Chapter 17
Fiona had her hands in soapy water, washing last night's dishes, when she heard a knock. She dried her hands on the dish towel and crossed the small front room of Sea Glass Cottage, not hurrying. Probably Winnie, dropping off a treat. Winnie was always bringing her food.
She opened the door.
Winnie stood on the step. And beside her, half a head taller, in a pressed blue shirt the exact shade she'd seen a hundred times, stood Drake.
For a second her brain wouldn't process what she was seeing. Wouldn't make the two facts fit. Winnie. Drake. Here. On her porch. At the same time.
The dish towel was still in her hand. She was gripping it, she realized, the way you grip a railing. Her whole body had gone still and cold, the way a pond goes still right before the ice. Some far-off, useless part of her noticed her heart was going much too fast.
"He says he's your husband," Winnie said.
The words hung on the porch, taunting her. Accusing her.
Husband. She opened her mouth but no words came out.
There was a whole tangle of things that needed saying, and not one of them came.
Ex. The man who said. The man who left her.
She reached for the start of a sentence and there wasn't one.
Heat climbed her neck and into her face, the slow burn of being caught at something, though she hadn't done anything.
She'd just been standing in her own doorway with dish soap drying on her wrists.
"He's Drake," she finally said.
That was all. Just his name, like that explained anything. Like it explained the months, the papers, the drive across three states to a town nobody back home had heard of.
Winnie looked at her. A long look, that asked a question. Her eyes went from Fiona to Drake and back. Whatever she saw on Fiona's face, she didn't push.
"Well," Winnie said. "I'll let you two talk."
And she went, down the porch steps and along the shell path, and she didn't look back. Fiona wished she would. Wished it hard, for one foolish second. Come back. Stay. Don't leave me standing here with him.
But Winnie was already gone, growing smaller against the dune grass, and there was nothing to do but turn and face the man on her step.
"Fee." Drake's voice, soft. Nobody else called her that. "Can I come in?"
She stepped back from the door. Why was she letting him in? But her body just did it, the old habit of making room for him, and there he was, inside the cottage, taking up more space than the cottage had.
He'd always done that. Filled a room until there wasn't quite enough air left for her in it. She'd forgotten, somehow, in the months of small quiet rooms that were only hers. Now she remembered all at once, the way her shoulders crept up, the way she found herself standing closer to the wall.
"You found me," she said.
"It wasn't easy." He smiled. That smile. The one that used to undo her in a parking lot, in a crowded room, across a dinner table when she was angry and trying to stay angry. "You really went and disappeared, didn't you?"
"That was sort of the point."
He laughed, low, and looked around the room.
At the secondhand sofa. The jar of sea glass on the sill.
The mismatched mugs. She watched him take it in and waited for the thing he always did, the little comment, or the eyebrow raise.
He didn't do it. He just nodded, like the place was fine. Like she'd done fine.
"It's good," he said. "It suits you."
A small warmth moved through her before she could stop it, and she hated that it did.
Hated that his approval still could do that to her.
She'd built this whole life with no help from him.
Chosen every mismatched mug. And one nod from him and some hungry part of her sat up like a dog at the door.
She turned the warmth over and found the shame underneath it, exactly where she'd left it.
"Why are you here, Drake?"
He turned and faced her full on. The smile went, and something more careful came in behind it. He'd practiced this. She could tell. He'd practiced it in the car.
"I made a mistake," he said. "A terrible one. I've known it for a while, and I kept telling myself you'd be better off, and then I couldn't tell myself that anymore." He took a breath. "I let you go and it was the dumbest thing I've ever done. I want to try again. I want us again. I want you, Fee."
I want you.
The words went straight through her, past every guard she thought she'd built, all the way down to the place she'd been pretending wasn't there.
Because here was the thing. Here was the rotten, pathetic truth. This was the same man who'd told her, with the dishes drying and the TV murmuring in the other room, that she wasn't enough. And that was the message she'd packed into a suitcase and driven away with. She was not enough.
She'd carried it so long it had stopped feeling like his voice and started feeling like the truth. Like weather. Like something that had always been there.
And now he stood in her living room and said he wanted her.
So maybe she wasn't a failure. Maybe, if the man who'd decided she wasn't enough had traveled all the way here to take it back, then she'd been worth something the whole time. Maybe she was worthy. Maybe—
She caught herself. Stop it. Stop reaching.
But it was already happening, the reaching, fast and quiet and underneath everything, the way water finds the lowest place. She could feel herself tilting toward him and the awful, sweet relief he was holding out. Here. You can have it back. You can stop wondering.
"You said—" She stopped. Started over. "You made it pretty clear how you felt. Before."
"I was wrong." He said it fast, like he'd been waiting for it. "I was scared. I was stupid and I said things I didn't mean."
"Some of them you meant."
He didn't argue. Give him that, at least. He just stood there with his hands a little open at his sides and let her look at him.
And she wanted to believe him. That was the part that scared her. Not him. Her. The eagerness of her own heart to be told it was good enough. The way it leaned toward him like a plant toward the sun.
"I don't know what to say," she said.
"You don't have to say anything tonight."
"I'm not going to."
"Okay." He nodded. "Okay. That's fair."
"I need to think. I need to actually think, Drake. Not just here, with you standing there saying all the right things."
A flicker of something crossed his face. She couldn't tell if it was hurt or strategy. Once she'd been able to read him like the front page. Now she wasn't sure she'd ever read him at all.
"I'm staying in town," he said. "There's a little hotel by the water. The Tides Inn?" He said it like a question, like she'd know it. She did. She'd walked past it a dozen times. "I'll be there a few days. Take your time. I just… I just needed you to know."
He moved toward the door, and at the last second he stopped close to her, closer than friends stand, and for one breath she thought he might reach for her hand. He didn't. Maybe he knew better. Maybe that was some kind of strategy too.
"It's really good to see you, Fee," he said. His hand came out. Close to her face. She didn't know if she wanted to jerk back or lean into it, and that annoyed her. Annoyed her a lot.
He dropped his hand and then he was gone, down the steps and along the path Winnie had taken, and the door clicked shut, and the cottage was hers again.
Except it didn't feel like hers.
It felt like he'd left something behind in it. Not something she could pick up and set outside. Just a charge in the air, the way a room feels after an argument or a phone call you didn't want. She stood in the middle of her own front room and didn't know where to put herself.
She made it to the porch on legs that didn't entirely belong to her and sat down hard in the old Adirondack chair by the rail. Out past the dune grass the Gulf rolled to shore, oblivious to her emotions.
Her hands were shaking.
She pressed them against the arms of the chair to make them stop and they didn't stop.
She knew this feeling. That was the awful part.
She knew it instantly. The fast pull of her own heart toward anyone who'd tell her she was fine.
She was fine. She'd been fine for months, hadn't she?
She smiled at the women in the checkout line back home, told her mother on the phone that everything was great, told herself in the bathroom mirror that she was fine.
Fine, fine, fine. Until the word lost all its meaning and became just a sound her mouth made.
And here it was again. The reaching. The same desperate reach for someone to hand her the worth she couldn't seem to hold on her own.
The terrible part wasn't that he'd come.
The terrible part was how much of her wanted to say yes.
Not because she missed him. She'd searched and searched and she didn't think she did.
But because yes was easy, and yes meant the question got answered, and she was so tired of being the only one who got to decide whether she was enough.
But seeing something and stopping it were two different things, and she of all people knew that.
What was she supposed to do now?