21. Richard
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Richard
The house is too quiet.
Two years I’ve lived here and it never felt like anything.
A nice place to keep my stuff. Two months of Emily and now every room is loud with her not in it.
The counter she sat on to argue about onions.
The guest room door she liked cracked open.
The shelf of books I bought her, still there, because she left them on purpose and I can’t make myself move them.
I don’t chase her. I told her to go figure out what she wants without me leaning on the scale, and I meant it. No texts. No driving past Tara’s. I work till midnight because work shuts my brain up, then lie there not going down the hall to her room. I want to every night. I don’t.
Three days. Feels like three years.
Paul clocks it on the second day. Comes in with the morning things, stops, sets the folder down slower than usual.
“You look like hell,” he says.
“Thanks, Paul. You’re a ray of light.”
“I’m serious. You sleep at all?”
“Not really, no.”
He pours my coffee, and on his way out, not turning around, he goes, “She’s the first person I’ve watched you act like an actual human around. For what it’s worth.” And then he’s gone before I can fire him or thank him, which is probably why he timed it that way.
On the third day I do one small thing. No flowers, no money, none of the big swings every part of me wants to take, the billboard, the airport run, showing up at Tara’s on my knees.
She doesn’t need a big show of how much I want her.
She needs the opposite. She needs to know I see her and that I can want her without crowding her.
So I think about the books. There was one she’d mentioned wanting, weeks ago, in passing, the next in some series she’d been reading, hadn’t gotten around to buying for herself. I order it. Not a rare one, not a flex, just the book she actually wanted. I write one line on a card.
Heard you’ve got a hole in your reading schedule. This is the next one. No strings. It’s yours either way. R
I have it sent to Tara’s. Nothing about us. No when are you coming home. Just the book she wanted, sent by a man who was paying attention.
Then I go home and I wait, and I am very, very bad at it.
Helen catches me standing in the dark kitchen the second night, no lights on, just standing there like a man who lost something and can’t remember what.
“You’re not eating,” she says, which is apparently the only sentence anyone in my life knows this week.
“Not hungry.”
She makes me a plate anyway, sets it down hard enough to make her point, and stands there with her arms folded until I pick up the fork.
Emily would have done the exact same thing, that same stubborn refusal to let me skip a meal and call it busy.
The thought lands harder than it should, and I have to set the fork down a second.
The house is full of women who love me in their blunt, exasperated way, and the one I want isn’t in it.
I keep turning over what she said. That I handle her.
That I’m so careful she can’t tell if I actually want her.
The worst part is she’s not entirely wrong.
I have been careful. I told myself it was for her, and maybe some of it was for me too, because if I never wanted her at full volume then nobody could ever tell me the wanting was too much.
Easier to be the patient one. The good one.
Careful is just a polite word for keeping a hand on the door.
I run a company. People go quiet when I walk into rooms. And here I am pacing my own kitchen at midnight over a woman who reads the last page of books first, and I’d burn the place down before I’d lose her, and that should terrify me. It doesn’t even come close.
***
She calls me that night.
I almost drop the phone getting to it. Her name on the screen at nine at night, and I make myself wait two full rings so I don’t answer like a man who’s been staring at his phone for three days, which I have been.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hey.” A pause. I can hear a TV low in the background, Tara’s place. “I got the book.”
“Yeah?”
“You didn’t have to do that.”
“I know. That was sort of the point.”
She’s quiet a second. “It’s the right one. The actual next one. I didn’t even know you were listening when I said that.”
“I’m always listening. It’s a problem. I retain everything. Ask me your coffee order, I dare you.”
“Don’t.”
“Oat milk, two shots, and you pretend you don’t want the caramel thing and then you steal sips of mine.”
“Okay, that’s, that’s genuinely crazy, and kinda sweet.” But she’s almost laughing, I can hear it. “How are you? And don’t say fine, you’re a terrible liar over the phone, your voice goes all flat and corporate.”
