Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Present Day
I t was the morning of the third day of their road trip. Victor woke up at dawn, made himself a cup of coffee in the little coffee maker, and went out on the balcony overlooking Utah's mountains. His heart felt lodged in his throat. The coffee was terrible—rancid and bitter—but he drank it because there was a slight chill in the air. He drank it because it activated his mind.
Esme’s hotel room was three doors down. He half considered knocking to see if she was awake but didn’t want to bother her. They spent more time together than they had in thirty years, and he didn’t want the result of all that “quality time” to be Esme hating him. Sometimes there was volatility in her eyes. Sometimes Victor feared she was demonizing him, thinking about the horrible things he’d done in the past and telling herself that he hadn’t grown or changed.
Victor finished his coffee and went inside to find a few missed messages from Bree. He collapsed on the edge of his bed to read them.
brEE: You haven’t been answering my messages.
brEE: I really wish you would.
brEE: I need to talk to you.
Victor hung his head in his hands. Bree’s texting the past few days had been a consistent and horribly timed reminder of the facts of Victor’s life.
He’d left his family for his secretary.
He was just like every other clichéd man in America.
Victor brewed another cup of coffee he knew he would regret and checked his email rather than writing Bree back. In it was another threatening email from the publishing house and a journalist's inquiry. She wanted to ask him about why he’d pulled the plug on his memoir. “It was a memoir slated to make millions of dollars after its publication,” the journalist wrote. “The fact that you pulled out has electrified and confounded the publishing world. Care to comment?”
Victor’s fingers throbbed. He closed his laptop.
It was nearly eight in the morning before he and Esme got on the road. Esme appeared at the van with her suitcase and said, “Yeah, yeah. I know. You’re angry that I slept in today.”
Victor raised his eyebrows. “I’m not.”
“I don’t believe you,” Esme said. “But I needed an extra hour of sleep last night. These hotel beds haven’t done me any favors.”
Victor hadn’t been sleeping well either. But it wasn’t because of the hotel beds. It was more a fact of knowing Esme was just a few doors away and that he’d sleep much better if she were breathing next to him. He’d begun to think about the next ten to twenty years of his life with a sense of dread draped across his shoulders. Coffees alone. Bedtimes alone. Waking up in the middle of the night with a terrible fear in my chest.
Esme said she was hungry an hour or so in. Victor admitted he was famished, too. They took an exit for a diner and sat in a red-cushioned booth to order pancakes, eggs, hashbrowns, and biscuits with honey. It was more food than anyone should have ever eaten at once, but Victor watched himself scrape the biscuit through the grease and egg yolks and scoop hashbrowns into his mouth like his life depended on it.
“You know what this place reminds me of?” Esme said suddenly.
Victor scrolled through his memories but couldn’t come up with any appropriate answer. “What does it remind you of?”
“That little place in Boston,” Esme said. “The diner down the road from where you lived that first summer we got together.”
The image flashed before him with remarkable detail: the quaint American diner, the couple who ran it and treated their regulars like their children because they couldn’t have any of their own.
“They used to pester us all the time,” Esme said with a laugh, “about when we were going to have children. Do you remember that? We had probably only been together a few weeks.”
“But everyone knew we were going to have children,” Victor said. “Wasn’t that plain as day?”
Esme laughed into her napkin. “Not to me, it wasn’t.”
Victor set down his fork. “I don’t believe that.”
“I had dreams for myself. Goals,” Esme insisted.
“But we were falling in love,” Victor remembered. “Remember those walks we took? What were the beers we drank at that little dive bar? Remember when I would come in to see you at the bakery, and you’d run around the counter and…”
Esme sliced the air with her hand to stop him. Silence permeated over the table.
Their server came to refill their coffees. “How are you doing over here?”
“We’re fine,” Esme said. “We’ll have the check, please.”
“I’ll be right back,” the server said.
Victor continued to watch Esme like a hawk, folding and unfolding his hands nervously. It occurred to him that he’d never asked Esme her perspective on that time of their lives. Everything had sped up after that summer: grad school around the corner, their wedding, Esme’s pregnancy, and Rebecca’s first words like a stream of colors that were difficult to make sense of. And then three more children after that. With a snap of the fingers, half his life was suddenly over.
Victor drummed up the courage to ask Esme what that had been like for her. But he was terrified of the answer. He was terrified to see himself back then too clearly. Was I a monster? He was worried the answer was yes.
So instead, he said, “I still can’t believe you ended up at Harvard.”
Esme brightened. “You didn’t think I had it in me, did you?”
“It wasn’t that,” Victor said. “It was never that.” He pressed his lips together. “I always knew you were much smarter than me. But I never knew how to handle that.”
Tears swelled in Esme’s eyes, but she blinked them away before they could fall.
“I imagine I didn’t handle it well.” Victor decided to push forward.
Esme sighed and squeezed her upper arms. The server returned with their bill, and Victor swept it away to handle it himself. But after he paid and tipped, Esme appeared behind him and said, “It wasn’t just you who didn’t believe in me. It was my stepmother. It was society. It was me, too. I let you tell me I couldn’t do it. I never should have listened to you.” Her voice wavered.
Outside, the Utah sunlight cut through bulbous clouds. The server, five feet away from them at the counter, counting her tips, raised her eyebrows. Victor sensed that she saw and heard a lot of crazy stuff at this diner.
“I wish you hadn’t listened to me,” Victor said finally. “I was an idiot.”
“But you went on to be one of the most successful men in your field,” Esme pointed out. “Doesn’t that prove something about you?”
“It proves that the world is twisted up and nonsensical,” Victor told her.
They stood like that, facing off in the foyer of the diner in the middle of nowhere. Victor’s stomach roiled. He’d eaten too many hashbrowns. He was going to regret it in an hour or two.
“I want you to tell me what it was like for you,” Victor said. “As much of it as you can stand to say aloud.”
Esme’s chin quivered. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.” Victor jangled the keys to the rental van. “We have nothing but time right now and miles to go on our journey.”
Esme’s eyes snapped. Victor had the sensation she was the prettiest woman he’d ever seen—not back then, but right now. Right now, as she touched her gray-tinged curls and bowed her head.
“I suppose I have nothing to lose anymore,” she admitted.
“None of us do,” Victor said. “Maybe it’s a blessing.”
“Or a curse,” Esme said with a sneaky smile.