Chapter 9
I don’t know what to say to Noah as he watches me.
He owes me an apology—I’m sure I heard him right.
He remembers the exchange? That was like thirteen years ago.
I don’t want to condone the actions that had set me off, or the emails we exchanged, but is, “it’s okay,” the right response?
I find that I don’t have a response.
Because it seems to keep him calm, he sips his water again. “Thirteen years ago Abby got her first diagnosis,” he says and his words pierce my chest.
“Abby was your wife?”
He nods and sips from his water again, only now the glass is empty and he stares at it as if his vice is now his nemesis.
“Stage four breast cancer. Things didn’t look good from the start.
The day I cancelled the signing was the day they rushed her into surgery.
” His voice hitches, and the need to move around the table and pull the man into me is nearly consuming.
But I sit across from him and watch as he busies himself with his napkin now that his water is empty.
“Anyway, it was unprofessional and so were my emails that followed.”
I reach across the table to capture his hand in mine. I can’t help myself. “I didn’t know.”
“Of course you didn’t. I was devastated, and you got the fallout. I didn’t even realize I hadn’t told you, I just became this angry monster.”
“You deserved to be,” I defend him and he shakes his head.
“No. I didn’t. I deserved to be upset and angry, and I was all of those things. I didn’t need to be nasty, but it just didn’t occur to me.”
“Thank you for the apology. I’m sorry you carried it with you for so long.”
He gives my hand a squeeze and pulls back as the server delivers our food.
When the server steps away, Noah lays his napkin in his lap. “I’ve created quite a reputation for myself that I’m a tad grumpy.”
I do everything I can to control my face. Yes, that reputation precedes him, but now I wonder if I can fix that. I don’t know why I’d even want to take on that mission, but something inside of me wants to.
Picking up my fork and twirling it into my pasta, I look up at the man across from me, still obviously very broken. “Katie said your wife only died eight years ago?”
He nods as he cuts into one of his raviolis. “I got five more years with her. I’d like to say they were happy and it was a blessing, but it wasn’t. That fucking cancer ate at her for five years. Five fucking years.”
Every word is filled with anger, and that pull to him is even stronger.
“I’m so sorry,” I say, and I realize then that I’m crying when I hear it in my voice.
I set down my fork and lift my napkin to my eyes and dab.
Noah lifts his gaze up to me. “This night took a turn, huh?”
“Thank you for trusting me with all of this. It means a lot.”
“Yeah, but I think it all started when I asked you about your ex.”
I fill my mouth with pasta to stifle my laugh. I chew, swallow, and wipe my mouth before I reply.
“I certainly didn’t feel the same kind of love for my ex as you did for your wife,” I say, because that came across when he talked about her.
“I assume when you say ex, you mean husband? I know you were high school sweethearts,” he reminds me where we left off when we started talking about New York.
“Yep,” I pick up my water and sip, signaling the server when he looks in my direction to let him know we need more water. “We got back together after he got home from college and I got back from New York, the first time. Then we got married,” I say as the server returns to fill our water.
We thank him, and Noah rests his arms on the table and leans in on them. His subtle way of telling me to continue, I suppose.
“I thought it felt perfectly normal when I’d go back out to New York to spend weeks, months at a time to help Lily when she had a baby, and I’d help my aunt at the store. But I realized, later, that it wasn’t normal, it was necessary.”
“Necessary?”
“Didn’t you ever need a break from your wife?”
He shakes his head. “No.”
“Oh. Well …” That stops me, so I take a bite of my dinner.
He doesn’t move from his interested perch. He waits.
I’ve seen this with authors before. The reason they’re good at what they do is because they enjoy watching people.
Every motion, every word feeds into their character building, even if they don’t mean to do it in the moment.
They write human emotion, and what’s more raw than someone telling you about their wife dying or the end of a marriage.
“Sean just wasn’t ticking all the boxes I needed emotionally. He never really did. He was just comfort,” I say, and lift my glass and sip my water.
“That’s understandable.”
“Maybe. It was still selling myself short to marry him,” I say honestly as I set my glass back on the table and pick up my fork. “He was a good enough guy, until he wasn’t.”
“And this is the meat of the story,” he says easing back in the booth and crossing his arms in front of himself again.
“Are you just listening to my back story looking to add it to a book?” I accuse him and his eyes go wide.
“I didn’t mean that?—”
“I’m sorry. That was crappy,” I say, taking a bite of my dinner.
He watches me with even more interest now, as if my accusation didn’t ruffle any of his feathers.
He eases back toward the table and picks up his fork, scooping up a ravioli. “I enjoy getting to know people. That’s the honest truth.”
“How do you do that when you yourself said you don’t get out much?”
“Well, I badger them when I do get around them. Just like I’m doing with you,” he says and I laugh.
“Great people skills,” I reply.
“I’ve never been accused of having those.”
That has me laughing more as I load up my fork again and shove a bite into my mouth.
There is a smile that crosses Noah Carter’s face when he’s pleased with himself, and poking fun of himself is one of the ways he does that, I’ve noticed.
“Why did you find it necessary to spend time away from your husband?” he asks when we’ve settled, drawing me back to my story.
“He was a narcissist.” I set down my fork and pick up my water. “I thought that since his parents were narcissists, it was just something that could be worked around. I mean, he never had a chance, right?”
I sip my water and set the glass back on the table.
“He’d tell me I should go to New York to help Lily.
Then he’d spend the whole time I was gone letting me know how unfair it was for me to travel without him.
” I wave my hand in the air. His flaws were just something I didn’t want to get into.
“Anyway. He was bad for me. He was bad for himself. I’m just glad it didn’t work out for us to have kids.
No matter how devastating my few miscarriages were, I came to understand there was a reason a baby wasn’t born in that marriage.
I guess the solace is there aren’t more genetically narcissistic people in the world because of me. ”
“That’s pretty deep,” Noah says, studying me.
“It’s how I coped.”
“I’m sorry for your losses.”
I feel that in my chest. It’s an ache that I haven’t visited in a very long time, but with Noah’s condolences, it’s back. Though, it’s not the same. He genuinely knows loss, and his words give me comfort.
Deciding that the conversation needs to just wrap up, I continue.
“Eventually, the story goes along that I wasn’t enough for him and he left me for someone else.
By the time they’d gotten involved, I was disillusioned, and I don’t think I even cared.
It was a good reason to get out of a marriage that didn’t bring me joy and didn’t serve me in any way.
I was happier across the country working in my aunt’s bookstore and dealing with moody authors,” I add the jab, and he chuckles at it.
“It was fulfilling enough work that you thought you’d open your own store, with a similar name, so that you could have one on one time with moody authors on your own turf?”
“That was my driving force,” I say. “I knew that one day I could convince one of them to fix my office door, and they’d be charming enough to get a free back-room brownie from Mrs. Packer,” I tease and he snorts out a laugh.
“Don’t let that get in the wrong hands,” he says.
I watch the stiffness in Noah soften. Perhaps we’ve given one another a tiny piece of ourselves and that’s worth something.
He’s someone who is broken from watching a horrible disease take the love of his life.
I’m someone who has yet to find the love of my life.
My story is a basic story of greed, really.
I wanted a family, but my body wouldn’t allow that.
I wanted a husband, but I wanted to be free to do what I loved to do.
He was free to do who he wanted to do. Now I’m free to live out my dreams in a cozy bookstore where brooding authors fix my office door, share stories with me, and remind me that I have a pot brownie under the counter.
Though I was going to give it to Lily, now I think I’ll make sure it goes into the refrigerator for later.
That might be just what I need with Noah Carter around.