Chapter 13
Tom
"I'm leaving, Tom."
The tone of her voice made the hair rise on the back of his neck.
"Leaving?" he said slowly, like the word itself didn’t fit in his mouth. "Leaving what?”
“You,” she said simply. "I'm leaving you.”
She wasn’t crying, wasn’t shouting. She looked terrifyingly composed.
"You're not leaving," he said automatically, like saying it out loud could hold the world together. "You're upset. You'll calm down."
"I'm perfectly calm." And she was. He watched her turn toward the stairs.
"Lo?" He followed her up.
When he reached the bedroom doorway, he stopped.
The room was stripped bare of Christmas. No garland on the headboard. No fairy lights looped around the curtain rods. No festive throw pillows. No saccharine Christmas card collage.
The rest of the house was still bursting with her usual gauche DIY decorations—but here, there was none of her Christmas excess.
It should have felt better. This was what he wanted, wasn’t it? Why did the sight make something twist in his gut?
Lauren was pulling clothes from her dresser, folding them with precise, mechanical movements.
“Lo, what is this?”
Lauren looked at him. For a heartbeat he saw something vast and wounded in her eyes—then it was gone, replaced by that terrible empty calm. “This is what you want.”
It didn’t make sense. Couldn’t. A laugh escaped him, sharp and disbelieving. They were having a fight, a stupid fight about Christmas.
People didn’t end marriages over tinsel and misunderstanding.
"You're not leaving." He said it again, firmer this time, like stating it could make it true. "You're just upset. You need time to calm down."
But she was calm—eerily calm. Tom was the one who wasn’t calm. He rubbed his chest; it felt painful, almost like he was drowning.
Tom needed to make her stop, stop packing, stop being so calm. “Christmas isn’t this important. It’s not this big of a deal.”
This was spiraling. Everything was spiraling. The floor felt almost like it was tilting. He couldn’t keep his footing.
"Is this about the check? That was just a number. I can write another one—”
"It's not about the money!" Lauren’s voice cracked, sharp, before she zipped the bag closed.
He wanted to grab the bag, tear it open, dump out the neatly folded clothes. Anything to make her stop.
If he could just make her stop, make her see reason, everything would be fine.
“Grow up, Lauren!” The words came out harsher than he meant. “My parents are right about you.”
He saw it—saw the way she recoiled—and something tightened in his face. But he didn’t stop. Fear drove him on. “Do you know how embarrassing it is that a grown woman spends all her time on DIY knick-knacks?”
She didn’t meet his eyes. “I’ve been quite stupid, I think.”
Something twisted in his gut. She just didn’t understand how things had to be. There were rules to how you had to keep a house. Restraint. Simplicity. “I shouldn’t have to pretend to like all this tacky handmade stuff just to keep the peace.”
Lauren turned everything she touched into chaos.
She picked up the bag. "I'll stay at my parents’ house. Housesit while they’re away.”
She couldn’t leave. She couldn’t.
"You're not going to your parents’ house.”
She belonged here. Here in her house. In the house he’d designed.
He pushed his hands through his hair. There was the window seat. The nook he’d incorporated into the design. It was where she sat on winter mornings with her coffee, sketching ideas for her crafts. She loved it.
The bay windows in the living room. She loved those too.
All those extra elements that he’d had to defend to his father. All those extra elements he had fought for.
For her.
And now she was packing to walk away from it?
He had to stop her. The idea of her walking out—it turned his stomach.
"This is your home.” His voice sounded strange to his own ears. “This is where you belong.”
“Tom, I can’t stay with you. Not now I know how you feel.” She looked up at him. Her eyes were tortured. “I… I can’t bear it.”
The idea of her moving out—leaving his house—
“I’ll go,” he said, grasping at the only thing he could think of to stop her. “You stay.”
"Tom—"
His eyes landed on the side table. The spare keys to her parents' house sat there on that stupid, oversized keyring she’d made.
"I'll stay at your parents'." Tom snatched the keys. “You stay here." Sweat prickled at the back of his neck. He clenched his fists, the keyring digging into his palm.
She set the bag down and for a moment, relief surged—until he saw her face. That look of quiet anguish.
“This isn’t a fight, Tom.” Her voice was calm again, calm in the way that terrified him. “The man I married is ashamed of who I am. And I won’t—” Her voice broke, then steadied. "I can’t live like that.”
