Chapter 31
Chapter
Thirty-One
STEFAN
“I thought you were coming home tomorrow,” Amelie said, and her voice came down the hall ahead of her, bright, warm, lifted at the edges in a way I hadn’t heard it aimed at me in longer than I wanted to count. “Did your meeting get canceled—”
She came around the corner already smiling.
A real one, the kind that took over her whole face, the kind I’d married her for.
She was barefoot in yoga pants and a blue tank top, her hair down and damp at the ends, and for one suspended second, she was the homecoming I’d rehearsed on the plane, flying toward me across the warm light of a room that looked exactly like the room where I’d fallen in love with her.
I didn’t even think. I crossed the distance and caught her face in both hands and kissed her.
For a heartbeat, she went still under my mouth, and I read it as surprise, as the held breath before she forgave me, and I pressed in, relieved, undone, home. I’m sorry, I tried to say into it. Baby, I’m so sorry. I’m an idiot. I’m here now, I’m—
She didn’t kiss me back.
Her hands had come up to my chest, and they weren’t pulling me in.
They were just there, flat, a polite, immovable distance, and her mouth under mine had gone careful and closed.
I pulled back far enough to see her, and the smile was gone.
Not replaced with anger, which I could’ve worked with.
Replaced with nothing I knew how to name.
Her eyes flicked past my shoulder down the empty hall, and then back to me, her expression shutting down.
I’d kissed her ten thousand times without thinking.
This was the first kiss I’d ever taken from her that felt stolen.
“Stefan.” She said my name hesitantly. “You’re back.”
“Yes. I texted you.” I was still holding her face. She didn’t return my affections, and I made myself let go.
“Oh.” She took a step back and smoothed her hair, and the gesture put more than an arm’s length between us. “How was—how was Istanbul?”
I deserved that. I’d lied about Istanbul like it was nothing, and I was going to spend a long time paying for it. So, I didn’t flinch.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I know you’re tired of hearing it, Am, but you have to know. I’m so sorry. For all of it. I thought about nothing else while I was away. Then the shoot was extended, and it was fucking hell. I should never have lied to you. I should never have—”
“You don’t have to do this.” She wasn’t cold. That was the disorienting part. Cold, I could have pushed against. She was gentle, the way you were gentle with someone you’d stopped needing anything from. “It’s fine.”
It’s fine from Amelie used to mean we were about to fight. Tonight, it meant I wasn’t worth the argument.
“It isn’t fine. Let me make it up to you. Tonight. Let me take you out, anywhere you want. How about that place by the beach that you like, just the two of us—” I heard myself speeding up in case she rejected my idea and made myself slow down. “Please. Let me take my wife to dinner.”
She looked down at her hands. “I already ate.”
“So, we’ll go out for drinks.”
“Not tonight,” she said awkwardly.
“Why not?”
“The nanny’s just about to bring the kids home from school.”
“Okay. So we’ll wait for the kids, then we’ll go on a family outing. Ice cream. They’ll love that.”
Then she did something I’d never once seen her do in seven years. She hesitated. I’d never known Amelie to turn down a family outing. It was her favorite thing in the world.
I frowned.
“I just worked a long shift. I was only staying up to tuck the kids into bed.”
“Oh. Okay,” I said slowly. “We’ll stay in tonight then and do something tomorrow.”
“Stefan… we have plans this weekend.” There it was, the thing she’d been trying to ease me toward instead of saying outright, and even then, she said it kindly. We. “Kai’s spending the night in LA because he has a meeting tomorrow morning—”
“Oh. Kai’s not home.” My relief was immediate.
“Right,” she admitted reluctantly. “I couldn’t go with him because I was working, so he wanted to do a family brunch after he drove back. Sorry. I-I haven’t checked my phone and didn’t know you’d be home this weekend.”
The sentence landed somewhere under my ribs and just sat there.
I understood, slow and stupid, that the bright voice down the hall, the real smile, the I thought you were coming home tomorrow, the jovial steps—none of it had ever been for me.
She’d heard the door and thought he had come home early.
She’d come flying up the hall like that for him.
I’d just been standing in the path of it.
My key in the front door used to pull her down a hallway exactly like that.
I knew, because I’d had years of it and never once thought it was something I could lose.
