Chapter 48
Forty-Eight
Piper
It takes ten minutes to convince my family to leave us alone.
Rowan, who has the subtlety of a foghorn, announces she’ll be in the next room in a tone that clearly means she will be listening through the wall.
Madison squeezes my hand at the door like she’s leaving a person in a burning building because they were asked to.
Dad looks at Ezra for a long moment before he looks at me.
I see every conversation we’ve had and haven’t had in his face.
I give him a small nod that says I’m okay and I need to do this and please go.
He does because he has always known when to hold on and when to let go.
Mom is last. She looks at me the way she sometimes does, that look that reaches deeper than most. I used to think it was about checking if I was okay. Now I see it’s about showing me she is. That she’s here. That she’s not going anywhere. She touches my face once, then she leaves.
The kitchen is simply the kitchen. It’s always been just that—the one I grew up in—with the same table and the same window overlooking the backyard. It should be neutral ground, but it isn’t.
Ezra sits at the table with his hand against his jaw. There’s a nasty cut at the corner of his mouth, and his cheekbone is turning a violent red. I grab a clean cloth and run it under cold water because the alternative is just standing here, and I can’t do that.
He looks up at me as I bring the cloth to his face. There’s calculation in his expression, the rapid assessment of what version of Ezra this moment calls for.
He goes for wounded.
“Piper,” he says.
“Hold still.”
“You let him do this.”
“Hold still, Ezra.”
“You ran away from our wedding, and you came home with him, and you just stood there and let him—”
“I didn’t let him do anything,” I say. “What he did was his choice.”
I press the cloth against his cheekbone. He watches my face as I do it. He’s always watching my face. I realize that now in a way I hadn’t before. The attention I once thought was intimacy was just monitoring. It was an evaluation of where I was and what needed fixing.
“Come home,” he pleads.
I step back. “No.”
“Piper.” He says my name with a patience that isn’t really patience.
It’s a controlled quality that indicates he’s being reasonable, and I’m the one making him work for it.
“You don’t have to do this. Whatever this was, running off with him, this little whatever you needed to prove, you’ve done it. It’s over. Come home.”
“I’m not coming home,” I repeat. “Not to your apartment. Not now and not after this.”
He stands up. He’s taller than me, and he uses that height without seeming to. It’s just how he positions himself, the way he fills a space. I used to find it reassuring. Now I see it differently.
Griffin is an inch taller, definitely broader, and he has never made me feel like he’s going to use it against me. I’ve never felt small around him.
Ezra rolls his eyes. “You’re not thinking clearly.”
“I’m thinking very clearly.”
“You ran away from your own wedding. You’ve been gone for two weeks with a man you’ve known your whole life in circumstances I don’t want to think about. And now you’re going to stand here and tell me you’re thinking clearly?”
“Yes.”
“You had an episode,” he continues. “Before the wedding, during the lead-up, I could see it happening—”
“Don’t you dare.”
“It’s not your fault, Piper. If you’d talked to the psychiatrist—”
“I said don’t.”
“I’m trying to help you—”
“Stop! Jesus Christ, just shut the fuck up for one minute.”
I look at him properly, maybe for the first time in years. I’m not seeing through the lens of who I was trying to be for him. I’m just looking directly at him with the eyes I’ve been cleaning out over the last two weeks.
“You’ve been telling me who I am for three years.”
“Piper—”
“Shut up. I’m talking.”
Something flashes across his face. Probably shock that I said it, that I mean it, and that I’m not adjusting.
Surprisingly, he closes his mouth.
“You told me I was too much,” I say. “And then too little. You told me my moods were a problem, and my clothes were a problem, and my music was too loud. You made me go to a psychiatrist and tell them I might be like my mother. Do you have any idea what it took for me to say those words?”
“I was concerned.”
“You were strategic. You found the thing that would make me doubt myself the most, and you used it. And I let you. I let you because I thought that’s what love required, that I make myself smaller and quieter and easier to manage. That’s not love, Ezra. I know that now.”
“He’s been putting these ideas in your head.”
“Nobody put anything in my head. I found them there, where they’ve been the whole time.”
He steps toward me. “You’re not leaving. We’re not done.”
“I’m done. I ended it on the phone, but I’m ending it now, in person, because I think you deserve that even though I’m not sure you’d have given me the same.”
His hand grips my arm. It isn’t tight. That’s what I always told myself. He was never rough with me, never raised his hand. It was just a hold.
But something shifts in that grip. I look at his hand on my arm, and I feel what the ring would have represented.
I imagine what it would have looked like five years from now.
I see the slow fade, the music softening, me becoming quieter.
I see the day coming when I couldn’t remember what I sounded like when I still took up space.
“Take your hand off me.”
He doesn’t move.
“Ezra. Take. Your hand. Off me.”
He lets go and stumbles back.
And we just… stare at each other.
I once loved him. I did. I loved the man who concealed the version he’s become.
It’s jarring, the lack of feeling I have toward him now, considering I was in a wedding dress two weeks ago.
“I want you to leave,” I tell him.
“This isn’t done.”
“I want you to leave my parents’ house. Now.
I’ll arrange to get my things from the apartment.
I’ll have someone with me. You don’t need to be there.
We’re done. That’s final. If you come back here or contact me in any way I haven’t invited, I will give a very clear account of this conversation to whoever needs to hear it. ”
He stares at me, looking for an angle or a lever that hasn’t been tried. There isn’t one. He knows it, so he picks up his jacket from the back of the chair and looks at me one last time with that assessing look.
I look back.
I don’t adjust.
I stand in my parents’ kitchen in my new clothes, meet his eyes, and wait.
Then he just… walks away.
I blow out a shaky breath as the front door closes, and I hear his car go.
The cloth is still on the table, damp and slightly pink at the center. The chair is at an angle where he pushed it back. The light through the window is going amber.
I don’t know what I feel. That’s the honest answer. It’s too many things at once. Relief. Grief. The hollow that follows something you’ve been building toward for so long.
I think about Griffin. I think about his hands on my face. Don’t let him do it to you. Baby, you promised me.
I want his arms. I want to be held by Griffin Hayes, press my face into his neck, and let the hollow fill with something warm.
“Piper.”
My head snaps up to see Mom in the doorway wearing her good blue cardigan. She’s looking at me with that knowing look. Her eyes are bright, and I can see the full weight of the mother-knowledge she’s been holding.
I break. I don’t choose it. It just happens. I press my hands to my face, and the sound that comes out of me is so raw that I feel like I’m bleeding out.
She crosses the kitchen, and when her arms come around me, I fold into her the way I did when I was small. She just holds me like she used to and doesn’t say a word.
I feel more people. Arms from behind—that’s Madison. Then something warm on my other side—that’s Rowan. Dad’s hand is on the top of my head.
I break fully. I cry for the dress that wasn’t mine, and the music that went quiet, and the years of slowly disappearing. I cry for the two weeks of coming back and the man who just left for the last time. I cry for all the things I didn’t say when I should have.
I cry because it’s over. I cry because it’s only now, in my family’s arms, that I understand how much I needed it to be.