“I’m not fine. I’m walking around a very large house being haunted by a five-foot-nothing woman who isn’t even in it. Helen’s worried about me. She keeps making me plates.”
“Are you eating them?”
“Some of them.”
“Eat properly, Richard.”
“Yes ma’am.”
“How’s Tara’s couch?” I ask. “Be honest. On a scale of one to your old marriage.”
“Surprisingly humane. The cat hates me though. He sits on the back of the couch and stares at me while I sleep like he’s taking notes for a documentary.
” She pauses. “I named him, by the way. Tara never gave him a name, she just calls him The Cat like he’s a Bond villain.
I’ve been calling him Gerald. He responds to it. Tara’s furious.”
“You’ve been there three days and you’ve renamed her cat.”
“I work fast. It’s part of my charm.” A beat. “Helen really making you plates, though? You’re not just saying that so I’ll feel sorry for you?”
“Helen made me a casserole last night and stood over me until I ate a structurally significant portion of it. Charles keeps asking if I’d like him to ‘fetch anything,’ which is Charles for you look like garbage, sir. The whole house has decided I’m in mourning. They’re not entirely wrong.”
“You’re so dramatic.” But it’s soft, fond, no heat in it.
There’s a softness in the quiet after that, the easy kind, the kind we’ve gotten good at when neither of us is scared. I don’t fill it. I just listen to her breathe and the TV murmur and let it be nice for a second.
“Can I tell you something dumb?” she says finally.
“Always.”
“Henry emailed me. Yesterday.” My whole body goes still.
“I blocked his number months ago, so he dug up my old email. Sent this long thing about how he’s been thinking, how maybe we gave up too fast, how he doesn’t recognize his life anymore.
Blah blah. The whole sad-man symphony. He already tried all of this before, I don’t know why he thought I would magically change my mind. ”
I keep my voice very even. “What did you say?”
“I didn’t answer. Deleted it, blocked that email too.
I just wanted you to know, because I’m not keeping things in reserve anymore, that’s the whole thing I’m working on out here.
He doesn’t get a single thought from me.
I just thought you should hear it from me instead of finding out some other way and spiraling, because I know you, and you’d spiral. ”
Something in my chest that had clenched at his name comes loose. Not because she handled it. Because she told me.
“I appreciate that more than I can say over the phone,” I tell her.
“I figured.” A beat. “I should go. Tara’s giving me a look. She thinks I’m being a coward, doing this by phone instead of in person.”
“Tara’s a menace.”
“Tara’s right, usually, which is the worst part of her.” A breath. “I’m not coming back tonight, just so you know. I’m not done. I have to actually finish the thing I came out here to do, or it doesn’t count.”
“I know. I’m not asking you to.”
“I know you’re not. That’s kind of the problem. It’d be easier if you were the asking type.” A soft, tired laugh. “Goodnight, Richard.”
“Goodnight, Em.”
She hangs up first. I sit there in the dark holding the phone. For the first time in three days the house doesn’t feel quite so empty, because she called, and she told me about Henry when she didn’t have to do either one.
***
It’s eleven at night when the knock comes.
I’m not working. I’m not sleeping. I’m sitting in the dark living room with a drink I haven’t touched, doing the math on how many more days of this I can take before the not-chasing breaks me, and then there’s a knock at the front door, soft, and I go completely still.
Charles is off tonight. Helen’s been in bed for an hour. Nobody knocks on this door at eleven at night.
I cross the foyer too fast and make myself slow down, make myself breathe, and I open it.
Emily’s standing on the porch. Jeans, a sweater that’s definitely Tara’s, hair a mess, eyes red like she’s been crying or driving a long way or both. She’s got the book clutched to her chest with both hands, the one I sent, like a shield or a ticket or a reason.
For a second neither of us says anything.
“Hi,” she says.
“Hi.” It comes out wrecked. I’ve got a hand on the doorframe like the house might tip. “You’re here.”
“I’m here.” She holds the book up between us, eyes already wet. “Who signs a card with one letter, Richard? One. Like a goddamn Bront? novel. R. Who does that? And yes, I know what I said on the phone. I lasted two hours. Be smug about it later.”
