Chapter 14
Fourteen
brOOKS
“What did Tony tell you?”
Everyone in The Funnel Cloud is waiting for the answer, despite trying to appear as if they're invested in anything else. The surface of a bar top. The selection on the jukebox. The blinking beer sign behind the bar.
Sam stands a few feet away, waiting for an answer. Her hair is falling from its knot, her left hand is bare, and she looks achingly beautiful.
I feel the ring in my pocket as if it's burned through the denim.
“Not here,” I say.
Her face tightens.
“Please,” I add. “Somewhere quieter. I’ll tell you everything.”
For a second, I think she’ll refuse. I deserve it if she does. Then she turns without a word and walks toward the back hallway.
I follow her past stacked cases of bottled water, boxes of donated granola bars, and a clipboard hanging from a nail beside the office door. The room Petra calls an office is barely bigger than a storage closet.
Sam closes the door behind us, apparently no more interested in sharing the details of her life with the bar than I am.
She folds her arms. “Talk.”
I drag a hand over my mouth. My knuckles are still scraped from Tony’s face. That seems almost laughable now.
“Tony was involved in some sort of ill-conceived scheme with Luci.”
Sam doesn’t move.
“He helped her make things look like they weren’t what they were,” I say. “The texts he sent you. The coffee. The comments. Standing too close when he knew I could see. None of it was accidental.”
Her eyes flicker, but she stays silent.
“He said Luci wanted him to make it look like there might be something between you two. Harmless enough that you wouldn’t notice.
Familiar enough that I would.” My throat works around the words.
“At the same time, they were choosing clips and posts that made it look like Luci and I were getting closer. Like she was the one beside me. Like she belonged there.”
Sam’s arms tighten across her chest. “The social posts.”
“Yeah.”
“The comments online.”
“Yeah.”
“The clinic?”
I close my eyes for half a second.
“No,” I say. “That was me.”
Her breath catches so quietly I almost miss it.
“Tony and Luci set the stage,” I say. “But I was the one standing on it.”
Sam looks down at the floor.
Then she asks the question I’ve been waiting for since Tony opened his mouth outside that motel room.
“Did you believe it?”
My first instinct is still to reach for anything that would make it sound better. Any wording that might blunt the blade before I hand it to her.
But she's had enough of me trying to move around the truth.
“Yes.”
She goes still.
“I didn’t have proof,” I say. “I knew that. There were times I told myself I was being an idiot. That Tony was young and friendly and you were kind to him because you’re kind to everybody unless they give you a reason not to be.”
Her mouth trembles once and then she schools it.
“But I believed there might be something,” I say. “Enough that I watched you differently. Enough that I got jealous. Enough that I let it change the way I treated you.”
Sam’s eyes lift to mine.
There’s no yelling. No thrown glass. No dramatic step back.
Just my wife standing in front of me with the last of something leaving her face.
“Tony said something else,” I force out. “He said nothing ever happened. You never flirted with him. Never encouraged him. Never crossed a line. He said most of the time you barely noticed what he was doing because you were working.”
"You're telling me things I already know," she bites out.
"Yeah. I am."
"It took him telling you though for you to believe it. You couldn't even be bothered to come to me and ask."
I flinch. She's not saying anything that isn't true, but damned if the truth doesn't hurt when it's put right in front of you.
“You’re right,” I say. “I should have known because I know you. I should have talked to you. I should have trusted you before some guilty man had to confess it to me.”
Her eyes shine, but no tears fall.
“I punished you for something you never did,” I say.
Sam looks toward the door. Out in the bar, someone laughs too loudly, then stops. A generator hums somewhere beyond the wall. The whole town keeps breathing while my world caves in.
“When I gave you my ring,” she says, “I told you what I'd spent the last two years believing. That you blamed me for losing the baby."
Every time she says it, it hurts that much more knowing she believed it.
"Sammy Girl."
Her jaw tightens.
"I never blamed you," I say, my voice breaking.
I want to pull her to me. Want to do exactly what I should have been doing all along and am only now seeing how damned foolish it was to have waited until now.
"God, baby, I wish I'd known you thought that, but it's my fault I didn't. I never blamed you.
You were the last person I blamed for any of that. "
She looks back at me then.
I keep my hands at my sides.
“I blamed myself,” I say. “You told me to go east. I said we were fine. I made the call. The road went slick. We crashed. You were bleeding and drifting in and out in my arms while Hershel drove like hell.”
Her face pales.
“I thought you were going to die,” I say. “Then we got to the hospital, and they told us the baby was gone. In my head, it was simple. I made the call. You were hurt. We lost our child. I almost lost you too.”
Sam presses her fingers to her lips. Her bare left hand shakes.
“For two years, every time someone announced a pregnancy and you went quiet, I saw that room again. Every time you looked at a baby too long and then looked away, I saw what my decision took from you. And I got scared.” I swallow. “So I tried to control every damn thing that scared me.”
“You took me out of the field.”
“Yes.”
“You made decisions for me.”
“Yes.”
"You thought you were giving me security when all you were doing was taking away the comfort I so desperately needed. Do you know what I would have given for you to have just held me and told me everything you're telling me now?"
I have to grip the edge of Petra’s cluttered desk to stay where I am. “You're right."
