Chapter 14 Now
Now
Thoughts are clanging together in my head, loud chaos.
I’ve always prided myself on being able to keep my emotions in check, but suddenly, there are too many for me to keep hold of, each one slipping through my fingers.
James must see the maelstrom of feelings on my face because he squeezes my hand, still tucked in his, and places a reassuring palm on my thigh.
“Please say something,” he says.
“W-what do you mean? When you say letters…”
“I mean the letters you wrote to those guys. Your exes. The ones you…you…I’m not sure exactly what, Nat, but it doesn’t sound good.”
I wrench my hand from his and spring to my feet, pacing. This couldn’t possibly be any worse.
“Look, I don’t know what you think you saw,” I say, forcing my feet to be still.
From somewhere downstairs there’s a shriek and a crash, followed by raucous laughter.
I’m sure something James and I picked out carefully for our new home is now broken.
He flinches at the sound but dutifully ignores it, pushing on.
“Nat, I found the box under the floorboards in the guest room. I’ve read every letter.”
My breaths become shallow, my panic a live bird fluttering in my chest, hoarding the space through which air should flow. Oh god, this is not the conversation I thought we’d be having.
“And y-you’ve read all of them?” He nods. I try to get my hands around the conversation, take control of it again, steer it where it needs to go. They’re trembling fingers holding keys over a drain. “I’m not sure the letters are quite what you think…”
“What I think is that you sound scary in them, Nat. You keep talking about this ‘monster’ living inside you. What the hell does that mean? What the hell have you done? In the second letter, the one about Luke—”
“Luca.”
“Right, Luca. It says he’s dead. I know you wouldn’t, but, Nat, I need to hear you say you didn’t—”
I keep my face straight and fire back quickly, “Of course I didn’t. It was a heart attack. He had a heart problem. Are you really asking if I murdered someone? Jesus, James.”
My own heart feels painfully tight. His eyes are bone-dry now.
“Can you blame me? Why bury the letters like that? And I saw the look on your face when I told you I’d found them.”
I let myself emote for a moment; he needs to feel the veracity of these words. “Because I’m embarrassed! And horrified. Those letters are about the worst trauma I’ve ever experienced. I was trapped in these horrible, toxic relationships with these horrible, toxic guys and it fucked me up, James.”
He takes my hand gently, rubbing my palm. “Look, I…I get that some things in the past are too painful to talk about. But I need you to explain it to me. Each one.”
“James, I—”
“Please.” The gas is pumping back into him now, reinflating him into the man I married—quietly confident, self-assured; there’s no moving him on this now.
Deep breath. I pull my arm away, stumble backward.
And then I tell him about Marc, about Luca, about George.
Most of it anyway. Parts of it, at least. Fine.
Snippets, in all honesty. I tell him the ways in which my exes were rotten.
I tell him the ways in which that rot spread, taking root in me and growing into something that felt dark, unsafe.
I confess to wanting to hurt Marc, to wanting to hurt Luca, to managing to hurt George, badly.
“You’ve married a monster.”
He squints as if the dust motes in the room might draw together to give him a clearer picture, fingertips massaging his forehead. “So let me get this straight—Marc is also dead? He fell off that roof.”
I nod. “A horrible accident.”
“And Luca had a heart attack.”
Again, a nod.
He gives me a knowing look. “I read the letter; I know you weren’t exactly cut up about it.”
I turn away. He immediately takes my shoulders, pulls me back around to face him.
“Look, I can understand that these were accidents, and I know why you might not feel all that bad after what they did to you. But George—Lord knows I want to hurt him myself—I still don’t understand exactly what it is that you did. You’re not being straight with me about it.”
Something like the truth is flaking off, ready to be picked at and flicked in James’s direction.
I’m nervous to tell him this much, but it’s clear he has to know if our marriage is to survive.
Perhaps beneath the dread, the conviction that it’s stupid to let anyone see this much of me, there’s also a flicker of relief in unburdening myself of my secrets to my husband.
I’ve been holding in so much for so long.
I relent, open my mouth to tell him more.
“One day, after…Not long after what he did to me, he came home drunk. He was being aggressive, taunting me about the time he…he hurt me. I just…” I can’t quite meet James’s intense stare and turn my eyes to the floor.
“We were at home, and it wasn’t much more than a slap at first, but when I hit him, it made him angrier, so I grabbed a knife to protect myself.
” I see James’s eyes go wide and hurry the next words out of my mouth.
“But he’s bigger than me, stronger than me.
