Chapter 34
Marin
I go back in at noon. Because that’s what I do. I get knocked down and I walk back into the room with another tray and take a seat across from him.
Charles is waiting. He knew I’d come back. He always knows.
“I’m going to keep saying it until you hear it.
” Charles adjusts against the headboard.
Winces at his ribs. Settles. “You’re not wife material.
Not because there’s something wrong with you—because there’s something broken in the way you love.
You don’t love people, Marin. You acquire them.
You pitch them. You close them. And when they try to leave the deal, you—” He lifts his wrists. The restraints pull taut. “Well. This.”
I stand up. The chair scrapes against the floor. My hands are shaking but my face is still, my face is always still, my face is a goddamn monument to composure. “And you cheat.”
“It's not cheating if it is the deal, Marin.”
“Fuck you.”
“The flower was a nice touch, though,” he says. “Really sold the delusion.”
I pick up the tray. The flower tips over. Water spills across the toast.
“We’ll try again tomorrow,” I say. My voice doesn’t break. It doesn’t. It bends in a place no one can see, but it doesn’t break.
“We won’t,” he says. “Because tomorrow will be exactly like today. And the day after that. And the day after that. You can keep me here forever, Marin. But you can’t make me love you. That’s the one thing you can’t close.”
I walk out. Close the door. Lean against the hallway wall.
The tray is still in my hands. Wet toast. Dead flower. Two pills he didn’t take. I stare at it like it’s a performance review—all that preparation, all that effort, and the client still walked.
Except this client can’t walk. And he still won.
From behind the door, silence. He’s done.
He said what he came to say—what he’s been saving up behind the groaning and the threats and the demands to be untied.
He waited until I came in with coffee and a flower and hope, and then he used the exact same words from the exact same Tuesday, and he smiled while he did it.
That’s Charles. He doesn’t waste ammunition. He waits for the moment it’ll do the most damage and then delivers it like a gift.
I slide down the wall until I’m sitting on the hallway floor. Tray in my lap. My ankle throbs. My eyes are doing something I refuse to name.
He’s wrong.
That's what he keeps forgetting when he's busy explaining me to myself. I don't lose. I don't leave. I wait. And eventually, every version of Charles that isn't mine gets bored and goes home.
Vanessa will too.
He has to be wrong.
Because if he’s right—if I don’t love people, if I only acquire them—then what am I doing in this hallway? What is this feeling in my chest that won’t stop, that keeps me coming back to his door with coffee and flowers and ibuprofen like some deranged Florence Nightingale who can’t take a hint?
It’s love. It has to be love.
Because if it isn’t, then I’ve done all of this for nothing.
And I don’t do things for nothing.
I call Luke. I don’t think about it. I don’t plan it. I just do it—the way you press on a bruise to make sure it still hurts.
The porch railing. That’s what I tell him. He says to give him an hour. I hang up and laugh at myself. What a joke I’ve become.
I called a handyman because my boyfriend told me I’m not worth loving and I didn’t know who else to call. That’s where I am. That’s the distance between who I was ten days ago and who I’m sitting on this floor being right now.
Now I have wet toast and a dead flower and a man coming to fix an emergency that isn’t really an emergency.
I pick up the tray. Stand. Walk downstairs.
I wash the dishes. I throw away the flower. I put the pills back in the bottle.
Then I go to the bathroom, fix my face, and wait for Luke like nothing happened.
Because that’s what I do. That’s all I know how to do.
From upstairs, Charles starts laughing.
Not the bitter kind. Not the mean kind. The real kind. Like something just occurred to him that he finds genuinely, deeply funny.
I stand in the kitchen and listen to the man I love laugh at me through the ceiling.