Chapter 3 #3
"Whatever you decide," Harper said, into my hair, "I've got you. I had you when he was gone and I've got you now that he's back. That part doesn't change."
"I know," I said, muffled against her shoulder. "That's the only thing today that hasn't scared me."
Cormac found me an hour later, eyes still red, flour smeared where I'd wiped my face with a dirty hand without thinking.
"Warren came by," I said, before he could ask.
"I saw him leave. He didn't look angry."
"He's not angry. He's gracious, which is somehow worse." I wiped my face again, made it worse. "He told me to go be with my husband."
Something moved across Cormac's face — hope, carefully leashed, the kind of hope a man teaches himself not to show his whole hand with. "And are you going to?"
"I don't know yet," I said, honest, because I owed him honesty even if it cost him.
"I need time, Cormac. I need to figure out who I am now, and who you are now, and whether those two people even fit together anymore, or whether we're just two strangers wearing the faces of people who used to be married.
I can't fold back into being your wife like the last two years were a pause button.
I lived them. They changed me. I need to find out if the man standing in front of me is the one I married, or someone new wearing his face, and I need to find out if I even want the same things I wanted before. "
I braced for an argument. Some part of me, old and tired and used to being managed gently by a man who liked to fix things, expected him to push, to make the case for us, to remind me of a decade of marriage like it was evidence in a trial.
He didn't.
"I waited two years to come home," he said instead, quiet, steady, no performance in it at all. "I'll wait as long as you need."
It was exactly the right thing to say.
I hated that it was exactly the right thing to say.
"That's annoyingly good husband material," I said, half a laugh cracking through the tears, "for a man who's been dead for two years."
"I've had a lot of time to think about what I'd say if I ever got the chance," he said. "Turns out most of my drafts were garbage. That one I actually meant."
"You had drafts?"
"Four hundred thousand of them, roughly."
"That's oddly specific."
"I had a lot of time," he said again, and there was something in his voice under the joke — something raw and two-years-deep — that made me put down the towel in my hands and just look at him, really look, at the man standing in the kitchen I'd built without him, patient in a way the old Cormac never quite managed to be.
"What were the other drafts like," I asked, curious despite myself. "The bad ones."
"Mostly speeches. Grand ones. I had one where I quoted poetry, if you can believe that.
I don't even like poetry. I think I was just so starved for beautiful language that my brain started manufacturing it out of desperation.
" He rubbed the back of his neck, a little sheepish, a gesture I recognized instantly, bone-deep familiar even after everything.
"There was a version where I planned to just stand outside and wait for you to notice me, no words at all, figuring my face would do the talking.
I decided against that one on the grounds that it seemed more likely to get the police called on me than get you to open the door. "
I laughed, actually laughed, surprising myself with how easily it came. "That would have been a headline. Local Woman Calls Police On Own Dead Husband For Loitering."
"The Clover Ridge Gazette would have had a field day."
"They still might. I give it a week before someone tips off a reporter in Millbrook."
"Then we'd better get our story straight," he said, and there was something almost playful in it, a flicker of the man I remembered underneath the careful, changed one standing in front of me, and it undid something in my chest to see it, to know that version hadn't been entirely lost in whatever room they'd kept him in.
"Our story," I repeated, testing the shape of the word. Our. Not his story and my grief running on separate tracks anymore, but something shared, something we'd have to build together whether I was ready for it or not.
"I like the sound of that," he said, quiet now, watching me carefully, giving me room to take it back if I needed to.
I didn't take it back.
"Me too," I admitted, and it cost me something to say it, some careful wall I'd built over two years creaking at the foundation.
"I hate how much I like the sound of it, actually.
I had a whole plan. I was going to have a nice, uncomplicated life with a nice, uncomplicated man, and instead I've got you, standing in my kitchen, quoting bad poetry you don't even like. "
"In my defense, I never actually said the poetry out loud. I just thought about it. There's a difference."
"Is there?"
"There has to be, or I'm in a lot more trouble than I thought."
I thought, with a kind of dread and hope tangled so tight together I couldn't separate them: this is going to take everything I have left.
And some reckless, stubborn, still-in-love part of me thought: good. I've got it to give.