Chapter Twenty-Nine
I brought nothing to dinner. Not flowers, not wine, not an apology dressed up as a gift. Wren’s third term had never technically forbidden it, but I understood, finally, correctly, that showing up empty-handed was the actual point.
She’d made the chicken soup recipe Ruth had taught her, badly, on purpose, and we both laughed at how wrong it tasted, and for a moment, stirring a bad soup in the kitchen where I’d once hidden a consent form, it felt almost like before.
Almost.
?
After Theo went down, we sat on the couch, not touching, a careful eighteen inches between us that felt, this time, like a choice rather than a wound.
“I keep thinking about November,” she said, staring at the muted television. “The night you talked to him through my stomach and already knew. I keep trying to decide if I can ever hear that story without it hurting.”
“Can you?”
“Not yet. Some days almost.”
?
She turned to look at me, and something in her face had softened in a way I recognized from before all of this, from June, from the version of us that existed before a binder and a glovebox and a fifth floor.
I leaned in. She let me get halfway there.
“Not tonight,” she said quietly, putting two fingers against my chest, not pushing me away so much as marking a line she needed to draw herself. “I want it. I need you to know that I want it. But I need one more piece of honesty first, and I don’t think either of us has said it yet.”
?
“What is it?”
“Is there anything else,” she said, “in that binder, in your phone, in eight years of your life, that I still don’t know? I’m not asking because I think there is. I’m asking because I need to hear you actually check, instead of just answering fast.”
?
I made myself actually check. I sat with the question for a full minute, the longest silence in the whole story, running through every drawer, every folder, every corner of myself I might once have decided was easier left unexamined.
“There’s a photograph,” I said finally. “From before Mara’s accident.
Us at her cousin’s wedding, the night before it happened.
I kept it in a box in my old apartment. I never told you it existed.
It’s not romantic. It’s just the last photo of the man I was before I broke something and started hiding from it. ”
?
Wren was quiet.
“Where is it now?”
“Still in the box. In my mother’s attic. I haven’t looked at it in years.”
“I want to see it,” she said. “Not to be jealous of it. I want to see the man you were building yourself out of hiding from. I think I need to understand him if I’m going to keep loving the one who’s left.”