Chapter 46
Tom
The commute was only fifteen minutes.
Every morning, he left Lauren’s parents’ place. Left a house bursting with mismatched furniture and homemade art. Then he’d park outside the office his father built—concrete and glass and control—and pretend he still belonged there.
He didn’t.
The construction plans looked the same. The employees sounded the same. His father’s voice still carried down the hall, calm and cold.
But everything felt different.
He couldn’t stop seeing color now.
Everywhere.
It was in the orange rust of the steel beams, in the paint splatter on a worker’s glove, in the red of a safety vest. Was this how Lauren viewed the world? He used to think that made her frivolous. He had been blind.
Worse. He’d willfully blinded himself.
He’d spent years muting everything he designed until his plans matched his father’s definition of “good taste.”
Tasteful. Polished. Empty.
But he’d gone too far. He’d laid that filter over everything in his life.
Including the most vibrant, alive woman he’d ever know.
He hated himself.
By the time he pulled into the driveway of her parents’ house each night, he felt like he’d been scraped hollow.
Most nights, Linda and Gerald would be making dinner together. Or watching TV. Sometimes Gerald would be doing a crossword, Linda would be knitting.
Tom should have seen it sooner—this was the marriage he should have been emulating.
Not the elegant performance his parents put on for the world, but this.
Two people making a life side by side. Shared work, shared joy, shared flaws.
A home stitched together with small kindnesses rather than self-importance.
Everywhere in this house, there were half-finished crafts. Swatches, patterns pinned to corkboards. Lauren’s parents’ life was chaos and color and warmth.
He dropped his messenger bag by the door and sat heavily at the kitchen table.
He rubbed his hands over his face.
He thought of the life he’d built and then dismantled, the marriage he’d crushed under his own pride.
He’d wanted to build something that lasted. A house. A marriage.
And he’d used the wrong role models. He’d looked to his parents. Happily married. Financially successful. He hadn’t realized that he wasn’t his father. Lauren wasn’t his mother.
In his desperation to be a good husband, he’d been a terrible one.
He didn’t know how to live with this version of himself—the man who had everything and made it mean nothing.
He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, staring at the worn floorboards.
The point wasn’t to build the perfect life for her. It was to build it with her.
Tom swallowed hard. The thought rose before he could stop it, so simple it hurt:
I just want to go home.
To the house he’d designed for the woman he loved. To her.
He pressed his palms against his eyes, fighting the burn there.
Tomorrow he’d go to work again. He’d nod when his father said “Nice work.” He’d pretend to care about angles and symmetry.
And tonight, he’d sit at her parents’ table, surrounded by everything he used to think was too much—too bright, too messy—and let himself learn.
It wasn’t tacky. It wasn’t classless.
It was brilliant.
Tom sat cross-legged on the bed, the quilt spread across his lap.
He ran his fingers along a seam, following the line like a road map through their life. Their first date. Their old apartment. The hiking trail where he asked her to be his wife.
The church where he’d promised to love her for the rest of his life.
How had he ever thought this quilt was childish? Amateur?
He’d been so wrong.
It was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
Tom’s thumb brushed the square with the church steeple.
Tom should have been paying attention.
He’d spent years trying to polish her edges, tidy the color out of her world.
She’d been perfect the whole time.
He looked down again. The last row was blank, pale cloth waiting. For memories still to come.
He traced the edge with a fingertip.
Tom laid his palm flat over the blank square.
He pictured the next square. The next turning point in their lives.
Lauren—blazing, furious, magnificent.
The woman who’d thrown him out because she still believed in herself.
The woman who’d taught him that love wasn’t about taste or polish or perfection.
He closed his eyes.
He could still see it: her standing there on that frozen Christmas night. Anger burning through her grief, beauty shining behind her in the tangle of garlands and handmade snowflakes. The moment she’d saved them.
He needed to sew that. For her.
To get the thread the exact color of her eyes. To find a fabric that could catch the fierce line of her jaw, the way her breath had fogged in the cold, the wild courage of her tears.
He could build houses out of blueprints and concrete. He could make walls straight, angles true. But could he create that moment? Could he do justice to the woman who’d made this quilt?
He had to try.
When he looked again, the empty fabric didn’t look so empty. It looked like a promise.
Tom had never realized how loud a needle could sound.
Every time it punched through the fabric, the noise cracked like judgment.
He sat at Linda’s craft table, shoulders hunched, surrounded by a small apocalypse of failed attempts.
The first square was bunched up like a wrinkled napkin.
The second had frayed edges that refused to lie flat.
The third was—he didn’t even know what the third was supposed to be anymore.
A triangle that might have been a roof? A door? A disgrace.
The trash can was a graveyard of fabric scraps.
The plan had seemed simple: work on the square, take a few tries until he made it perfect, and when he had done that, sew it to the quilt.
Tom threaded the needle again. The thread slipped. His fingers weren’t built for this—too thick, too clumsy. He sucked his thumb where the point had pricked it. Blood dotted the fabric anyway. He wiped at it with his sleeve, which made it worse. The stain spread into a rusty little bloom.
“Jesus Christ,” he muttered, pushing back from the table.
This—this messy, quiet, fragile act—this was her world.
He wanted to learn her language.
Tom set the fabric down again. How did you make thread look like light?
He tried sewing a little cutout of red cotton onto the background. The edges curled. He pressed them flat and burned himself on the iron.
He didn’t curse this time. He just sat there, thumb in his mouth, staring at the scrap, feeling pathetic.
Every stitch he’d ever watched her make had looked effortless. Her hands had moved in rhythm, easy and smooth. She’d hummed sometimes. She’d looked peaceful.
This was not peaceful.
He started over again. Cut another square. He exhaled, slow.
Maybe he could trace. He found a pencil, sketched a tiny outline of a door. Not perfect. But… better?
He began to stitch and didn’t stop until he’d completed the scene.
He closed his eyes and laughed under his breath, quiet and a little wild.
It was terrible.
Comically, monumentally terrible.
He pulled the thread out and started over.