26. Declan
DECLAN
One week after Avery tells me about the morning I stole, I sit in the literacy center with her four words printed across the top of my letter: We’re having a baby.
My tutor has marked the longer sentences with faint slashes where I can pause, and a blank card hides everything beneath the line I’m reading.
I’ve practiced the pages until my voice on the recording no longer sounds like a man trying to outrun each word.
Reading them to a wall is one job. Reading them to Avery is another.
“You can shorten the third page,” my tutor says. He turns it around and points to the paragraph where the word entitlement appears twice. “You understand what you wrote. The purpose is for her to hear what you wrote. Save the hardest draft for somebody who’s grading you.”
I drag the card down and read the first occurrence again, breaking it where he taught me. En-ti-tle-ment. I hate the word. It names the belief beneath every choice I made, and the letters still refuse to stand in order for it merely because the truth matters. “It stays once. The second one can go.”
“Good. Which sentence replaces it?”
I take the pencil and cross out the line instead of copying the whole page to hide the mistake.
That habit has taken longer to break than any letter pattern.
Avery spent years showing me that a crossed-out word wasn’t a public execution, and I thanked her by letting Sasha stand over my shoulder with a red nail against club paper.
“I thought loving Avery meant I could do what I wanted and she would remain my wife.”
My tutor writes the sentence on a separate sheet, then slides it over for me to copy in my own hand.
He leaves the question of whether it’s a good apology alone.
He knows only that I’m reading something to the woman divorcing me and that I need to get through it with the page still in my own hands.
Everything else is Avery’s to decide, including the right to hear every word and tell me it changes nothing.
By Sunday afternoon, I have the final letter in large print, the marked copy beneath it, and the recording on my phone if I lose a word badly enough to need the sentence read back.
I leave my cut and weapons at the clubhouse.
The yellow sock, folded test, and ultrasound picture stay locked inside Gage’s desk because bringing them would look like I was using them to control how Avery felt.
I carry only the pages she agreed to hear.
The county patrol passes me on the road to her rental and raises two fingers from the steering wheel.
The report can reach me through Cruz like everything else.
The marital house is empty beneath its cameras, the garage key sits with Avery’s attorney, and Sasha hasn’t returned to any property the club watches.
Two weeks without fire have already made the threat feel less immediate to some of the men.
I know better. Sasha waited months to take club files while I mistook patience for loyalty.
If she waits until the divorce to burn the house, it will be because she wants the timing to hurt.
Avery opens the door before I knock. She wears a rust-colored sweater and loose black pants, her hair caught at the back of her head with a clip that looks ready to surrender.
The curve beneath the sweater is larger than it was last week.
I notice before I can stop myself, then notice the cracked skin near her thumb when she wraps her coat around her.
She catches me looking at both. I used to take her hands over the sink and work my mother’s balm into the splits until she pulled them back and told me I was wasting it.
My hands stay on the pages, because nobody has told me they can do anything else.
“The porch,” she says, stepping outside and locking the door behind her. “June isn’t here. Cruz knows you’re here. You have one chance to ask.”
The old porch chair waits against the wall with another beside it. No table this time, no water, nothing that lets me pretend I’ve been invited for comfort. I remain near the stairs while Avery takes the chair closest to the door. “Will you hear me read the letter?”
She studies the pages in my hand rather than my face. “Yes.”
Relief hits hard enough to make my fingers bend the corner, and I flatten it against my thigh before I sit. “If you want me to stop, tell me. I won’t leave the letter.”
“I agreed to hear it. Don’t make me promise to protect you from how I react.”
“You don’t have to.” I place the marked copy on top, slide the blank card beneath the first line, and try to make my hand stop shaking by gripping the paper harder, which sends the shake straight into the words.
“I practiced. That part was for me. I did it so you wouldn’t have to finish a sentence for me tonight. ”
Avery’s mouth pulls tight. On Tuesdays, she used to touch the line beneath my finger and say the word before shame turned me angry.
