Chapter Thirty-Three Sienna #2
By noon, I realize I’m famished, which is a welcome sensation, knowing that my appetite is returning to normal. Compared with my husband’s cooking, the food on the tray is below par to say the least, but I enjoy it, nonetheless.
As soon as I’m done, Nurse Melanie walks in. She’s young and fit, and I suspect, by the look of her biceps and quads, she lifts weights.
“Time to go for a walk.” She lowers the side rail on my bed. “It’s the best thing for you right now, to get moving again.”
I eagerly toss the covers aside because I want to get better so that I can go home. Besides that, her enthusiasm is contagious.
I’m on my second lap around the ward when I glance at a clock and notice it’s past one o’clock.
I recall that Nate promised to be back before lunch, and again, I find myself leaning into old insecurities.
With every passing moment, I feel more and more certain that he’s gone to the restaurant and gotten himself caught up in something.
But then I hear his jovial voice behind me. “Look at you!” He appears at my side, freshly showered and dressed in a clean pair of jeans and the off-white fisherman’s knit sweater I gave him for Christmas a few years ago.
He kisses me, and his cheek is smooth. He smells of shaving soap.
“Sorry I’m late, but I went to the mall to get you a new phone.
” He raises a small reusable shopping bag.
“I set you up with a better plan than before, and I also got new phones for the kids. Believe it or not, it’ll be even cheaper than before. ”
I blink a few times in astonishment. “You’re joking. They’ll be ecstatic.”
“Maybe it’ll earn me some points with them.”
“Oh, it will.” We start walking slowly while I wheel the IV pole beside me. “Thank you so much for doing that. I’ll be glad to have a phone again so I can keep in touch with them.”
“And your husband,” Nate reminds me.
“Of course. You too.”
An alarm goes off in one of the rooms, and a nurse exits a different room to attend to it. After she passes us, Nate says, “I didn’t go to the restaurant, but I was on my phone a lot in the mall, dealing with stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?” I ask.
He halts abruptly, meeting my gaze head-on. “Martina emailed me her resignation.”
Stunned, I freeze mid-step. “She did what? Did she at least give you two weeks’ notice?”
“No, but it’s fine,” he replies and drops his gaze to the floor. “Maybe this is a sign that I should take some time off and keep the restaurant closed. Maybe indefinitely. I don’t know yet. All I know is that I want to focus on us.”
My thoughts flash back to the early years of our relationship, when we were young and madly in love. We bonded over our dreams and ambitions. He supported me in mine, and I supported him in his. We were a great team. Until we weren’t.
“Why did she quit?” I ask, curious about her email.
“Because she’s a spoiled diva,” Nate replies.
I can’t help but laugh with satisfaction, hearing him say this. “Please, give me the dirt.”
Nate’s lips curl into a smile. “If I must . . . when she announced her resignation on the group chat, a few of the employees sent me private messages, saying they were happy to see her go. Graham called her a manipulative attention-seeker, and one of the bartenders said she always had to be in the spotlight and that she took credit for other people’s accomplishments. ”
“Interesting,” I say. “But why did she quit?”
Nate holds nothing back. “Because I called her last night and asked that she keep to a professional tone with her texts, and to not use heart emojis. I didn’t threaten to fire her or anything. I just wanted her to stop doing that. But I guess she was offended.”
I hate to admit it, but this news gives me immense pleasure. “She packed up her toys and stormed off?”
“Pretty much.” Nate and I start walking again. “Now I’m without a house manager.”
“I could do that job, you know,” I tell him. “I know how to run a business, and the kids are more independent now. It might be good for me to get out there in the world again. And good for us.”
He nods nostalgically. “We always did make a good team.”
We stroll the hospital corridor in silence for a while, and I think of everything we’ve been through over the past few days.
“I need to tell you something,” I say.
Nate regards me with a serious expression.
“I’m not sure if Amanda told you about this,” I continue, “but when I was in the water . . . or after that . . . I don’t know exactly . . . I had a near-death experience.”
Nate stops short. A deep crease forms between his brows. “Oh, my God. What happened?”
I shrug because it’s impossible to explain, but I start walking again and do my best. “After I drowned, I saw a light at the water’s surface, and I swam toward it.”
He slowly digests this.
“It felt very real,” I continue, “but now that I’m back here, it feels like a dream. But it was a good dream.”
Head down, he nods. “What else happened? What was it like?”
I’m starting to feel tired, so I gesture toward my room. “Let’s go back. I need to lie down. Then I’ll tell you the rest.”
He escorts me down the hall and helps me into bed, tucks the thin blanket around me, and pulls a chair close.
“Did you see Jacob?” he asks.
I’m not surprised by the question because my husband of many years knows all the depths of my soul. Nothing, not even our recent differences, can erase that. “Yes.”
He nods with understanding, but I sense a fear in him.
I tip my head back on the pillow and stare up at the ceiling, and all at once, I’m back there in my imagination, in Jacob’s kitchen. I hear his voice in my head.
We definitely would have had disagreements .
. . No one is perfect. Some of us get banged up pretty badly in life, and it’s not easy to recover .
. . It’s how we learn and grow. But growth is in the healing.
That’s the whole point of living—to learn how to forgive each other for our trespasses, and how to be kind, and find joy together, even through our differences.
