25. Killian
— ? —
Killian
The paper in her hand might as well have been a live grenade.
I watched her face cycle through emotions I couldn’t name, watched the warmth of the past few hours drain away and leave a cold, brittle stillness in its place. She didn’t move, didn’t speak, just stood there holding the evidence of my stupidity while I scrambled for words that might fix this.
Sabrina hadn’t moved. She was still holding the paper, her eyes fixed on the words I’d written in a moment of exhausted honesty that I’d never expected anyone to see.
“I can explain,” I said.
“Do it.”
Her voice was flat and dangerous. Not angry yet, but waiting to be. Waiting for me to give her a reason.
I approached slowly, my hands slightly raised in surrender. “That list isn’t what you think it is.”
“It’s a list titled ‘Things I Hate About Sabrina.’ It seems pretty straightforward.”
“It’s not. I promise you, it’s not what it looks like.”
“Then what is it?”
“It’s… context. I need to show you the context.”
I moved to the desk drawer and pulled out the stack of papers I’d been accumulating for years.
The stack was enormous, pages and pages of notes written in my terrible handwriting, some typed and printed, some scrawled on the backs of receipts and napkins and anything I could find when a thought occurred to me.
I brought the whole pile back to where she was standing and set it on the floor between us.
“What is all this?”
“This is everything.” I knelt down and started organizing the papers into groups. “I told you I had lists. I didn’t tell you how extensive they were.”
I held up the first stack, the thickest one by far.
“Things I Know About Sabrina Kerrington. I started it the week after we met. Every detail you’ve ever mentioned, every preference, every habit I’ve noticed over the years.
Your coffee order depending on your mood.
The way you organize your closet by color instead of category.
The specific sound you make when you’re pretending to listen but you’re actually thinking about something else. ”
Sabrina took the stack from me with trembling hands. She flipped through a few pages, her eyes scanning the entries.
“This is… Killian, there are hundreds of pages here.”
“I know.”
“You wrote down that I hate the sound of styrofoam?”
“You mentioned it once, years ago. You said it made your teeth hurt.”
“I don’t even remember saying that.”
“I do. I remember everything you say. I can’t help it. My brain latches onto information about you and refuses to let go.”
She set that stack aside and looked at the next one.
“Things I Love About Sabrina Kerrington,” I said. “Started it around the same time. It’s longer.”
She opened it and read the first page. Then the second. By the third, tears were sliding down her cheeks.
“You love that I argue with researchers who’ve been dead for decades?”
“You get so passionate about methodology. It’s incredibly attractive.”
“You love that I start books and never finish them?”
“You work out how they end by the middle. Finishing them would only bore you.”
“You love that I cry at commercials about dogs?”
“You have a big heart. You can’t help it.”
She was crying harder now, clutching the pages to her chest. I waited, letting her process, knowing that the hardest part was still coming.
“And this?” She held up the original page, the one that had started all of this. “The hate list?”
“Look at it,” I said quietly. “Really look at it.”
She smoothed the paper out and read it properly this time, not just the title but the contents.
The list was short, painfully short compared to the others.
Her fish stew. She looked up at me with confusion.
“It’s terrible,” I said. “I’m sorry, but it’s objectively terrible. It tastes like seawater and regret. But I eat it every time you make it, and I tell you it’s good, because you’re so proud of your grandmother’s recipe and I can’t bear to dim that light in your eyes.”
She let out a wet laugh and kept reading.
The way she shuts me out when she’s hurt. “That one’s self-explanatory. When you’re in pain, you close off instead of letting me help. I understand why you do it, but I hate it because I want to carry some of the weight for you.”
How fast I gave up on them. She frowned at this one.
“That’s not about you,” I said. “That’s about me.
I hate that when things got hard, my response was to work more instead of fight harder.
I hate that I let you walk out the door without doing everything in my power to stop you.
I hate that I gave up on our family instead of showing you every single day that I was never going to stop fighting for us. ”
“Killian…”
“And the last one.” I took a breath. “That she’d ever doubt how much I love her.
I hate that you doubt me. I understand why you do, because I gave you every reason to.
But I hate it because it means I failed.
It means all the love I feel, all the ways you’ve shaped my entire existence, wasn’t enough to make you feel secure.
And that’s my fault. That’s entirely my fault. ”
Sabrina sank down to the floor, the papers scattered around her, and I knelt across from her and let her cry.
“I thought you regretted me,” she said finally, her voice thick with tears. “That night at your parents’ house. I heard you tell Sully that maybe you never should have married me. That I’d still have my fire if I’d said no.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“I know that now. But for weeks, that’s what I believed. That you looked at me and saw a mistake.”
“Never.” I reached out and took her hands.
“Sabrina, never. What I was trying to say, what came out so badly, was that I’d done this to you.
