17. Tell Me Something True
TELL ME SOMETHING TRUE
FOX
Ilay Lucy down carefully on our bed, pulling the covers back first so she doesn’t have to do anything but let me settle her against the pillows.
I sit next to her on the bed and stroke her forehead.
“Your mother is a piece of work,” she says pleasantly.
“I know. I’m sorry.”
“She wants you and Reina together.”
“I know. I’m sorry for that, too.”
She looks toward the window. “The fig tree is doing well. The peonies, too. I was worried about them after last week’s rain, but they look—“
“Sweetheart, what did she say to you?”
“She said something about divorce?”
“What about it?”
“Didn’t you hear her?”
She’s being evasive. I should let it be. She’s tired. But….
“I came running when I heard her voice, but I didn’t hear what she precisely said.”
She gives me a measured look.
I kiss her nose.
She looks at her hands. “She said you don’t love me.
That you were being kind, given the accident, and she made the divorce sound inevitable, like you want it.
” She stops. “She was generous about the settlement. I didn’t pay much attention, but I think it was high six figures. I didn’t know that was in the cards.”
My mother is lucky she isn’t here right now.
“There is no settlement. There’s no divorce.
” I lean forward, putting myself in her eyeline.
“My mother has never—“ I stop. I choose my words carefully because Lucy, even without her memory, is not a woman you can be imprecise with, and the truth and the lie are sharing very close quarters right now. “My mother has never approved of anything I chose independently. Not once. If I chose it, she found a problem with it.” I hold her gaze. “She has been finding a problem with you since the beginning, because you are mine, and she didn’t select you, and that is her limitation, not yours.”
Lucy regards me thoughtfully.
“She told me you don’t love me,” she repeats as if those words stung her the most.
“My mother doesn’t know what I feel.”
“Do you?” she challenges.
I think about the ICU. I think about the days in that terrible chair. I think about standing in the corridor outside her room, counting the days since I had said the most comprehensively wrong thing of my life, still running out of ways to understand how wrong.
“Yes,” I admit with confidence and honesty. “I know exactly what I feel.”
A shadow passes over her face. “And what is that?”
“I love you. You are my wife. This is our home. What my mother thinks about any of it has never been relevant and is less so every day.” I hold her gaze. “I’m sorry she upset you.”
Her gaze lingers, assessing. I meet it head-on because I have nothing left that requires hiding—or rather, the thing I’m hiding is something I’d lie about for entirely different reasons, and every other part of me is available to be looked at for as long as she wants to look.
“Reina is very beautiful.”
“Is she?” I don’t look away. “I didn’t notice.”
She looks toward the window again. “You must have loved her very much.”
“I thought I did. I was wrong about that.”
“How do you know?”
“Because I love you. And what I had with Reina—whatever I thought it was—doesn’t come close to that. There’s no comparison.”
Her face softens, her eyes light up a little. Then, she wrinkles her nose thoughtfully. “Fox, why do you love me?”
I kiss her forehead. “I love you because you’re brave, kind, and generous.
Because you’ve got a huge heart and the ability to love even those who don’t deserve it.
Because when you walk into a room, any room, you make it brighter.
Because I can’t live without your light, without your warmth—they make me a better person, every day. ”
Her eyes fill with emotion, and there’s a light quiver in her voice when she asks, “Why did I love you?”
I kiss her lips, sliding my tongue inside her mouth to taste her because I need the intimacy. It’s quick, fast, and not nearly enough. But she’s not ready for more.
“Why don’t you tell me that when you get your memory back?”
She bites her bottom lip, her eyes clouded.
“Fox,” Lucy says, and her voice has a new quality to it.
It’s not the pleasant, careful tone she’s been using since the hospital. This has come up from a different space inside of her. I don’t know if that’s a good or bad thing.
“Yes, sweetheart.”
“My ribs hurt.”
The shift. The retreat back into the practical. I know this about her—the way she uses the concrete to step back from the edge of anything too large to manage.
I understand.
“Let’s get you some painkillers.”
“I don’t want them.” She shakes her head. “They make me—I can’t think on them. I keep falling asleep and I can’t—“ She stops. “I don’t want to sleep right now.”
“Okay.” I stand. “I’ll get something lighter. The ones they gave for—“
“Fox.” I shut up. “Will you lie with me?”
I get into bed with her.
She shifts against the pillows, carefully, her pain evident in every movement, and she reaches out. Not much. Just enough. Her hand finds mine.
I close my fingers around hers and rest my shoulder close to hers.
She stiffens briefly, then settles.
“The peonies are extraordinary,” I remark. Because they are. Because she made them.
“Your mother hates them.”
“My mother has terrible taste.”
She chuckles.
I turn and press my lips to her cheek—the skin of the woman I have been an idiot about for the duration of our marriage and will not be anymore.
She breathes, shallow and careful.
And at that moment, in our bed in our home as I hold her hand, I have never in my life been more certain of anything than I am of this: I am not letting her go.
Not again. Not ever again.
She has forgotten the version of me that deserved to be left. I am going to become, before she remembers, the version that deserves to be stayed with.
Whatever it takes.
“Fox?” she murmurs, after a while.
“Yes, sweetheart.”
“Tell me something true,” she says drowsily.
I think about that.
“You make everything better than it is,” I confess. “That’s just who you are. And I was too”—I swallow, righting my heart that’s raw with emotion—“in my own head to say so when I should have.”
We stay like that until her breathing evens out and the tension in her hand releases.
She sleeps, her fingers still loosely wrapped around mine.
I don’t move.
I will not move.
I will stay here for as long as she needs.
I look at the fig tree through the window and hear her words from before she left, “The fig tree needs water…every other day until the heat breaks.”
It’s not just the fig tree, sweetheart. I need to water our relationship, and not every other day, but every minute of every day for the rest of our lives.