“It was nice to see him,” I admit. “But it made me realize that my life with you has been so much more than a brief spark of first love. You’ve loved me for two decades, and you’ve given me children.
We bought a house together and built two businesses.
Our life has been full of highs and lows, but you’ve always been there, in for the long haul.
So now, I want you to know that if I ever made you feel like I was comparing you to Jacob, or if you felt like you couldn’t compete with a ghost, I’m sorry.
I never wanted you to think you weren’t good enough or that you didn’t measure up to some impossible standard.
You got enough of that from your father. ”
Nate sits forward and rests his elbows on his knees. “I did sometimes feel like you were holding on to him, that you thought he could do no wrong.”
“He couldn’t,” I reply. “Because he didn’t live long enough to make any mistakes. But he would have made plenty, I’m sure, if he’d survived.”
I glance at the sky outside the large window. The sun is just moving into view. It’s going to be blinding in the next few minutes.
“Something else I’ve learned from this,” I say, meeting Nate’s gaze, “is how trauma can push you off your path and take away your faith in good outcomes. I think I was always waiting for the other shoe to drop with you, and when you got busy with the restaurant, I latched on to that as the beginning of the end. I imagined us falling off a cliff.”
Nate steeples his fingers and presses them to his forehead. “Funny. When you first mentioned trauma, I thought you were referring to me and my relationship with my father—how that planted an expectation of failure in me. But you’re talking about your fall from Cape Split.”
“Yes, but it’s no different from what you went through as a child. Trauma put fear in both of us, I think. And on the day you missed my father’s funeral, for me, it felt like the beginning of the earth collapsing.”
Nate hangs his head low. “I’m so sorry. If it helps you to know, I’ve always regretted that. I should have been there.”
Another alarm goes off in the room across the hall. No one comes to answer it, and we sit uneasily, listening and watching, until it finally stops chiming.
Nate says something out of the blue. “I think I should see a therapist.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” he replies. “I think I might actually enjoy trash-talking my dad with someone who’s willing to listen for a full hour.”
I laugh. “I’d be more than willing to listen to you trash-talk your dad. You wouldn’t even have to pay me.”
He smiles. “Yes, but you’ve already heard it all. I think I need fresh ears.”
I nod approvingly. “Then let’s look into that.”
His phone chimes, and he pulls it out of his back pocket. “It’s Connor. Oh, wow.”
“What is it?”
Nate reads, taps, and scrolls. “The video of you getting swept off the rocks is everywhere. It’s on CBC, Fox, and CNN. Even the BBC.” He swipes and scrolls some more, then rises from the chair to show me his screen.
We watch and listen to a panel of experts on one of the news channels.
They’re discussing how social media groups can become pitchfork mobs.
They refer to Nate’s arrest and show photos of the Oblique website and Nate in his chef’s uniform, leaning confidently over the stainless steel worktable in the kitchen.
“Babe, you’ve gone global.”
Nate shakes his head in disbelief. “But they’re showing my perp walk. God, I’m in handcuffs. This is terrible.”
“But justice prevailed,” I remind him.
His phone rings, and he checks the call display.
“It’s Graham.” He accepts the call. “Hello? Hey.” Nate wanders away from the bed and stands at the window.
“Really? Wow. No, I don’t think I can do that.
” He looks back at me. “I really need some time off.” He listens, his eyes trained on mine.
“Yeah, that’s great. It’s really good news, but let’s just take some time to regroup, okay?
” He pauses. “Sure. Yes, I agree. I just . . . I’m not right in the head yet. Thanks. We’ll talk more tomorrow.”
Nate ends the call and stares at his phone for a few seconds.
“What’s happening?” I ask.
He returns to his chair, takes my hand, and kisses it, yet again. “Nothing. Just a bunch of phone calls about when the restaurant will reopen.”
“Phone calls from who?”
“Reservation requests,” he explains, “and some reporters.”
I feel a rise of excitement in my chest, and I lay my hand on his cheek. “Sweetheart . . . this could be huge for you. You should go.”
He blinks a few times, looking confused.
I smile warmly and feel goose bumps all over my body.
This is his dream, and I’ve wanted it for him since the first time we met.
It hasn’t always been easy, climbing this hill, but he supported my dreams with my business, and he gave me two beautiful children.
It’s his turn now, and he needs to take it while the stars are aligning.
“Babe, go open your restaurant,” I say. “I want you to. You have to go and milk this publicity for all it’s worth.”
He stares at me and slowly processes my words. Then a smile spreads across his face. He rises from the chair, and I sit up as he bends to kiss me on the mouth.
“I love you,” he says.
“I love you too.”
As he backs away and grabs his jacket off the chair, I feel a lightness in my bones, a glowing sense that all is right with the world.
“Whatever happens,” he says, “I just want you to know . . .”
I wait with bated breath for him to finish that thought.
“It’s all for you. Everything I am and everything I do, from this day forward, is for you.”
I feel like I’m dreaming. Happiness bubbles up in me—not a fleeting, surface-level joy, but a quiet and profound contentment that fills every space inside of me.
It’s a feeling of being whole, of knowing, at last, that everything was always meant to be just as it is.
There is no more longing, no more searching, no more aching for what was or what could have been. I want only what I have, here and now.
I want Nate.