Chapter Twenty-Four #2
I do the one thing guaranteed to get her to protect herself. I make myself the wall she has to push through.
“We had a good time, didn’t we?” The words taste like metal.
“We’re cutting it a little short, but we both got something out of this.
And now he’s back, and it’s not like you can let Martin keep running your company.
There’s a lot at stake, and Jameson is finally back to help you fix everything. This is how it’s meant to happen.”
She goes very still. “You don’t mean that.”
“I do.” I make my face into the one I wore in briefings when a soldier wanted a different answer than the one that would keep him alive. “This was fun. We needed it. But it doesn’t change reality. We both have jobs to do, and we need to get back to those lives.”
She flinches away from me as if I raised a hand at her. It cuts me deep. Right through the ribs.
My free hand balls into a tight fist, doing everything I can not to take every word back and wrap her in my arms, and tell her that I love her.
To tell her the truth about what I really want—”choose me, and I will do anything to make sure you never regret it.
” But she will regret it. Maybe not this year, or the next, or five years down the road, but someday, the novelty of being with me will wear off.
She’ll resent me and the life we have, and then someday, she’ll leave.
It might as well be today before I’ve given her everything I have left.
The man in the doorway is a trust with her name on one check and her father’s on another and a board waiting to eat my girl for breakfast if she hesitates.
This is protection. This is love, even if it all feels like I’m going against my own DNA. Against every cell in my body.
“Go,” I say again, softer, trying to make it hurt her less…and failing.
“But Adeline, and the Hawkeyes season. You don’t have a fill-in nanny.” She's desperate to come up with an excuse to stay, and it’s breaking me not to let her find us a way out of this.
I had stopped looking for a nanny. Stupidly, I gave up on the search to find anyone better than Vivi. Maybe it’s because I didn't want to find anyone to replace her. Maybe I didn’t want to come to the realization that Jameson would come back. I don't know.
I come up with a lie quickly. Something I know that will push her to the edge.
“That ballet mom with the casseroles said she can help with Adeline until the Hawkeyes finish the season. Which is convenient since I guess she already knows where I live.”
I force out a light-hearted snicker as if the convenience is comical, or that nothing about replacing her as a nanny is bothering me in the least, but nothing could be further from the truth. And the look in Vivi’s eye says she doesn’t find any of this funny.
She lets our hands fall, breaking us apart. For a second, she doesn’t move. Her eyes redden, but no tears fall. She won’t let herself cry, not now, though I can see in her eyes that I broke something in her.
Something that’s breaking in me, too.
Maybe it was hope?
Or maybe it was something even deeper than that.
“You’re right,” she finally says, defiance in her eyes.
She lifts her chin, and I try not to draw attention to the fact that I see it wobble with emotion just a little before she reels it back in.
She won’t let me see how much I just hurt her.
Not just that I'm pushing her to another man, but that I dangled the idea of a dance mom taking her place. As if I've been entertaining the idea of anyone but Vivi in my house—not a fucking chance. But I already know what I’ve done. She continues on. “We both got what we wanted. It’s time to face the facts of what we are and what we obviously never were. This was never supposed to last. We only agreed to the nanny position until Jameson returns, and you only offered me your bed for two weeks, and now that time is up.”
The way she says it, as if all I wanted from her was sex, has me biting the inside of my cheek to stay quiet. If I tell her that I fell in love with her before I ever laid a finger on her, it will only make this harder than it has to be. I have to let her down to make sure she walks away.
When I don’t challenge her assumptions, she pulls her shoulders back and turns away from me, heading up the aisle toward him like a woman heading into weather she can’t outflank but will face without running.
She’s stronger than me.
I sit down because my brain doesn’t trust me not to run full speed towards her and yank her off her heels, tossing her over my shoulder, hauling her out of this auditorium until we reach my car.
Driving her and Adeline out of this place, looking for higher ground, somewhere I can better defend from to keep her with us.
The chatter in the auditorium swells and blurs, but the blood in my ears swishes louder, the sound of my heart beating against my chest drowns out the noise. I can’t watch her leave anymore. My vision switches to him. His eyes aren’t on her either. They're on me.
We stay like that for what feels like eternity. No words, but we don’t need any. She belongs to both of us, and neither of us at the same time, and we both know it.
Then we both cut our attention to her as she finally makes it up to him. The EXIT sign, looming over their heads, illuminating the fact that this is where Vivi exits my life.
I can’t hear the words. I don’t need to. I know the shape of that conversation. I know how compromise sounds when a man like him is holding the ledger.
“Uncle Trey!”
I turn in my chair. Adeline barrels out from backstage in her cover-up, cheeks pink, eyes still glittering with the high of stage lights and crowd applause. She launches into me all elbows and joy. I catch her and the joy cracks me right down the sternum.
“You were amazing,” I say, and it’s a relief to tell one true thing out loud. “The turn? You nailed it.”
“I know,” she says, pleased, then wiggles away enough to peer around me. “Where’s Vivi?”
I look past her. Vivi’s still with Jameson. He has a hand half-lifted like he’s about to touch her arm and then thinks better of it. Good.
“She’s…talking to someone.”
Adeline follows my line of sight. Her face changes. Not confusion. Not yet. Something colder. She swings back to me so fast I almost miss the first hot tear in her eyes.
“Don’t let her go,” she says, fierce and small. “You have to fight for her.”
The auditorium tilts. I lower out of my chair down to one knee so we’re face-to-face. “Hey. We don’t talk about fighting at a recital. Coach’s rules.”
She doesn’t smile. Her hands fist in my jacket like I’m the one trying to leave. “She loves us.”
“I know,” I say. But hearing Adeline say it only makes it feel more hopeless. “And we love her.”
“Then why are you letting her walk away?” Her voice cracks on “away,” and I'd do anything, including walking straight through a brick wall just to stop what’s happening at that EXIT sign.
I can’t say any of that to a nine-year-old who has so much to learn and has already lost too much. She doesn’t need to think of the fact that a life with us might not fulfill Vivi. And the truth is a life with me might not fulfill Adeline either, but right now, she and I are all we have.
So I do the thing a coward does and call it protection.
“Because sometimes loving someone means making sure they don’t lose themselves,” I say. “Even if it hurts.”
“That’s dumb,” she says, furious. “You’re dumb. It’s all your fault she’s leaving us. You could have stopped her, and you didn’t.”
I can see that her raised voice is starting to gain attention.
Even Vivi turns to look in our direction. Though I don’t think she can make out the words, the tone in Adeline’s voice is coming through clear. She’s mad at me.
“I can’t just stop her from living her life and going back home.”
“We are her home, and you messed it all up.”
And then she spins around and runs for the side exit. I grab our things sitting on the chair and chase after her. I glance over quickly, seeing Vivi notice it. I see the moment she’s about to chase after me and Adeline, but I hold up a hand to tell her to stop.
Not because I don’t want her help, but because this is more about Adeline and me than it is about Vivi. We have to learn to rely on each other—no one else.
As I chase after Adeline in the dark and the rain, her bun starts to fall out. Symbolizing everything that’s happening tonight, giving me flashbacks of seeing Vivi in my review mirror in her wedding dress, running in the rain toward my SUV.
I was going to ask Vivi to pick me tonight.
Instead, I told her to go.
Maybe at the end of the day, what I really couldn't handle was the idea that Vivi would pick me and that I would let her down. I wouldn’t be enough for her with all my missing pieces, and I’d have to live with failing…again.
Like I failed John that night. Like I failed Tommy when I left him to join the Army.
Maybe the person who can’t live with my own regrets and resentment…is me.