He knocked me down before I could really do anything.
Even if I—I tried. I cut him, but I didn’t kill him. ”
When I finally look up at James, he isn’t reacting at all like I expected.
Relief is plain on his face. He pulls me to him, hugs me close.
“I was terrified that…I mean, I know you could never, but for a moment I thought…Listen, you’ve been through a lot, Nat.
That’s not your fault. It’s not your fault. ”
“I don’t get it.” I shake my head, pull away. “How can you be so calm? I nearly killed a man—”
He cracks a dry smile, although I notice his eyes are wet again.
“I don’t know if I’d call this ‘calm.’…But these past relationships, the pain: you’re getting help for it, right?
I mean, your therapy…I get why it was so important to you now.
And it—well, you’ve been saying therapy helps you.
So it must be helping with…all this. And what happened with George was self-defense.
Jesus, Nat, look at me—it’s been a whole week since you found out about the money, and… and look. You’ve not hurt me.”
Something clicks. I feel physically sick. “Is that why you went to stay with your parents? You were scared I’d hurt you?” His face crumples and I know it’s true. My already waning confidence dies and guilt grows on its corpse. “Oh god, James. Oh god, I’m so sorry.”
“No, I fucked up by not coming to you. I meant what I said in my vows; I want it to be us against the world. You’re my best friend, my chosen family. I should never have gone to someone else without speaking to you first.”
I think of our vows, our shotgun wedding.
It was wonderful, mad, and probably too soon.
I thought it was romantic that James didn’t want to wait, liked that it gave me less chance to chicken out and a reason not to worry about inviting people I knew.
But I’m sure James is learning what it means to marry in haste and repent at leisure.
“I get why you didn’t come to me. I know what I sound like in those letters. I know I…I know I’m not normal.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Why not? It’s true. Would you have been so afraid of me if I was?”
He gestures for me to sit down, and I do. We both take a moment to stare at the bedroom wall. I’m not entirely sure how to navigate things in the new shape of us, and I don’t think James knows how to, either. He married the easy, charming Cool Girl, and now he has…this.
“So,” I say, first to speak again, “the blackmail. You went to confide in Will about what you read and he decided to extort you?”
“Yeah. I mean, the letters sounded like maybe…I worried—we worried…But I wasn’t sure.
I know you. I know the woman I married. But Will…He said he’d go to the police, tell them everything he knew about you, see if they could find out what you did, if you were a…
I was shocked, and confused, and, yes, a little scared…
but I couldn’t let that happen. Nat, I love you to your bones; I wasn’t going to let them put you away.
” He rests a hand on my thigh again and gently squeezes.
“But you know that could still happen, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“George. I say it in the letter. If I’m reported, I could go to prison. I attacked him—it’s actual bodily harm at the very least….”
James simply shakes his head. “Will won’t talk, and we say nothing more to him.
That’s what the money was for.” He reaches for my hand again.
“I should have just come to you and talked this out. If I had, we wouldn’t be in this mess.
We’re meant to be better than this. We talk to each other, don’t we? ”
I pause, thinking of our repeated pact to not bring up the past. “We do.”
“Please, Nat. Do you think you could find a way to forgive me?”
It would be hard to dig my heels in, punish him, when I’ve been hiding a secret of this magnitude.
When I’m still hiding secrets. It’s my messy past that’s gotten us into this messy present, and as much as I wish James had kept a cool head and hadn’t gone behind my back…
God, I wish he hadn’t gone behind my back.
It feels stupid to brush it under the carpet, and “stupid” is not something I usually allow into my life, but I simply give a weary nod and say, “Okay.”
“Okay?” he confirms, pitiful hope singing out in his voice.
“Okay.” I nod again.
He takes me in his arms and squeezes me close. For a moment, my face is buried in his neck. His aquatic and citrusy cologne brushes against my nose, that smell of home coming back to me again. He gives me a gentle kiss, salt seeping into it from tear-streaked lips.
“And what about me?” I ask. “After what you’ve read, after what I’ve told you…Can you still trust me?”
He takes a beat. “I trust you.”
And in that moment, I’m reminded of how good an actor my husband is—whether it’s pretending to be less posh than he is; or to hate his privilege more than he does; or to enjoy Audre Lorde as much as I do.
Because not everyone will have caught the minuscule shift in his register, but I know that when James says he trusts me, at least part of it is a lie.
And as I detect a curl of that anger, that white-hot rage still lurking beneath my broad relief, I can’t be sure that I trust myself, either.