Sometimes she would pretend she wanted the sentence aloud for herself, giving me a way to ask without asking.
I loved her most in moments like that, and I was wrong to assume she would always keep doing the asking for me. I find the first line and begin.
Avery,
I loved you while I cheated on you. I used to say that as if loving you made the affair confusing.
Loving you made it worse. I knew who waited for me at home.
I knew what you trusted me with. I knew we were trying for a baby.
I wanted Sasha anyway, and I wanted to keep you after I took what I wanted.
The word confusing comes out wrong. I hear the extra sound after it leaves my mouth, stop, and take the line again from the beginning. Avery’s hand moves above her knee, fingers lifting as if she might point to the word. She catches herself before she reaches across the space.
“I can—” she starts, the offer born from six years before her anger can kill it.
“Don’t.” The word comes out too hard, and I lower the page before pride turns the refusal cruel. “Please. You carried enough of my reading. If I lose the sentence, I’ll use the recording. You don’t fix this page for me.”
Her raised hand closes around the edge of her coat. “Then keep going.”
I reset the card, use the pencil mark beneath the word, and begin the paragraph again. This time I reach the end with the sentence intact.
I split my life because I believed I was important enough to have both parts.
You were my wife, my home, the person who knew my mother, my bad mornings, my reading, and every part of me I didn’t show the club.
I treated all of that like a guarantee. Sasha was sex, praise, and a room where I could act like needing nobody made me powerful.
I told myself the rooms would never touch.
Calling that confusion is a favor I don’t get.
I built both lives and lied so I could keep them.
Avery looks toward the street when I read sex.
A truck passes at the corner, but her attention stays on the empty road after it’s gone.
She already made me give her the sexual timeline across a conference table.
The word can’t hurt her for the first time, yet I feel every night inside the way she refuses to look at me.
I chose to have sex with Sasha, then came home and had sex with you while you believed our marriage was closed.
I knew you were tracking your cycles even after you stopped showing me the charts.
I saw the thermometer in the bathroom. I heard you cry once and pretended I hadn’t because asking why would’ve forced me to admit how often I was gone.
I let you try to make our child with me while I hid another woman.
I changed what you were agreeing to, and you had to sit pregnant in a doctor’s office wondering whether I brought home an infection.
My negative test came back clean and left the choice I took still taken.
The sentence about the infection blurs. I move the card down, find the first sound, and read it again. Avery turns her face back to me. Her eyes are dry. That frightens me more than tears would, but I keep my attention on the line instead of asking what she feels.
You made reading safe for me. The first night at the kitchen table, you turned the contract around and asked about the cancellation clause so I wouldn’t have to admit I couldn’t get through the first paragraph.
You read my mother’s hospice letter when I couldn’t make my eyes hold the words.
You never laughed, told the club, or used what you knew to make me smaller.
I accepted that from you until I began treating it like another service my wife would always provide.
The next paragraph begins with Sasha’s name.
The letters refuse me twice. I’ve read her name from burner messages, bank statements, and the affair timeline until it should be easier than my own, but shame makes the first sound catch.
I press the audio icon. My recorded voice reads the sentence into the winter air, and I stop it after the first line.
Sasha noticed me stall over a manifest. She read it.
I liked that she saw the problem and called me dangerous anyway.
I let her read the next paper because I wanted the relief.
I let her keep reading because ending that part would’ve meant ending the affair, and I didn’t want to.
Sasha stole nothing from our kitchen. I handed her the same private place after you spent years protecting it.
Avery pulls her coat closer across her stomach. “You gave her the hospice letter?”
The question isn’t in the outline of facts she received because I never handed Sasha the original.
I know what Avery is really asking. “No. She never saw your copy or the letter itself. I told her my mother was dying when it came, and that you read it to me. Sasha knew the ritual. She didn’t touch that page. ”
“You told her about me reading it?”