I watched you dim over the years, watched you get smaller and quieter and more tired, and I knew it was my fault.
I was the one who wasn’t present. I was the one who let you carry everything alone.
And I wondered, God help me, I wondered if you’d still be the brilliant, fierce woman I fell in love with if you’d never had to put up with me. ”
“You blamed yourself.”
“Of course I blamed myself. Who else was there to blame?”
She pulled her hands away and wrapped her arms around her knees. “I thought you blamed me. For the miscarriage. I thought you looked at me and saw the woman who couldn’t keep your baby alive.”
Everything under my ribs went loose and cold.
Because for a moment I was back there. Eighteen months ago, the small hours of a morning I had spent a long time teaching myself not to remember.
The hospital had sent us home because there was nothing left to do.
She hadn’t cried in the car. That was the part that had frightened me most, how quiet she’d gone, how carefully she’d folded her hands in her lap the whole way, as if she could hold herself together by holding still.
When we got inside she’d stood in the middle of the kitchen in her coat and looked at me, and I hadn’t known what to say.
I still don’t know what I should have said.
I only know what I did, which was nothing.
I told her I’d make tea, then filled the kettle and stood at the counter with my back to her because I couldn’t look at her face and stay standing, and by the time the water boiled she had gone upstairs alone.
I let her go upstairs alone. I told myself I was giving her space. The truth was that I was a coward, that her grief was a room I couldn’t make myself walk into, and so I stood in the kitchen and let a door close between us that I spent the next year and a half pretending not to notice.
She had never once heard me say that I remembered it that way, that the silence in that kitchen was mine, that I built it and chose it over her when she needed me most.
I came back to the present with her watching me, waiting.
“What? No. Sabrina, no. How could you ever think that?”
“Because you stopped touching me. After it happened, you pulled away. You worked more, you came home less, and every time I tried to talk about it, you changed the subject. I thought you couldn’t stand to look at me.”
“I couldn’t stand to look at myself.” My voice cracked.
“I didn’t know how to help you. I didn’t know what to say or do, and every time I saw the pain in your eyes, I felt like a failure.
So I ran. I buried myself in work because it was easier than facing the grief, easier than admitting that I was completely useless when it came to the things that actually mattered. ”
“We should have talked about this.”
“We should have talked about everything. Instead we built walls and pretended they weren’t there.”
We sat in silence for a moment, the weight of years of miscommunication settling around us.
“There’s no one to blame,” I said finally.
“For the baby. For what happened. It wasn’t your fault, Sabrina.
It wasn’t anyone’s fault. Sometimes babies just…
they’re not ready. They can’t stay. And as much as it destroyed us, as much as I would give anything to go back and change it, we can’t blame ourselves for something we had no control over. ”
“It felt like my fault.”
“I know. It felt like mine too.” I reached out and cupped her face in my hands. “But it wasn’t. It was just terrible, random, unfair. And we let it break us instead of holding onto each other.”
“What about this baby?” Her voice was small. “What if something goes wrong again?”
“Then we’ll face it together. Not separately, not hiding in our own pain, but together. The way we should have done the first time.”
She leaned forward and pressed her forehead against mine. I could feel her tears on my cheeks, or maybe they were my own.
“Maybe this one will be ready,” I said softly. “Maybe they’re just waiting for us to figure our shit out so they can come into a family that’s whole instead of broken.”
“You really believe that?”
“I have to believe something. And believing that feels better than the alternative.”
We stayed there breathing together, the air between us finally, completely clear.
“I want to try again,” I said. “Really try. Not because we’re married and we have a kid and it’s the responsible thing to do. But because I love you, and I choose you, and I want to build a life with you that we both actually chose. On purpose. Every day.”
“I’m scared.”
“I know. I’m scared too.”
“What if we screw it up again?”
“Then we do it again. We keep doing it as many times as it takes. Because I’m not giving up on us, Sabrina. I’m never giving up on us again.”
She pulled back and looked at me, her eyes red and swollen, her face blotchy from crying. She’d never looked more beautiful.
“I really miss our family,” she said. “Before things got weird. Before we stopped talking and started just… existing in the same space.”
“I miss it too. Every day.”
“Okay.” She took a shaky breath. “We’ll try.”
“You mean it?”
“I mean it. I’m terrified, and I have no idea if this is going to work, but I want to try. I want us to be real again.”
I pulled her into my arms and held her tight, and she held me back, and we sat on the floor of the studio surrounded by papers that documented every single thing I knew and loved and hated about the woman in my arms.
“I will make things work,” I said into her hair. “I swear to you, Sabrina. I will spend the rest of my life making sure you never doubt me again.”
She didn’t answer with words. She just held on tighter.
And for the first time in months, that was enough.