9. Stephanie
— ? —
Stephanie
I didn’t sleep.
I lay in that cabin bed for hours, staring at the ceiling, listening to the party wind itself down on the far side of the complex.
Laughter thinning out, then a car engine turning over somewhere past the trees.
The little pinewood room held onto the smell of the day, sunscreen and citronella and the faint char of last night’s disaster, and I lay in the middle of it with my burned feet throbbing under the sheet and one thing playing on a loop in my head.
His voice.
Hi, Steph.
Two words. Two stupid words that shouldn’t have meant anything after three years of silence. He’d said them low, almost wondering, a name he’d stopped letting himself say. The wonder in them, more than the words, burrowed under my skin and refused to leave.
I turned over. Punched the pillow into a shape my neck hated. Turned back.
The cabin had a ceiling fan that ticked once every rotation, a tiny catch in the bearing, and I’d started counting the ticks around two in the morning and lost the count somewhere in the dark without meaning to stop.
My whole body was tired in the leaden way that has nothing to do with sleep.
My feet stung under the sheet where the gauze pulled at the blisters, and every time I shifted to get comfortable, the tape reminded me who’d wrapped them.
Steady hands. That quiet frown he wore when he concentrated.
He hadn’t asked permission before he knelt down in front of me and lifted my heel into his hands.
He’d just done it, the way he’d once done everything for me before he decided a clinic mattered more.
Yes, three years. Yes, divorced. No, I did NOT want him back.
I had divorced him for a ton of reasons, and I could recite them in my sleep because I’d had to, for months, to keep from crawling backward.
The neglect that had hollowed out our marriage one canceled dinner at a time, the loneliness of a house too big for one person who technically had a husband.
And under all of it, the night I lost our baby on the stairs while he sat in a restaurant with his phone face-down and set to silent.
Those reasons hadn’t evaporated because he’d carried me across a lawn and taped gauze to the soles of my feet with a doctor’s careful hands.
But none of those reasons was him lacking beauty, obviously.
He was still hot as hell. Maybe hotter, which felt deeply unfair, cosmically unjust, the kind of thing you’d file a complaint about if there were an office for it.
The longer hair suited him. It made him look younger, less like the man who used to knot his tie in the mirror before he’d say good morning to me.
And his body had changed too. Bigger through the shoulders.
Cut in a way he hadn’t been. I’d felt it when he lifted me last night, the solid wall of him under a thin cotton shirt, and I’d spent the whole short walk to my cabin pretending I hadn’t.
And those tattoos.
I groaned and pressed my face into the pillow until I saw sparks.
I hadn’t gotten a real look at them. Only glimpses, dark lines vanishing under a rolled cuff, curling around one forearm when he reached to steady me. Kevin Coleman, who used to iron his jeans and alphabetize his bookshelves by author and then, God help us, by publication year, had gotten tattoos.
Multiple tattoos.
What else had changed about him?
No. Stop it. I didn’t care what had changed about him.
I was over him. I’d moved on, built a whole life in Boston that didn’t have his name anywhere in it, and one weekend on Nantucket wasn’t going to undo three years of work I’d bled for in a therapist’s chair and on my sister-in-law’s couch and alone at two in the morning more times than I’d admit.
I sat up and swung my legs over the side of the bed, and the cool board floor was a small mercy against my soles.
My reflection ghosted in the dark window, hair a disaster, eyes bruised from no sleep.
I’d come to this island for one woman’s birthday and a weekend of pretending I was fine, and I’d managed to catch fire, sprain my dignity, and lie awake reciting the greatest hits of my own heartbreak. Stellar work, Steph. Top marks.
I needed a cold shower.
Actually, scratch that. I needed the pool.
The clock on the nightstand glowed 5:47. Early enough that the whole complex would still be sleeping off its champagne. I could have the water to myself, swim until my head went quiet, and be back in my cabin before anyone poured a first cup of coffee.
I dug my bikini out of the suitcase I still hadn’t unpacked, because unpacking would’ve meant admitting I was staying. Black, plain, cut for actual laps and not for being looked at. I pulled it on without checking the mirror, grabbed a towel off the rack, and slipped out into the morning.
The morning was almost obscene, it was so pretty.
