14. Sabrina #2
“No, listen. I mean it kindly.” He met my eyes and held them, and for a second he wasn’t the funny one.
“If I tell you what he meant, you’ll believe it, because you like me and I’ve got no reason to lie.
And then he’ll never have to say it to you himself.
And in about a year you’ll be standing in a kitchen realizing that the only person who ever explained your husband to you was his brother. ”
The cabin’s refrigerator clicked and started humming.
“That’s the most annoying thing anyone has said to me this month,” I said.
“I’ve been saving it. I workshopped it in the car.”
“It shows.”
“It does show, doesn’t it. The middle bit was better before I added the kitchen.”
I laughed, and then the laugh went somewhere I hadn’t authorized, and I had to put my hand over my eyes for a moment. Sully did the correct thing, which was to look intently at the drone box and say nothing whatsoever until I was finished.
“Can I tell you one thing that is mine?” he said eventually.
“If you must.”
“He called me the night before the two of you got engaged. Two in the morning. I thought somebody had died.” Sully turned the mug again.
“He wanted to know whether it was fair. That was the word. Not whether you’d say yes, he’d already run that, he had percentages.
Whether it was fair to ask somebody like you to attach herself to somebody like him. ”
“What did you say?”
“I said he was a lunatic and I hung up on him, because it was two in the morning and I was twenty-six.” He shrugged. “I’ve thought about that phone call a lot in the last few weeks.”
“So have I, and I wasn’t on it.”
“Yeah, well. Welcome to the family.” He stood, and knocked the table with his thigh on the way up, and swore, and apologized to Ivy’s empty chair out of pure reflex. “The drone works. He put a guard on the propellers so it can’t take a tree again. He didn’t want me to tell you that either.”
“You’ve told me a lot of things he didn’t want you to tell me.”
“I’m the supportive brother,” Sully said. “It’s a nuanced role.”
At the door he stopped, one hand on the frame.
“For what it’s worth, and you can throw it straight in the harbor. Whatever happens with the two of you, you were the best thing that ever walked into that family. Tessa says it, Mom says it constantly, Dad has said it once, which is the same as a parade.”
“And you?”
“Me?” He grinned, and for a second he looked so much like his brother that it hurt to look at. “I’m here for the free coffee and the moral high ground.”
“You didn’t make the coffee. I made the coffee.”
“That was the free coffee. Bye.”
He was down the steps and into his car before I could ask again, which I have since concluded was the entire plan.
***
The rest of the morning passed in a blur of cleaning up waffle batter and fielding Ivy’s questions about why Daddy had to leave so soon.
I made noncommittal answers and redirected her attention to coloring books and cartoons, anything to avoid the conversation we were inevitably going to have someday about why Mommy and Daddy weren’t living together anymore.
After lunch, Ivy went down for a nap. The cabin was quiet, the storm damage from last night already starting to feel distant. I picked up my phone and found a notification waiting.
Voice message from Killian.
The sensible move was to block this number the way I’d blocked the last one and stop letting him back in one grand gesture at a time.
Instead I turned the volume down and held the phone to my ear.
“Hey.” His voice was soft, intimate, pitched for my ears alone.
“I know you said we weren’t going to talk about it, but I need to say this.
Last night was… it was everything, Sabrina.
Having you in my arms again, being close to you, it reminded me of what we had.
What we can have again, if you’ll give me the chance. ”
I closed my eyes and let his voice wash over me.
“I’m not going to pressure you. I know you need time, and I know I have a lot to prove before you can trust me again.
But I want you to know that I meant what I said.
I love you. I have loved you through every stupid thing I’ve ever done.
And every hour I spend away from you feels like a piece of me is somewhere else. ”
The recording crackled slightly, ambient noise in the background.
“I’m going to keep showing up. I’m going to keep sending you things and fixing your leaks and making terrible waffles for our daughter. I’m going to be the man you deserve, the one I should have been all along. And maybe someday you’ll believe me. Maybe someday you’ll-”
A voice in the background. Female. Sharp and bright.
“Killian! There you are! I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”
My blood went cold.
“Shit,” Killian muttered, and the recording cut off.
I knew that voice. I’d heard it at the Juice Shack, dripping with false sweetness and barely concealed condescension.
Cordelia.
I played the message again, just to be sure. The words were the same, sweet and earnest and everything I wanted to hear. But at the end, unmistakably, Cordelia’s voice calling his name. Cordelia finding him, looking for him, interrupting his message to me.
The heat that had been building in my chest curdled into a cold, sharp knot.
He’d sent me a love note while he was with her. He’d whispered promises about showing up and being better and never stopping, and then his ex-girlfriend had appeared and he’d hung up so fast the recording hadn’t even finished.
I sat on the couch with the phone in my hand and felt the fragile hope I’d been nurturing crack right down the middle.
I never should have let him back in.