12. Killian
— ? —
Killian
We’d crammed onto the living room floor because the cabin was too small for the game board any other way, knees touching, Ivy’s stuffed animals lined up as spectators.
“Okay.” Ivy placed her piece on the board with total, unblinking ceremony. “I’m going to buy the purple one.”
“That’s Boardwalk,” Mom said. “Are you sure you want to spend that much money?”
“Yes. Purple is my favorite color.”
“Sound financial reasoning,” Sully muttered.
I kept glancing at her over the top of my cards.
Her hair was pulled back in a messy ponytail, and she was wearing one of my old sweatshirts, the gray one with the hole in the sleeve.
She’d probably grabbed it by mistake, not realizing it was mine, but seeing her in it made my chest feel tight.
She wasn’t playing. She was watching Ivy, a small smile touching her mouth every time our daughter mismanaged her fake money, and every time I looked over, the smile was aimed at Ivy and never at me.
Ivy landed on my railroad and scowled with her whole face.
“Rent.”
“You can’t be serious,” Ivy said, aghast.
“The rules are the rules.”
“You own all four railroads. That’s predatory,” Sully translated for her.
“That’s capitalism.”
Sully snorted. Tessa threw a piece of popcorn at my head.
Ivy counted out her rainbow money with the exaggerated tragedy of a tiny landlord being evicted, and across the room Sabrina laughed under her breath.
I cataloged it the way I cataloged everything about her now.
Her hands were steady tonight, her color better than it had been a few days ago.
She was eating more regularly than before.
Tessa had been keeping me updated, against Sabrina’s explicit wishes.
I knew I should feel guilty about the information pipeline. I didn’t. I needed to know she was okay, even if she didn’t want me to know.
We played two more rounds. Sabrina stayed in her chair. Every so often she offered commentary: that Sully was cheating, that Ivy was going to bankrupt us all, that I was a robber baron. But she wouldn’t come closer, and the stretch of carpet between us might as well have been a canyon.
When Ivy mortgaged Boardwalk to buy a hotel, I saw my opening.
“We need a fourth,” I said. “Ivy’s monopolizing the board and Sully’s out of money. Sabrina. Play.”
“I’m reading.”
“You’ve been on the same page since we started. Come play. Please.” I heard the crack in my own voice and didn’t bother hiding it. “Please. One game. I’m not asking for anything else. Just sit on the floor with us and let me lose to you at Monopoly like a normal family.”
She hesitated, the book still open in her lap. Ivy took up the cause with her whole heart. “Please, Mommy? You can have my purple hotel. You can have ALL my hotels.”
“You drive a hard bargain, kid.” Sabrina set the book down. And then, slowly, like it cost her something, she slid off the chair and onto the floor beside Ivy, a careful gap of space away from me, but on the floor. In the game. With us.
It shouldn’t have counted as a victory. It counted as a victory.
“Your turn, Daddy.” Ivy pushed the dice toward me.
I rolled and moved my piece around the board. Landed on Community Chest. Drew a card.
“Bank error in your favor,” I read. “Collect two hundred dollars.”
“That’s not fair,” Sabrina said. “You already have the most money.”
“Life isn’t fair.”
“Profound. Did you come up with that yourself?”
“I’m a billionaire inventor. Profundity is part of the job description.”
“I thought the job description was ‘disappoint your wife and forget to come home for dinner.’”
The room went quiet. Ivy looked up from her pile of properties, sensing the shift in atmosphere.
“Mommy, are you mad at Daddy?”
Sabrina’s face softened immediately. “No, baby. Mommy and Daddy are just playing. Grown-ups sometimes say things that sound mean but aren’t really.”
“Like when you call Daddy a stubborn donkey?”
“Exactly like that.”
Sully burst out laughing. Even Mom cracked a smile.
The game continued. Ivy went bankrupt spectacularly, sacrificing her empire to buy a hotel for the purple property she loved so much. Tessa won through a combination of strategic housing purchases and ruthless rent collection. I came in second, which Sabrina pointed out with great satisfaction.
“The billionaire couldn’t even win at Monopoly.”
“I was distracted.”
“By what?”
By you. By the way you tucked your hair behind your ear when you concentrated, by the small smile you were trying to hide, by the fact that you were here in the same room breathing the same air, and it was the closest I’d been to happy in weeks.
“By Ivy’s financial decisions,” I said instead. “Who buys Boardwalk in the first round?”
“Someone with vision.”
Ivy was falling asleep against Mom’s shoulder, her eyes drooping despite her protests. Mom gathered her up and carried her toward the bedroom.
“I’ll put her down. You all clean up.”
We boxed up the game in comfortable silence.
Sully and Tessa gathered their things, making excuses about early mornings and ferry schedules.
They hugged Sabrina with a warmth that loosened my chest. Whatever happened between us, my family would take care of her.
That was the one thing I could be certain of.
“We’ll see you tomorrow?” Tessa asked.
“Maybe. I might take Ivy to the beach.”
“Text me if you need company.”
Sabrina nodded, and they were gone, and suddenly it was just the two of us in the small living room with the mess of popcorn and game pieces between us.
She started gathering the popcorn bowls. I helped, our hands brushing as we reached for the same piece of debris.
She pulled back immediately.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be.”
We finished cleaning in silence. The tension was thick enough to choke on, all the things we weren’t saying filling the space between us.