She lets out one breath. It sounds worn thin.
“Do you know what that felt like from my side?” she asks.
I don’t answer. I don’t get to guess anymore.
“I lost the baby too,” she says. “I lost her, and then I woke up and my husband was different. You weren’t grieving with me. You were moving me out of the life we built. One piece at a time.”
I expect her to cry. But there's a little voice in the back of my head that tells me that she's already cried this one out too many times to cry about it now. This is the calloused part that comes after all that.
“I lost the truck. I lost the field. I lost my place beside you. I lost your confidence. Then Luci showed up, and suddenly she had all of it.”
“Sam.”
“No.” She lifts a hand. “Shut up and listen.”
My mouth shuts.
“What if I’d done that to you?” she asks.
“What if after the accident, I decided you couldn’t be trusted in the field anymore?
What if I put another man in your seat? What if he rode beside me, worked beside me, laughed with me after chases, showed up in every clip beside me until everybody online started talking about how good we looked together? ”
It feels like an invisible hand has punched through my chest wall and gripped my heart.
“What if you had to sit behind a desk,” she says, “and watch him live the life that used to be yours?”
I have no answer.
Because that's the second most horrific thing I can imagine.
“You may not have wanted Luci romantically,” she says. “But you replaced me with her everywhere else first.”
The words hurt because they're true. I can blame Luci and Tony all I want for their part in it, but it was me who made it possible.
“Then the clinic,” she says.
My stomach turns.
“When I heard you were hurt, I didn’t care that I was angry with you. I didn’t care what you’d said or what I thought you felt. I just needed to know you were alive.”
I know what's coming but I'm powerless to stop it.
Her eyes finally fill. “Then I walked in and you were holding her. You looked right at me. You saw me, Brooks. You saw what it did to me, and you didn’t let go.”
My lungs stop working.
“You looked almost defiant,” she whispers. “Like some part of you wanted me to see it.”
The ugliest truth in me lifts its head.
“I did.”
Sam recoils.
I make myself keep going. “I was angry. Jealous. I thought you and Tony—” I stop before I can dress it up. “For a few seconds, I wanted you to feel what I thought I was feeling.”
"And I'd done nothing."
“I know.”
“I came running because I loved you.”
"I know that, too."
“You put me behind that desk,” she says, each word careful now. “I warned you about the storm. You ignored me. You were trying to hurt me.”
I press my palm to my chest because there’s a pressure there I can’t breathe past.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
She laughs once, broken and small. "If you think I'm sorry will fix it, you're sadly mistaken."
“No.” My eyes burn. “I know it won't fix it."
“I lost our baby,” she says. “Then I lost the work I loved. Then I lost my place beside my husband. Then another woman stepped into it. Then you looked at me like I might be betraying you.” She wipes beneath one eye, angry at the tear.
“And through all of it, I kept trying to figure out what I could do differently. How to make you see me again.”
“Sammy Girl.”
“Don’t.” Her voice cracks.
She looks at me, and there is no storm I can chase, no road I can take, no wheel I can turn that will get me out of this.
“Brooks,” she says, “you broke my heart.”
I've heard tornadoes tear metal from buildings. I've heard glass blow out and sirens wail.
Nothing has ever sounded as devastating as those four words.
"I'd give anything to go back in time and change it. I'm sorry. Because, Sam, I'm an idiot. An idiot who loved you too much and not enough all at once."
She nods slowly, like it's the only thing she can do.
“I believe you,” she says. “About the baby. I believe you didn’t blame me.”
The relief hurts.
“But understanding why you hurt me doesn’t erase that you did.”
“No,” I say. “It doesn’t.”
For once, I don’t tell her I was scared. I don’t tell her I was trying to protect her. Because, quite frankly, I'm finally coming to understand that the last thing she needs to be certain of is what I feel or what I need.
Took me damned long enough to figure that one out.
“I don’t know how to repair all of it,” I say. “But I’m going to try.”
Her face changes. Not hope. Warning.
“Don’t turn this into another outcome you’re trying to control.”
I open my mouth to say something, but she stops me.
“I mean it,” she says. “Don’t start fixing things because you think enough apologies or big gestures will make me come home.”
"I know that."
“Do you?”
I reach into my pocket and close my fingers around her ring. I don’t take it out. I don’t offer it. I don’t make her look at it.
“I have to make it right because I’m the one who damaged it,” I say. “If you never give me another chance, I still owe you that.”
Her eyes move over my face for a long moment.
“I still love you,” I say quietly. “You'll always be the love of my life. And I still want my wife back more than I know what to do with. But that can’t be the reason anymore.”
She wipes at her cheek again. “Then what is?”
“Giving back what I took,” I say. “Fixing what I can. Leaving the rest up to you.”
Sam looks toward the hallway.
Every part of me reaches for her.
My hands stay still.
“I need air,” she says.
I step back from the door.
She walks past me close enough that I catch the scent of rain in her hair and soap on her skin. Close enough that my body remembers every old right I no longer have.
At the threshold, she pauses.
I wait.
She doesn’t turn around.
Then she walks down the hall and back into the noise of The Funnel Cloud.
I stay in Petra’s cramped office with my hand closed around her ring, and this time, I let her go.