Chapter 3 #2
Maybe nothing physical happened. Maybe everything happened. The problem is that both possibilities hurt.
Even if he never touched her, he left me waiting in this bed with his promise glowing in my hand.
He went to her suite after midnight when he knew I was home hurting.
He stayed long enough for the world to wake my sister with headlines.
He gave strangers a picture of himself smiling down at another woman in a doorway while his wife slept alone in a house that has not felt like home in months.
My phone buzzes again.
Jessica:
Chloe. Please answer me.
I can’t. If I hear her voice, I will come apart so loudly I’ll never stop.
Instead I open the camera roll, though I don’t know why.
My thumb scrolls through old photos with the desperate, pointless instinct of someone looking for evidence the other way.
Sebastian asleep on the couch with his glasses still on.
Sebastian holding a cupcake from Jessica’s bakery.
Sebastian kneeling in our garden with dirt on one knee of his suit pants because he came home during lunch to help me plant lavender when I got obsessed with making the back terrace softer.
There's something the camera roll doesn't show.
It doesn't show those nights in the hospital. The ones where Sebastian climbed into bed with me to hold me while I sobbed. It doesn't show the discharge forms that turned grief into medical terminology that felt cold and distant from reality.
Three times, I learned what it felt like to hope quietly and lose violently. Three times, Sebastian held me through it. Three times, I believed we had survived because we were together inside the grief. We weren't untouched, and we weren't healed, but we were together.
Somewhere along the way, we stopped being together in the smaller hurts. Maybe that is where the ending began. It didn't start tonight, or with Katrina’s hand on his arm, or in the suite.
Maybe it began with all the times I swallowed a sentence because Sebastian looked tired.
It began all the times Janine smiled me into silence, and I let Sebastian find me afterward instead of asking him to stand beside me in the moment.
It began all the times he said soon, after the launch, after this meeting, after the next crisis, and I accepted the future as payment for the present.
I lower my feet to the floor. The wood is cold.
My first clear thought is not that I’m leaving him. It's that I can’t be here when he comes home.
I can’t sit on this bed and wait for the front door. I can’t watch him walk into the bedroom smelling like night air, hotel hallway, and Katrina’s world. I can’t let him say my name in that voice, the one that used to make me feel held, and find out whether I am strong enough not to lean toward it.
I'm not ready for his explanation. I'm not ready for his face. I'm bleeding too badly to let anyone touch the wound.
I stand, and for a moment the room moves around me. I grip the edge of the dresser until it steadies. My wedding ring catches the moonlight. It looks the same as it did yesterday.
I twist it once. My finger resists. I have worn this ring through every ordinary morning and every terrible one.
I've worn it through park galas and doctor appointments, through anniversaries, funerals, miscarriages, launch dinners, and quiet Sundays when Sebastian made pancakes badly and ate the burnt ones himself.
The ring slips free. My hand looks naked in the dark. I set it on the dresser beside his watch tray.
It isn't thrown, and it isn't dramatic. It's just placed there, small and bright and final enough for tonight. Then I move, because if I stop, I'll pick it up again.
I pull the weekender bag from the closet. My hands don’t seem connected to me as I pack. Underwear. Jeans. Two sweaters. Toiletries. The blue sleep shirt Jessica gave me last Christmas. I add my charger, my medications, my wallet.
In the bathroom, I catch sight of myself in the mirror and almost don’t recognize the woman there. Pale face. Red eyes. Hair creased from sleep. A bare left hand curled against her stomach like she’s protecting something already gone. I turn away.
Downstairs, the house feels larger than it ever has. Every room is arranged around absence. The kitchen where I waited. The living room where I set down cold tea. The front hall where Sebastian should have come in two hours ago, tired and sorry and mine.
My phone buzzes as I reach the stairs. For one wild second, I think it’s him. It’s Jessica.
Jessica:
I’m serious. If you don’t answer in five minutes, I’m driving over there in pajamas.
I type with my thumb while standing in the front hall.
Me:
I’m coming to you.
Her reply is instant.
Jessica:
Thank God.
I’m up. Door unlocked. Do you need me to come get you?
I look at the dark driveway through the glass.
Me:
No. I’m calling a car.
While I wait, I stand in the foyer with my bag at my feet and listen. There is still some part of me, apparently, that expects headlights, a key in the lock, or Sebastian saying my name before I can go. Nothing.
The car arrives seven minutes later. I step outside and lock the door behind me.
The night air is cool against my wet face.
I don’t look back at the house until I reach the car, and when I do, the windows are dark.
It's beautiful, empty, and a place designed for a life I no longer know how to enter.
The driver asks, “Chloe?”
I nod and climb in.
As we pull away, my phone lights up in my lap. For one breath, I cannot make myself look. Then I do. There is no message from Sebastian. It's just another headline, another image, and another stranger turning the worst night of my marriage into content.
I turn the phone face down.
The road to Jessica’s is quiet, washed in streetlights and shadow.
I sit in the back seat with my bare hand curled tight in my lap, and I try not to think about the ring on the dresser.
I try not to think about Sebastian coming home and seeing it.
I try not to think about whether he will understand why I left, or whether he’ll be angry, or whether he’ll call Katrina before he calls me.
I don’t know what I’m going to do. I only know what I can't do.
I can't be waiting prettily when he walks in. I can't pretend I’m okay because he looks tired. I can't swallow this too and let it settle somewhere inside me with all the other things I never said.
Jessica’s porch light is on when the car pulls up. I pay, step out with my bag, and stand on the walkway for a second because my legs don’t seem convinced they can carry me any farther.
Then the front door opens. My sister stands there in pajama pants, barefoot, fierce and wide awake. I take one step toward her, and whatever has been holding me together finally lets go.