“I should go,” I said finally.
“Yeah. It’s late.”
I grabbed my jacket from the back of the chair. Hesitated.
“Sabrina.”
She looked up. Her eyes were tired but clear, and I couldn’t quite read what moved behind them.
“Thank you for letting me come tonight. For letting me see Ivy. For… all of it.”
“She needs her father.”
“I know. But you didn’t have to let me into your space. You could have made this harder.”
“I’m not trying to make it harder.”
“I know you’re not. That’s not what I’m saying.” I ran my hand through my hair, searching for words that didn’t want to come. “I meant that you’re being generous even though I don’t deserve it. Even though I’ve given you every reason to shut me out completely.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then she set down the bowls and walked toward the door.
“I’ll walk you out.”
The night was warm, heavy with salt and roses. The porch light buzzed above us with a moth already circling it, and somewhere in the distance I could hear the sound of waves.
Sabrina leaned against the railing, her arms crossed over her chest.
“I listened to your voicemail.”
My heart stopped. “You did?”
“Yeah.”
“And?”
She took her time answering. “I don’t know what to do with it. You didn’t try to explain away what you said. You didn’t try to make excuses.”
“There aren’t any excuses.”
“I know. That’s the problem.” She looked out at the dark yard. “If you’d tried to justify it, I could have been angry. I could have told myself you were just making excuses again, like always. But you didn’t. You just… told me the truth.”
“That’s all I have left to offer you. The truth.”
“The truth doesn’t fix things.”
“I know. But lies made everything worse, so I figured I’d try the opposite.”
A near-smile flickered across her face.
I stepped closer. She didn’t move away.
“I was a stupid asshole,” I said quietly. “I know that doesn’t cover it. There aren’t words big enough to cover how badly I fucked up. But I need you to know that you have no idea how much I feel for you. How much I’ve always felt for you.”
She turned to look at me. Her eyes were bright in the porch light.
“You left out the part where you followed me to the coat check.”
“I didn’t follow you to the coat check.”
“You stood beside the coat check for a very long time holding a coat somebody had already handed you.”
“I was deciding something. It looks identical to panicking from the outside.”
She laughed, short and surprised, and the sound went straight to my chest.
“What were you deciding?”
“That if I let you walk out of that hotel, I’d spend the rest of my life reading your papers and wondering.”
“You never told me that.”
“I never told you a lot of things. I assumed you could see them, which I’m now aware isn’t a communication strategy.”
She laughed again, and this time it lasted longer.
“I miss this,” I said. “I miss talking to you. I miss the way you make me laugh at myself. I miss the way your brain works, how you see patterns I’d never notice, how you challenge every assumption I make.”
“Killian.”
“I know. I know I can’t fix this with words.
I know I have to prove it with actions. But I need you to know that none of it was because I stopped looking at you.
I never stopped looking at you, even when I wasn’t present enough to prove it.
You’re the most brilliant, infuriating, beautiful person I’ve ever known, and the idea of losing you makes me feel like I’m going to stop breathing. ”
She was quiet. I could see her processing, weighing my words against the weight of everything that had happened between us.
“I have a surprise for you,” I said.
“What?”
“I can’t tell you. It’s not ready yet. But when it is, I want to show you.”
“You’re being cryptic.”
“I’m being hopeful. There’s a difference.”
I wanted to kiss her so badly it was a physical ache. And this time I didn’t step back.
My hand came up and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear, the way I’d done a thousand times in another life, and she went very still.
She didn’t pull away. That was the thing that undid me.
She let my fingers rest against her jaw, and her breath changed, went shallow, and her eyes dropped to my mouth and stayed there.
I leaned in. Slow, giving her every chance to stop me. She tilted her face up to meet me, close enough that I could feel the warmth of her, close enough that her exhale ghosted across my lips, close enough that one more inch would have ended the argument my whole body was making.
Her hand came up and pressed flat against my chest. Not pushing. Just there, over the place where she had to be able to feel my heart slamming against my ribs.
“Not like this,” she whispered. Her voice was wrecked, and it wasn’t a rejection so much as a plea. “I can’t. If I do this now I’ll do it because I’m lonely and sad and you drove all the way out here, and then tomorrow I’ll hate both of us. I can’t start there. Do you understand?”
It took everything I had, but I nodded. I made myself take one step back, and then another, and the loss of her warmth was its own small death.
“Okay,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like mine. “Okay. Not like this. When you kiss me again, Sabrina, and you will, I want you stone-cold sober about it. I want you sure.”
Her eyes flashed at the arrogance of when, not if, but underneath it I saw the thing she was trying so hard to hide, the wanting that matched my own.
“Good night, Sabrina.”
“Drive slow. The roads are bad past the harbor.”
I walked to my car. Turned back once, to see her still standing on the porch, watching me go.
I drove away with the image of her burned into my retinas.
She’d laughed tonight. Twice. She’d walked me out, she’d stood close enough to touch, she’d listened to my voicemail and not deleted it immediately.
It wasn’t forgiveness. It wasn’t even close.
But it was a crack in the wall she’d built, and I was going to pour everything I had into widening it.
The road stretched out before me, dark and empty. I pressed the gas and drove toward a house that felt too big without her in it, already planning the next step in my campaign to win her back.
She was worth every hour of it.