Cool and hushed, the sky going pink and gold at the edges.
Dew beaded on the grass and soaked the hem of the path.
Birds were carrying on in the scrub pines like they’d invented the day.
If I hadn’t been sleep-starved and emotionally compromised, I might have stopped to enjoy it.
The pool sat behind the main house, tucked past a low hedge and a rack of rolled towels. I followed the stone path, my bare feet stinging on the cold wet grass where the burns had blistered, and rounded the corner.
I stopped dead.
Someone was already in the water.
A man, swimming laps with long, efficient strokes that barely broke the surface. His back was to me, broad and moving, ink dark against wet skin. I watched him reach the far wall, tuck, flip, push off in one clean motion. He surfaced with water sheeting off his shoulders.
Who’s that? my brain offered, unhelpful and treacherous. He looks yummy.
Then he turned.
Kevin.
Holy shit.
His eyes found mine across fifty feet of chlorinated blue, and for a beat neither of us moved. Water ran off his hair, down his face and throat and over a chest that was very defined and very tattooed and very much not helping my resolve.
“Good morning,” I managed.
He swiped water from his eyes with the back of one hand. “Oh. Um.” He cleared his throat. “Good morning.”
A pause. Awkward didn’t come close.
“I thought the pool was empty,” I said.
“I thought the same.” He was already stroking toward the ladder. “I usually get up early. Old habit.”
I nodded and worked very hard at not staring while he hauled himself out, the muscles in his back and arms shifting under all that ink.
He’d always been in shape, always been the man who ran before sunrise and knew the macros of his own breakfast. This was past that.
Three years of whatever he’d been doing, and whatever he’d been doing had worked.
The tattoos wrapped his forearms and climbed over his biceps. More of them curved up out of the waistband of his trunks and over his ribs, dark and deliberate. He’d had none of this when we were married. Not one line. He looked remade.
Seemed unfair, frankly.
One of the tattoos on his forearm resolved as he lifted his arm to wring out his hair.
It wasn’t a design or a ship’s anchor. It was words, small careful script I couldn’t read from here, running down the inside of his wrist toward his palm.
He’d inked words onto himself where he’d see it every time he checked his watch.
I looked away before I could start wondering what it said, because wondering was a door and I had no intention of opening it.
He grabbed a t-shirt off a lounge chair and pulled it on. The cotton went instantly transparent against his wet skin, which wasn’t much of an improvement, but at least I could stop counting tattoos.
“All yours,” he said, tipping his chin at the pool.
“You didn’t have to get out.”
“It’s okay. I was getting hungry anyway.” He toweled his hair, then dropped the towel around his neck and held onto both ends. “Stay. Enjoy the water.”
I nodded, and the words I meant to say dissolved somewhere behind my teeth.
The low sun had gotten into his eyes and turned them nearly silver instead of their usual pale blue.
I’d fallen for those eyes at twenty, that summer at my mother’s house with Hugo talking over both of us.
I’d watched them while he promised, at the altar and after it, to protect our time and to show up.
I remembered watching my phone while he didn’t answer. Eleven times in a row.
“Hey,” he said.
I looked up. He was studying me with a look I couldn’t name. Nervous, or hopeful, or both stacked on top of each other.
“I just-” He cleared his throat. His gaze dropped down my body for less than a second before it snapped back up to my face, and he had the grace to look caught. “If you want, we could talk. About the past.”
Every muscle in me locked.
“There are things I’d like to say,” he went on, careful, laying each word down soft. “And things I’d like to hear from your side. If you’re open to it.”
I stood there in my plain black bikini, exposed in more ways than the obvious one, and felt three years press down on my shoulders.
The words we never got to. The questions I’d sworn I’d never ask because asking would mean I still wondered.
The closure I’d told everyone, including myself, that I didn’t need.
“There’s nothing to say that a phone call couldn’t have covered three years ago.” It came out sharper than I meant it, and I watched it land. “Oh. Right. You don’t answer those.”
It hit him. I saw it go in, saw the flinch he didn’t bother to hide, and for one second the careful, rehearsed calm cracked and the raw thing underneath it showed through.
“That’s not fair,” he said, and his voice wasn’t soft anymore.
“You want to hand me that one across a pool like it’s a coaster.
