes ringed dark.
He keeps turning something over in his fingers, and it takes me a moment to see it’s his wedding ring, off his hand now, worried smooth between thumb and forefinger.
There’s a pale band where it used to sit.
This is the golden boy. The one who never had to try, who charmed his way through every room, who our mother would forgive anything. And he’s standing in my doorway looking like a man who’s been sleeping in his car.
“I’m not here to fight,” he says. “I got that out of my system on Wren Street.”
“I noticed.” The bruise is still taking its time to fade.
“I know I’ve lost. I know she’s done.” He lets out a breath that shakes going out. “Lilia won’t take my calls either. Blocked my number. So I’ve got no wife, no…” He can’t finish it. “No anyone. I set the whole thing on fire and I’m standing in it with nothing.”
“You did that,” I say. “Nobody did it to you.”
“I know.” He runs a hand through his hair, and the gesture is so lost, so unlike the brother who used to own every room he walked into, that I almost feel something.
Almost. “That’s the part I can’t get around.
I keep waiting for someone else to blame and there’s only me.
” He looks up. “Did you love her? Back then. When I asked if you were interested and you said no.”
I could deflect. I could give him the short answer that gets him out of my office faster.
I’m too tired of short answers.
“Yes,” I say. “It was a lie.”
His face does something complicated. “I knew it. The way you looked at her, even at the wedding. I told myself I was imagining it.”
“You weren’t.”
“So you stepped aside.”
“I stepped aside. And I’ve regretted it every day since.”
He’s quiet a long time.
“I did love her,” he says finally. “In my own way.”
“Your way wasn’t enough. That’s the whole story, Simon. That’s all it ever was.”
He nods, slowly, like it’s the first true thing anyone’s said to him in weeks. Then he stands, and at the door he stops.
“The divorce,” I say before he can. “Don’t drag it out. Don’t punish her with it. Just let her go.”
“Will it change anything? With you? The family?”
“Probably not. But it’s the only decent thing you’ve got left to give her. So give it.”
He looks at me for a moment. Then he nods once more and goes, and the door clicks shut behind him, and I sit alone in my office trying to feel like I won something.
Mostly I just feel tired.
***
Three weeks, and she still hasn’t called.
I don’t text her. I don’t drive past the hotel. I promised her space and I’m giving it to her even though every day of it feels like a small death. My friends think I’m being pathetic. My mother thinks I’m being naive. Some nights I think they’re both right.
But I remember how she looked at me that last morning at the cabin. The way she kissed me before she got out of the car. The way she said I will call like it was a fact and not a kindness.
She’ll call.
I just have to still be standing here when she does.