Chapter 18 #2
“So here’s what I’ve been living with since the porch.
” She put both palms on the table. “The listening. The jacket. The watching whether I could breathe. Your right side. The way you’d ask what I needed before I’d worked it out myself.
I decided all of that was never mine. I decided those were things Ryder does for whichever woman is currently assigned to him, and I got a good look at what it was like when it was pointed at somebody else, and it was identical.
I couldn’t find one thing in five years that had my name on it. ”
I have thought about that answer every day since.
I could have lost her to another man and been less destroyed by it than I am by that.
Without touching Jess, without one kiss, I made my wife go back through five years of being cared for and take it apart looking for whether any of it had ever been meant for her.
“When Jess wouldn’t say the baby was real,” Eden said, “I felt relief. And then I thought maybe she’d lost it, and I was relieved about that too, because grief might have given me my husband back.
I sat in my kitchen and hated a child for existing and then hated myself in case it didn’t.
Do you know how long I’ll be carrying that?
There was never anything there. It was never a child.
It was a line in a contract, and I’m the one who has to live with what I thought about it. ”
The timer had four minutes left on it. She reached over and turned it off.
“That’s what you apologize for,” she said. “Not being frightened. Not keeping your hands to yourself. Not moving Silas west. You apologize for what I lived in while you already knew.”
“May I answer.”
“One sentence.”
“I made you live as the sick wife I’d replaced, and I kept doing it after I’d watched it put you in an ambulance.”
“You’ve learned the sentence.” Eden stood and picked up the pouch. “We’ll find out whether you can live in it. Leave.”
I put the chair back where it had been and went past Bear without asking when there would be another one. Mia sealed the recording that night at Eden’s instruction. Whatever was said in that room after I walked out of it, I don’t know, and nothing in me gets to.
I asked Mia that evening for five minutes on the porch. She brought it back within the hour: Saturday, nine o’clock, no entry, Leah inside, no answer owed to me.
I wrote four attempts in the bunk and burned all of them in the ashtray on the step.
The first one began with the photograph, because fear is still the easiest fact I own.
The second one asked her to understand what I’d been trying to do.
By four in the morning I had it: the apology couldn’t ask her to understand me at all. It had to be a list.
I left my weapons on the bunk beside the empty hook where my cut used to hang, and crossed the road at nine. She stood behind the screen. I stopped below the bottom step.
“Five minutes,” she said. “If you say but, we’re done.”
“I saw the photograph and I should have shown it to you. I should have taken it to Bear, put you in the room, given you every road, and taken the one you chose even if I hated it.” My heart was going hard enough to get in the way of the words, so I kept them flat.
“Instead I hired Jess. I wrote both sides of a phone. I took the sentence I said through the bathroom door and gave it to a stranger. I moved our savings where you couldn’t see them and worked out the exact number that would frighten you without turning your lights off.
I told you the club would take your house, using Bear’s name, which he never gave me.
I invented a pregnancy because I knew a child was the one thing you’d step aside for.
I used your asthma to make you believe I wanted a woman whose body was less work.
I did it in front of your friends, and then in front of the whole compound, and then in a hospital week, and then again after Gage told me you woke up asking for me.
I put another woman in your seat and drove her past you twenty minutes after you took your ring off, and I did that knowing what your ring means to you, because I bought it. ”
Eden opened the screen and stood in it with her bare hand on the frame.
“I was wrong before the porch, during the lockdown, after the hospital, and after the gates opened,” I said.
“You should never have needed my permission to know somebody had aimed at you. I’m sorry for every hour I made you believe I’d chosen her, and I’m sorry that I knew exactly which parts of you to use to make it work.
You don’t owe me anything for finally telling you the truth. ”
She was quiet long enough that I heard a bike start on the far side of the yard and go out through the gate.
“That’s the first apology you’ve given me that doesn’t ask me to be grateful you were afraid,” she said.
I kept both feet on the gravel below the bottom step and didn’t move toward her.
“It’s correct.” She let go of the frame.
“I reject it. I want you miserable. I want you to open every envelope Mia sends across that road standing up, because you won’t know until the second page whether I’ve filed.
I want you to look at my curtains and remember I used to tell you everything, including things about you I never said out loud.
I want every man on this compound who looked at me like your leftovers to hear you say you lied.
I want you to carry a week the way I carried a week — except nobody’s going to tell you when yours ends. ”