Chapter Thirteen
Winona
Home was the house where the lights had been going out one by one, but tonight when they came through the door she turned on all of them—the kitchen, the hallway, the lamp in the living room that Townes had turned off to save electricity three months ago and she had not turned back on because it hadn't seemed worth the argument.
She turned it on now.
Townes watched her do this and said nothing, just took off his coat and set it over the back of the hall chair and remained in the hallway while she moved through the ground floor turning on lights, and she could feel him watching her, and the feeling of being watched by him—wanted by him, in the specific way she had not felt from him in so long—was creating something in her chest that was not quite comfortable yet but was alive, which was better than the numbness.
She came back to the living room and stood in the middle of it. He was in the doorway.
"I need to say some things," she announced. "And then I think you need to say some things. And they're going to be uncomfortable."
"Yes, we do" he agreed.
"I'm not going to perform forgiveness," she said.
"I'm not—I'm not there yet, Townes. What you did, keeping all of that from me, it wasn't just bad judgment.
It was—" She found the word. "Isolating.
It made me alone in a marriage I was already feeling alone in.
And the fact that the threat wasn't real doesn't change the fact that your response to it was to close a door I already couldn't find the handle for. "
He moved from the doorway into the room.
He sat on the couch—not to make the conversation casual, she could tell, but to take himself out of the framing of the doorway.
To be in the room. "I know," he admitted.
"I know that. I've been—" He stopped. Then, with visible effort, "I've been so afraid of having the conversation where you tell me that I've failed you beyond repair that I kept not having it.
And that is a thing I did to you. That's not marriage, it's—preemptive grief. "
She sat in the armchair across from him. "When did you start being afraid of that?"
He thought about this seriously, which she appreciated.
"The year after our second anniversary. When the firm started taking more of my time and you started taking on bigger projects, and I felt like—like we were both working so hard to build things and neither of us was building us.
And instead of saying that I just—kept working. Because work I knew how to do."
"I did the same thing," she confessed. It cost her something to say it but she said it anyway.
"I felt you pulling away and instead of naming it I made myself self-sufficient.
I stopped asking for things because it hurt less than asking and being met with that—" She gestured. "That managed silence."
"I'm sorry," he declared. "For the silence. For handling Madrigal alone and making it possible for her to hurt you. For every time you were at that drafting table late at night and I came and sat in the corner instead of pulling up a chair and being in it with you."
Winona was quiet for a moment. She felt the words land. She let them.
"I'm sorry for the distance I built on my end," she admitted.
"For the pre-emptive protection. For saying nothing when I had something to say.
" She paused. "I have wanted to tell you for two years that I miss you.
That I miss—who we were in this house when it was full of people and paint and you were on a ladder and I thought, that is the person I get to keep. "
Something moved across his face that she hadn't seen in a very long time. Not the controlled expression, not the managed stillness—something under that, the actual face of him, unguarded.
"I am still that person," he argued. "I just got—buried. But I'm still there."
"I know," she offered. "I know. That's why I'm in this room."
They sat in the lit room for a while, letting the silence be different.
She was the one who moved first.
She crossed from the armchair to the couch and sat beside him, close, the first voluntary closeness they had permitted in months.
She felt him become very still the way he always did when he was trying not to presume, trying not to reach before she gave him permission, and she took his hand between both of hers and held it.
"We're going to go to therapy," she proclaimed.
"Yes."
"We're going to have an actual conversation every day, with no managed silences. About something real."
"Yes."
"And you're going to tell me things," she stated. "All the things you think will cause alarm. Even when they feel manageable. Certainly then."
"Yes." His hand turned in hers, holding back. "And you're going to tell me when you're lonely. Not nothing. Not goodnight. You're going to say the word."
She thought about those nights at the drafting table. The cardinal in the bare oak tree. Nothing.
"I can do that," she agreed.
He lifted her hand and pressed his mouth against her knuckles, not urgently, not performing—just very specifically, with his whole attention, the way he used to. She felt it all the way through.
"Win, I miss you" he cooed, against her hand.
"I know.”