Chapter 36
Chapter Thirty-Six
Mara
By the time dinner is over, I feel like someone ran my soul through a colander and poured lukewarm vulnerability through the holes.
Every nerve ending is frayed. Every thought is too loud.
Mila is still vibrating with uncontainable joy—babies, ballet, Martians, and marriage, apparently.
She spins through the room like the tiny CEO of Emotional Whiplash, and Alec just .
. . follows her. Answers every question.
Takes every left turn like he has the full map of her mind memorized.
Meanwhile, I’m sitting there trying not to fall apart over pasta and garlic bread. Trying not to notice the way Alec said I’m falling like it was both a confession and a diagnosis. Trying not to think about how Mila handed him the role of “future sibling dad” like it was a coloring book assignment.
Trying not to want.
Because that’s the part I’m worst at—the wanting.
I’m still stuck back there while we clear the table. Mila narrates drying forks as if it’s a prime-time cooking show. Alec stands by the sink, sleeves pushed to his elbows, hands in warm water, and my brain won’t stop replaying how he said it:
I plan on sweeping you off your feet and being mindful of Mila while I do it.
Who talks like that?
Who warns a woman he’s going to fall for her?
Who falls for a widow who gets overwhelmed by old letters and still hasn’t figured out how to process decades of loss?
After the kitchen is clear, we move into Mila’s routine—teeth, pajamas, and tonight’s “What I Wish to Dream About” update, which is, predictably, frogs.
She curls against my side while Alec reads If I Had a Pet Frog with more dramatic flair than should be legal.
It’s a book he bought for her the last time he was in the bookstore.
She soaks up all the attention, eyes heavy, voice drifting into question after question.
“Do you think babies know who they belong to?” she asks around a yawn.
I should’ve been ready for it. I never am for the things she slips without a warning.
“I think they figure it out,” I tell her, smoothing her blanket. “People show them—with love.”
She nods like this is a scientific fact that should be published, gaze soft and wandering. “Then they’re lucky. When they get the right people. We’ll love our babies a lot when they arrive.”
I kiss her forehead, tuck her unicorn close, and wait until her breathing evens out.
We stay another moment. Just standing there. Watching her.
This child, who can detonate emotional landmines with the tone of someone asking about the weather, then falls asleep without a single repercussion.
When we finally leave her room, the penthouse feels different—quiet in a way that isn’t empty.
The lamp near the balcony casts a soft gold across the room, touching the stacks of vinyls and boxes waiting for me to brave their contents.
The silence feels almost tender, like it’s giving me space to catch up with myself.
Alec walks beside me down the stairs, close enough that I feel the outline of him—his quiet, his restraint, the way he matches my pace without announcing that he’s doing it.
There’s a thoughtfulness to him tonight, a gentleness threaded into his silence, as if he knows my mind is still tangled somewhere between the letters I’ve read and the ones still waiting to be opened.
And then I see it—the shoebox on the couch.
My breath stumbles, barely there, like my body already knows what those letters can do to me before I even touch them. Alec follows my gaze, and something in him reacts—not big, not obvious, just a quiet shift that finds the exact place I’ve been trying to ignore inside my chest.
I could say goodnight. I could run. I could tell him I’m tired, that tomorrow might be better, that tonight isn’t a night for . . . anything, not even light conversation.
Instead, I hear myself say, “I was going to go through another box of vinyl.”
“Yeah?” he asks softly. “And are you planning to kick me out and handle all that on your own?”
I shoot him a look. “You’re very confident for a man who used an encyclopedia to explain parenthood.”
His mouth curves, just slightly. “In my defense, she started with ‘the whole love thing.’ It went downhill fast. I call that surviving.”
I laugh. Sort of. It slips out awkwardly and too close to a sob, but I don’t let it catch.
Because underneath all this—his quiet presence, her declarations, my scrambled emotional bandwidth—I’m hanging on by the thinnest thread.
We linger in that thin, fragile almost-lightness.
I’m the one who breaks.
“Mila told you that you can be part of our family,” I say, my gaze fixed on the corner of a cardboard box because looking at him directly feels too intimate. “I heard her.”
He watches me carefully, quietly, like someone who knows not to make sudden movements around a wounded animal. “Yeah,” he murmurs. “She did. Do you want to talk about it?”
Talk about it? I’m the person who has literally dodged therapy sessions by faking dental appointments. My emotional skillset includes: repressing, compartmentalizing, and occasionally crying in grocery store parking lots. I don’t talk about anything unless I’m legally required to.
I open my mouth—but he speaks first.