“No worries,” I said, swallowing the lump forming in my throat. “Well, if it’s a family brunch, we can have it in the dining room. Common space.” Which meant I was automatically included.
She looked down, avoiding eye contact.
“We can sort out your birthday plans then. Any special requests?”
“Er.”
What now?
“Kai’s already arranged everything.” She glanced toward the window. It was dark outside now.
“Oh.” But I had planned every one of Amelie’s birthdays since she was sixteen.
“Everyone from work is coming. Rose and Caden are flying in, too. We’re going to do a big barbecue.” Amelie loved barbecues. It was an American tradition that had endlessly fascinated her. Of course, Kai knew about it. “I hope you can make it,” she added awkwardly.
Just like that, I had received an invite to my own wife’s birthday party. I didn’t know whether the right word to describe my feelings was humbled or humiliated, or perhaps a cross between the two.
There was nothing else to say between us, just the unbearable silence of two people who had lost each other in a big house.
“The gifts,” I said, because I had to fill the silence with something, and my hands had nothing to do.
“I brought some things. For you and the kids. There’s a rug you’ll lose your mind over, and the sweets from this shop that I thought you’d like, and—” I was already half turning toward the entry where the bags were.
“Let me just grab them, and you can open them. It’ll only take a second—”
“That’s really sweet,” Amelie said. “But you don’t have to. Honestly. I’m just really tired.” She wrapped her arms around herself, not against the cold—there was no cold—against me, against the whole shape of this. “Maybe later. Okay?”
Once, I’d bought Amelie a pair of simple earrings with my hard-earned money. She tore into the box excitedly, and I still vividly remembered those shining eyes. She had called Rose to tell her all about it.
Now she said, Maybe later.
“Okay,” I said.
Just then, her phone on the kitchen counter lit up, a pale blue rectangle.
“There’s my phone.”
Amelie had never been particularly attached to her phone and had a habit of leaving it around the house. It was no wonder she hadn’t seen my text. I watched her walk over, her thumbs moving across her phone’s screen.
“Oh, I see your text now,” she said absentmindedly, scrolling through what I could only presume were the rest of her messages. “I missed a bunch of texts.”
I didn’t need to ask who had sent the other messages when I saw a small private smile tugging at her mouth. Even the inanimate house already knew the answer. But I was desperate to connect with my wife.
“Who texted you?”
“Um, it’s just—” She started to respond but forgot when another text chimed in.
“Anything important?” I asked tentatively.
“Er—” Her smile broadened when her phone vibrated once more, indicating more messages were coming through.
She finished reading through the texts and set the phone face down on the counter without responding. She probably figured it was rude to engage in a text conversation while I awkwardly watched. “Sorry, what were you saying?”
A small memory returned to me, a similar instance when the shoe was on the other foot. At that time, I had been distracted while my loving wife had desperately sought my attention. She had asked who was texting in an attempt to connect with me, and I had brushed her off just as callously.
An imaginary ice pick stabbed me in the heart. Was this the pain my wife felt all the times I ignored her?
“Don’t worry about it,” I told her. I deserved to feel the same pain that I made her feel.
I stood there in the middle of the room that was a copy of the happiest place I’d ever lived, holding nothing, while my wife waited politely for me to leave, and for the life of me, I could not think of a single thing to do.
I said the only thing I had left. “Stay with me tonight. On my side of the house.”
The change in her was immediate. She flinched slightly and tried to fold away before I could see it. Her arms tightened around herself. “Stefan, I don’t think—”
“Not like that.” I lifted both hands, palms out, the universal surrender of a man promising to behave. “I know we have things to work on and you need time… after everything. I just want to fall asleep next to my wife. That’s all. That’s still allowed, isn’t it?”
She glanced back over her shoulder, toward the warm hall behind her, toward the bedroom I now understood was theirs, and something in her expression set to work on a problem that shouldn’t have been a problem at all.
“Kai won’t be back until the morning. You said so yourself,” I pointed out, hating that I’d reached for his name to win the point. “Why can’t we stay together if he’s not even here?”
It was the wrong thing to watch land. She didn’t loosen.
If anything, hearing that he was gone made her more careful, not less, as though his absence was something she’d been left in charge of guarding rather than a door left conveniently open.
I didn’t understand it. I filed it under the long list of things about my wife I no longer seemed to understand.