“A man with no shame and a lot of free evenings, apparently, does that.”
“It’s so unfair.” She’s losing the fight with her own face. “You don’t get to be the controlling one’s opposite and the romantic one. Pick a lane.”
“Nope.” I step back, pull the door wide. “Get in here. It’s freezing and that sweater’s not a coat. Your actual coat’s still in my closet, by the way, where I’ve been very normal about it and definitely haven’t looked at it once.”
She laughs, wet and startled, and comes past me into the foyer. The house quits echoing the second she’s through the door. She looks around like it’s new. I want to ask a hundred things. I ask none of them. I just wait, because I’ve gotten disgustingly good at waiting and I hate it.
“So I did the thing,” she says, turning to face me.
“The whole stand-on-my-own thing. Three days on Tara’s couch.
I did offer to get a hotel, with my own money, which, side note, I forgot I have money?
I’ve been so busy being kept I straight up forgot I came with my own.
” She huffs. “Tara wouldn’t hear of it. Said a hotel was a sad rich-girl cliché and I was better than that. ”
“Tara’s a national treasure.”
“Tara’s a menace, and yes.” She takes a breath. “I made a list. Everything I’d do if I never came back. Where I’d live. What job I’d take. The whole independent-woman starter pack. I made myself actually picture it.”
My heart’s doing something it has no business doing. “And?”
“And it was fine, Richard. That’s the thing.
It was a perfectly good life on paper.” Her eyes go bright and furious.
“And I hated every single version of it. Not because I couldn’t do it.
I could. That’s the part I needed to find out and now I know it, I can stand on my own, I’m not a woman who has to be kept by anybody.
” Her voice cracks. “I hated it because you weren’t in it.
I kept building these nice little futures and then standing there looking around for you.
You weren’t there. The whole thing just went gray. ”
“Em...”
“I’m choosing you.” Fast, like she’s been holding it the whole drive over.
“Not because I’ve got nowhere else to go.
I proved I do. I’ve got options now, real ones, and I’m picking you anyway, on purpose, eyes open, from the outside, exactly like you said I should.
Because it turns out I’m way more scared of a life with no you in it than I ever was of getting hurt inside one with you.
” She wipes her face with the back of her hand, angry about the tears.
“I pushed you away because being that happy felt like standing on the edge of something. So I went and stood somewhere safe for three days. And it turns out the edge is the only place I want to be.”
I close the distance and pull her in, book and all. She fits against my chest like she always has, like she was built to land there. I feel her let out a breath she’s been holding for three days.
“You came back,” I say into her hair, because I’ve got nothing more dignified.
“I came back. I’m not going anywhere.” Her arms lock around me. “Not unless you tell me to.”
“That’s never happening.”
She tips her face up, wet and certain at the same time. “I love you. And I’m saying it standing on my own two feet, in Tara’s sweater, with my own car in your driveway and a whole other life I could’ve gone and had. That’s the version that counts, right? The one where I don’t have to.”
“That’s the only one that counts.” I press my forehead to hers. “I love you too. For the record, I’d have waited a hell of a lot longer than three days.”
“I know. That’s half of why I came back.” The spark’s surfacing through the tears now, the real her coming back online. “Also you weaponized a paperback against me and I want it on the record that I find that deeply annoying and it worked completely.”
“I’ll take it. Annoying and it worked is my entire brand with you.”
“It really is.” She laughs, soggy and helpless. “Three days building a whole independent life, and you knocked it flat with one book and a card you signed with a single letter. That’s not even a fair fight, Richard. That’s a cheat code.”
“I’ve had ten years to find your cheat code. Sue me.”
“I might.” She’s grinning now, full watery wreck of a grin. “I’ve got my own money, remember. I can afford a lawyer now.”
“God, that’s hot.” I mean it. She laughs harder, and I kiss her in the doorway of the house that finally isn’t quiet anymore, and I don’t let go for a long time.