Chapter 7 #3
"Have you, though? Because 'liability' feels pretty specifically bad, Cormac."
"Fine. Worst thing I've ever been called. I'll allow it." He kissed the top of my head, and I felt him smile against my hair.
We lay there a long while after that, not talking, just breathing together in the dark.
The spring air moved the curtains in slow, lazy waves. I thought about how strange it was that grief and joy could live in the same room, the same bed, the same body, without one ever fully canceling out the other.
I'd expected, somewhere in the two years of building a life without him, that if he ever did come back — some impossible, unlikely if — the return would feel purely joyful. Uncomplicated. A straight line from loss to restoration.
It didn't feel like that. It felt like both things at once, grief and joy tangled together so completely I doubted I'd ever fully separate them again.
Somewhere in the dark, I decided that was all right.
Maybe that was even the more honest version of a happy ending — not the absence of everything hard, just the presence of something good big enough to hold the hard stuff alongside it.
"Tell me about the worst day," I said, quiet, into the dark. "In there. I don't want the softened version. I want to actually know."
He was quiet a long moment. "There was a day, maybe eight months in, when they let slip a detail about the town.
Nothing specific. Just enough to know something had happened here, some accident on Route 9, and I didn't know if it involved you.
I spent eleven days not knowing. I counted them, same as I counted everything else.
Eleven days imagining every version of losing you before I finally got confirmation it was somebody else's family, not mine. "
"Cormac."
"I'm not telling you that for sympathy," he said. "I'm telling you because you asked for the real version, and that's it. That's the worst day. Not the worst thing that happened to my body. The worst thing that happened to the part of me that loved you, not knowing."
I held him tighter at that, feeling the old ache of it settle between us, real and named instead of buried.
"Your turn," he said, after a while. "Worst day for you. I want to know too."
"The funeral," I said, without needing to think about it.
"Not the grief of it. The specific horror of standing at a graveside knowing everyone was watching me to see how I'd hold up.
I remember thinking, in the middle of the eulogy, that I couldn't even cry properly because I was so aware of being watched.
It took me another three days alone in this house before I actually let myself fall apart. "
"I'm sorry I put you in that room."
"I know," I said. "You've said it. I believe you.
I think we're both going to be saying sorry to each other for a while yet, about different pieces of this, and I think that's all right.
I don't think sorry has to mean anything's still broken.
Sometimes it just means we're being honest about what happened. "
He kissed my hair, quiet agreement, and we lay there a while longer, trading small confessions back and forth in the dark the way we used to trade the day's small events before any of this happened — easy, unhurried, two people slowly remembering how to be married again one honest sentence at a time.
"What are you thinking about," Cormac asked, quiet, his hand still moving slow through my hair.
"That I used to think love was supposed to erase grief," I said. "Like once you found the good thing, the bad thing was supposed to just quietly disappear to make room for it. I don't think that's true anymore. I think maybe you just learn to carry both."
"That sounds like something Ruth would say."
"Ruth's said a version of it to me at least four times in the last two months. I think it's finally sinking in."
"She's usually right about this kind of thing. Comes with the territory, I suppose."
"Does that bother you? Comparing me to your grandmother's best friend in the middle of an otherwise very romantic moment?"
"Ruth would take it as the highest compliment," he said, laughing, and the sound of it — easy, unguarded, entirely his — settled something in my chest that had been unsettled since the very first knock on my door.
"Cormac?"
"Mm?"
"I'm glad you're home."
"Me too," he said, quiet, serious now, all the joking gone out of his voice.
"More than I know how to say. I spent two years building a version of this moment in my head, and I want you to know — the real thing is better.
Every single part of it. Even the hard parts.
Especially the hard parts, honestly, because at least they're real. "
I pressed my ear back against his chest, listening to his heartbeat steady and slow beneath me, and outside the open window the spring night moved on around us, mountains dark and patient in the distance, the house breathing steady and warm around two people who'd finally, after everything, found their way back to the same room.