Fine. I’ll take it. I’ll take it every day for the rest of my life.
But don’t pretend there’s nothing to talk about when there’s a whole dead child between us that neither of us has ever once said out loud to the other. ”
The word child hit me open-handed. Alex. He’d said it, or almost, closer than either of us ever had, and the whole pool deck seemed to tilt.
“Don’t,” I breathed. “Don’t you dare use them to win an argument.”
“I’m not trying to win.” He dragged a hand down his face, and just like that the anger drained out of him and left worse behind it, tired and wrecked. “God. I’m sorry. That’s exactly the thing I promised myself I wouldn’t do.”
We stared at each other. The air between us had gone thick and warm and heavy with everything we’d buried. My heart was going too fast, and there it was again, the old ache low in my chest, the one I’d spent three years learning to breathe around.
“I don’t know if I can relive all of that,” I murmured. The sadness climbed my throat, close to spilling. “I don’t know if I can go back there.”
He nodded. His face changed, the hope folding down into resignation, quiet but not shocked, a man who’d braced for exactly this.
“I understand,” he said. “Of course. If you change your mind, just tell me.”
He turned and walked away.
I watched his broad back get smaller, watched the towel swing at his neck, watched him round the corner of the main house and disappear. And a low, awful certainty rose up out of my stomach, the sense that some load-bearing piece of me was leaving with him.
Call him back, it said. Tell him to stay. Tell him you’ve got questions too, and things you never got to say, and wounds that still won’t close.
Stupid thought.
I dropped my towel on the nearest chair and dove.
The water was cold, colder than it had any right to be, and I gasped a mouthful of it as it closed over me. I kicked deeper, letting the chill scrub everything else off. The silver of his eyes and the soft catch in his voice. The way my idiot heart had stumbled when he said my name.
I stayed under until my lungs went to fire. Until the wanting thinned out and there was nothing left in my skull but the press of the water and my body’s plain animal need for air.
Don’t drown, I told myself when I surfaced, sucking wind. That’s your one job. Don’t drown.
I swam laps until my arms quit arguing and just ached. Until I was too tired to feel much of anything past the tired. The sun climbed. The sky turned from pink to a hard clean blue, and the complex started to stir, a door here, a voice there, someone laughing at the far end of the lawn.
I kept swimming anyway. Back and forth. Back and forth. Trying to outrun three years inside a rectangle fifty feet long.
It wasn’t working.
The chlorine had gotten into the back of my throat and my eyes had that raw swum-out feeling, and still I couldn’t make myself climb out.
Out there was the deck, and the towels, and the long walk back past the main house where he might be sitting on some porch step with his coffee, watching the water he’d given up to me.
In here it was just cold and quiet and the muffled thud of my own pulse.
I flipped onto my back and floated, arms out, staring up at a sky without a single cloud in it, and thought about his face when I shut him down. The way he’d nodded. The way he’d taken it and left, no argument, no schedule, no telling me what we needed to discuss and by when.
That wasn’t the Kevin I’d divorced. The Kevin I’d divorced would have pressed. He’d have booked the conversation and cleared his calendar and treated my grief as an obstacle to be managed rather than a boundary he had any duty to respect.
He’d changed, Tris kept saying. Worked on himself. A lot.
Maybe. Maybe the man who’d just walked off wasn’t the same man who’d let his phone ring while I bled on our stairs and called for him into an empty house.
But did it matter?
Did any amount of change erase what he’d done? Did therapy and early mornings and a chest full of new ink mean I owed him forgiveness, or a reopened wound, or one single inch of the ground I’d fought so hard to stand on?
I didn’t know.
I didn’t know anything except that I was cold and wrung out, my feet still throbbed where the fire had kissed them, and I had a whole weekend of this in front of me.
One weekend. That’s all Tris had promised. Just one.
I could survive one weekend.
Probably.
I let my feet drop and stood in the shallow end, water sheeting off me, and made myself say the true thing where only the pool could hear it.
I wasn’t afraid of getting through the weekend.
I was afraid of what I’d already felt in the first eight hours of it, the thing that had stuttered in my chest when he said my name.
Because if a hello could do that, three days of him would finish me. And I had seventy more hours to go.