“I’m afraid too,” he says, voice low. “I never knew my parents, and every foster home I lived in was temporary. I don’t know how to love or how to stay. I’m guessing it’s something similar for you . . .?”
Similar.
My laugh almost snaps on the way out. Not because he’s wrong, but because he has no idea how tangled it is.
Alec doesn’t know how it felt to be married to a man who was already gone before his heart stopped beating.
He doesn’t know how it feels to still be mourning someone who never really saw you.
To carry a grief that no one else seems to understand because it wasn’t clean, or fair, or poetic—it was layered and cracked and hard to hold.
He doesn’t know how little I think of myself some days. How easy it is to believe I’m too much, or not enough, or just . . . inconvenient.
“As you know, my husband died,” I say softly.
But it feels like I’m offering him the title page of a book without showing him the chapters that would make anyone weep. I keep going, because something in me is tired of being the only witness.
“But that’s not all of it,” I whisper. “We fought that evening. I thought he was cheating. I—” I shake my head because maybe I need to stop blaming myself. “We said awful things to each other. He walked out. And then . . . he never came home.”
Taking a deep breath, I wait for his reaction, but he’s just looking at me. As if he’s just waiting for me to let this out.
“I want to miss him without tripping over every contradiction,” I continue, “in a way that makes sense. But I can never do it. The doubt is always first. Then the questions I never asked. The answers I’ll never get.
The anger I’m not supposed to feel. The relief I hate admitting.
The love I’m supposed to hold on to, even though it feels faded and curled at the corners. ”
My voice thins. “I don’t know how to separate the different versions of him. The man I loved. The man who hurt me. The man I hurt back. The father who never lived long enough for her to remember him as more than fragments.
“I don’t know how to grieve him properly,” I admit. “I don’t know how to explain that to anyone.”
I close my eyes—and the memory rises before I can stop it.
Sam is pacing in front of the counter, running a hand through his hair the way he always does when he’s two seconds from shutting down. The overhead light hums, casting the kitchen in that late-evening dullness that makes everything feel unfinished—like the day, like us.
“I’m trying,” he said, voice tugged thin. “You think I don’t know things are off?”
I leaned back against the sink, arms crossed tight around myself. “Off is not the same as absent, Sam. We haven’t touched in months. We don’t even try anymore.”
“We” was the wrong pronoun. I should have said “you.”
“You don’t. Because I try. I try so hard to be present, be there for you. To kiss you and be passionate, but you . . . you reject me every time I try.”
He stiffened, shoulders tight. His jaw clenched, and when he finally spoke, the words came out rawer than I expected.
“God, Mara, I can’t do this tonight,” he snapped. “You don’t stop. Ever. It’s nagging or pushing or questioning, and I’m drowning in all of it.”
I blinked, stunned, but he wasn’t finished.
“I have a life outside this house. Outside these conversations. I’m exhausted—work is a mess, everything is falling apart, and then I walk in and you’re waiting with another interrogation. I can’t handle it anymore.”
The room seemed to tilt.
“This isn’t just about me, but us as a family,” I shot back, voice shaking. “You come home late, you turn away from me in bed, you cancel plans, and when I ask what’s wrong you shut down. I’m your wife. Not a roommate. Not a chore you can ignore.”
He dragged a hand through his hair, pacing like he wanted to run straight out of his own skin.
“You make everything into a crisis,” he bit out. “Everything I don’t do the way you want is a crime. I’m tired, Mara. I’m fucking tired of you and this fucking life.”
The words hit hard.
“There’s someone else, isn’t there?” I asked and add, “Does she make you happy? Unlike me?”
He froze.
Just for a beat. Just enough that I felt something cold slip through me.
“Stop making up shit,” he said.
But his voice didn’t sound like truth. It sounded like exhaustion. Like surrender. Like he was done explaining himself and wanted the conversation to die already.
“You don’t even try to sound believable,” I whispered.
His jaw tightened—hurt, frustration, something bitter twisting through his expression. “You want everything to be dramatic. You always do. Not everything is a catastrophe, Mara.”
“That’s rich,” I shot back. “Coming from the man who can’t even look me in the eye when he says he’s faithful.”
He groaned, dragging a hand over his mouth. “I can’t do this tonight.”
“You never want to do this,” I said, voice cracking. “You just run.”
He turned toward the door.
And something inside me detonated.
“Fine,” I said. “Run, just fucking run but I might not be here when you’re ready to come back home.”
He didn’t turn back. Not even once. The door clicked shut behind him—and that was the last time I saw him alive.