"I love you,” he said.
She gestured to herself, to her Rudolph slippers with the oversized red noses, the house cardigan with the buttons she’d painted to look like peppermints. “Do you? Do you really?”
Yes. He felt a hollow churn in his stomach. He just wanted her to be less… less tacky.
Tom pulled into the driveway of Lauren's childhood home and killed the engine. The house sat quiet in the early evening gloom.
He grabbed his bag from the passenger seat, the quilt from the backseat and headed for the front door. A wooden sign hung beside the door, hand-painted with swirling letters: Welcome to Our Home.
Tom rolled his eyes as he unlocked the door.
He'd been here before, obviously. Thanksgiving once a few years ago. Lauren's birthday a couple of times. But mostly they went to his parents’ house instead. Minimalist and refined. The art on their walls meticulously spaced.
Nothing to assault the senses.
Not like this house.
The walls in the entrance were crowded, layered with framed cross-stitch samplers. Dozens of them, every size and color, fighting for space. Saccharine messages in competing fonts. Home Sweet Home. Bless This Mess. Live Laugh Love. Flowers and birds and poetry.
The living room was worse.
Every surface had something on it. Crocheted doilies under every lamp. Throw pillows with garish designs—a watering can spilling fabric flowers, a basket of kittens, a patchwork heart. The couch was buried under a violently bright afghan, every square a nightmarish clash.
Above the fireplace hung an enormous painting of flowers in a vase: amateur brushstrokes, colors too bright. In the corner, a signature: Linda. Lauren's mother.
Wooden letters spelling FAMILY marched across the mantel, each one painted a different color and decorated with stamps and stickers. Ceramic figurines crowded between them—angels, birds, children in old-fashioned dress.
A basket beside the couch overflowed with what looked like half-finished projects.
No wonder Lauren didn't know better.
This was where she had grown up. This explosion of handmade, homespun, aggressively crafted everything.
Somehow this was what she thought a home should look like.
Tom stood in the middle of the room, his jaw clenched.
She’d seen his parents’ house. But she stubbornly refused to follow their lead, no matter how many hints his mother gave her.
His parents had dignity. Discipline.
Whereas this house was suffocating. Everywhere he looked was another handmade thing, another craft project, another expression of that same relentless, unnecessary cheerfulness.
Tom climbed the stairs, each step creaking under his weight. The stairwell wall was a gallery of family photos in mismatched frames. Lauren at every age smiled out at him. Lauren missing teeth. Lauren in a homemade Halloween costume—was that supposed to be a fairy? Lauren graduating college.
In every photo, she was beaming. Happy and bright and painfully unselfconscious.
The guest room was clearly her old bedroom.
A corkboard hung above the small desk, layered with photos, pressed flowers, ribbons from school events.
The walls were blue, sponge-painted with clouds.
A basket overflowed with winter scarves and gloves.
A few skeins of yarn peeked out between them.
The top of the pile held a thick gray scarf, soft and uneven, flecked with green.
He reached out automatically, running a thumb along the yarn. It wasn’t store-bought; he could tell by the inconsistencies, the small missed stitches. Handmade.
He lifted it, rubbing the fabric between his fingers. It was ugly, imperfect.
Tom sat on the edge of the bed, the scarf still in his hands.
This was Lauren's normal.
He thought of his own childhood home. Everything neutral, coordinated, expensive.
That was what a home should look like.
For some reason, Tom thought of his college sketches. Bold. Colorful. Ambitious.
His father had flipped through the portfolio once. Just once.
"Clients don't pay for ‘interesting,’” his father had said. "They pay for classic.”
Classic.
His student portfolio gone into the trash. "No need to preserve your learning curve," Richard had said.
Tom hadn’t argued. He had needed the salary, the stability, the proof to himself that he could provide for the woman he loved.
And so his father had taught him. Painstakingly, patiently. Until Tom could no longer tell which blueprints were his and which ones were his father’s.
His father had been right in the end. His college designs had been embarrassing. Just like this house was embarrassing.
He lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Someone had stuck glow-in-the-dark stars up there, and they were still there. Still keeping watch over Lauren's childhood bed.
“The man I married is ashamed of who I am.”
Her voice echoed in his head, quiet and certain and devastating.
Tom closed his eyes against the faint constellations above him. His hand found the scarf again, fingers tightening in the soft wool.