Chapter Nine
Beau · Now
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The first time Sienna and I were alone, nothing happened—and that’s exactly the problem. Nothing happened, and it was the most something that had happened to me in a year, and a man who can’t tell the difference between those two things is a man already in trouble.
It was a Saturday ride, deep into the summer by then, the rides being most weekends now, a fact I’d stopped doing math on.
We’d stopped at the overlook and the others had ridden ahead to a spot down the road, and Sienna had hung back, fixing something on her bike that I don’t think needed fixing—so it was the two of us at the overlook with the whole valley below and nobody else, and she looked up at me and said, “Can I tell you something? You’re the only one of them I can actually talk to. ”
That’s all. That’s the whole thing she said.
And I felt it go through me like current—because do you understand what it does to a disappearing man to be told he’s the one worth talking to?
Martha and I, by then, talked about logistics.
Pickups and bills and whose turn for the dentist. We’d stopped talking like people somewhere in the move and the title and the cold middle of the bed—and here was a woman with the wind coming up off the valley telling me I was the one she could actually talk to, and I stood there at the overlook and let myself feel, fully, the thing I’d been not-letting-myself-feel for weeks: that I liked who I was when she looked at me.
That I liked it more than I liked who I was at my own kitchen table.
I didn’t do anything. I clung to it for a long time, the not-doing—I didn’t touch her, didn’t say anything I couldn’t have repeated to my wife, got back on my bike and rode home.
But I also didn’t finish the thought. I like who I am when she looks at me more than I like who I am at home—that thought has a second half, and the second half is and that is a problem I need to take home and fix with my wife, tonight, before it grows.
I didn’t think the second half. I let the first half sit there, warm, in a little room with the door shut, next to all the other little rooms, and I rode home and kissed Martha and didn’t say a word—and told myself a faithful man is a man who doesn’t act, when the truth is a faithful man is a man who doesn’t let it grow.
I was watering the thing daily and calling myself loyal because I hadn’t yet picked the fruit.
There was guilt. Of course there was—I wasn’t a monster, just a coward, which I’ve learned is worse in the ways that matter, because a monster knows what he is and a coward gets to keep feeling like a good man right up until the bill comes due.
The guilt I handled the way I handled everything that year: I took it into the garage in my head and shut the door on it, and told myself I’d earned a thing that was just mine—that I gave everything to that family and couldn’t I have one thing, one road, one person who saw me, that didn’t belong to them.
Every word of that was true. Arranged into exactly the wrong shape.
That’s how it happens. Not with a decision to betray the people you love—with a series of true feelings, stacked wrong, each one defensible, until you look up and you’re at a fire two hundred miles from home choosing a rally over your son’s recital and still, still, telling yourself you’re a good man who just needed some air.
The overlook was where it started to grow.
I could have pulled it out by the root that day, with one honest conversation at my own kitchen table.
I watered it instead. And everything after—the warning I brushed off, the chair I left empty—everything after is just the harvest of a thing I refused, at an overlook with the wind coming up, to stop watering.