Chapter 13
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— Bea —
I went to the funeral. I hadn’t been sure I would, right up until the morning of it. I’d been back and forth all the night before — the argument running both ways. He’d ended things. It wasn’t my world to walk into anymore.
But Lindsay Curtis had called the day before, her voice thin and steady like someone running on nothing but the necessity of getting through the next thing. Will you come? Will you be with me? There was no world in which I said no to that.
The procession was something I hadn’t anticipated.
Dozens of bikes, two by two through the center of town behind the hearse — hazard lights on, no helmets, faces forward.
People stopped on the sidewalk to watch.
I stood beside Lindsay and felt her flinch at the sound of the engines, then steady herself.
He always wanted to belong to something, she said.
He did, I said. He was.
At the graveside I did what I tend to do in rooms full of people who are hurting — moved quietly through them, checked in, made sure anyone who looked like they were barely holding on had at least one person looking at them.
Colt, stone-faced — except when his eyes tracked to Lilac, which they did every minute or so, and then for that moment he wasn’t stone-faced at all.
Even in the middle of a funeral for a slain brother, that man couldn’t hide the love for his wife.
Handful, trying to keep it light for everyone and not quite managing it.
Indira, who caught my eye across the grave and gave me a look that said she was fine and that we would talk later.
I looked for Holden.
Not to speak to him — I hadn’t decided what I’d say, wasn’t sure I was ready. But I kept finding myself scanning the far side of the grave, the line of brothers near the hearse. He was never where I was looking. Every time I turned, he seemed to have moved.
After the graveside I went back to Lindsay’s. Stayed until she fell asleep on her sofa, then let myself out quietly and sat in my car for a long time before I started the engine.
I admitted to myself what I’d been doing all afternoon.
I’d wanted to know he was okay.
That was the thing that undid me — not the service, not the coffin going into the ground, not even Lindsay’s hand in mine.
The fact that even now, even after everything, my first instinct was still to find him and check that he was standing.
He’d told me I’d do exactly that. He’d said it in my doorway like it was a character flaw, a reason to leave — you’ll spend the next month trying to help me recover from this.
Sitting in my car in the dark outside Lindsay’s house, I thought about how he wasn’t wrong.
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Indira called the day after the funeral.
We’d spoken a handful of times in the days leading up to it — she was the one handling everything, and she’d been the one to invite me in the first place.
Those calls had been all logistics and Lindsay: what time, what she needed, whether she’d eaten, whether anyone was staying with her overnight.
Neither of us had said a word about Holden.
We both knew the shape of what wasn’t being said, and we both knew it would keep until there was room for it.
I’d been grateful for that. I don’t think I could have held a conversation about him and gotten through the arrangements at the same time.
So when she called the day after, I knew what it was before I picked up. What I hadn’t expected was the first thing she said. “I’m not calling to defend him.”
I sat back in my chair. “Okay.”
“I’m calling because I heard what he did and I want to know how you are. Not how you’re coping. How you are .”
The distinction mattered. It was the kind of thing a person only knew to say if they’d had their own experience of people asking the wrong version of the question.
“Angry,” I said. “Confused. Sad.” I paused. “All of it at once, in no particular order.”
“That sounds right.”
We talked for an hour. I paced my apartment without noticing—kitchen to window and back, the phone pressed to my ear—and she matched my energy without drawing attention to it.
She didn’t offer explanations for Holden’s behavior, didn’t try to make it make sense, didn’t suggest I should or shouldn’t forgive him.
She just listened, and occasionally said the right thing without making it sound rehearsed, and at the end she said “I’m here. Whatever you need. No agenda.”
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Lilac brought food on day five. She let herself in with the spare key I’d given her months ago, put a container of soup in my fridge, and sat across from me at the kitchen table.
She moved carefully, the particular deliberateness of someone navigating a body that was changing faster than she’d expected.
Not much to show yet, but I noticed it — the way she lowered herself into the chair, the way she kept one hand at her side as if checking something was where she’d left it.
“Colt’s outside?” I asked.
“In the truck. He didn’t want me driving myself.” She rolled her eyes, but gently. “He’ll wait as long as I’m in here.” She paused. “You know he missed my first pregnancy. All of it — finding out, the scans, learning the sex. This time he’s not missing a second of it if he can help it.”
I nodded because it made sense. “How are you feeling this week?”
“Better. The nausea’s finally backing off.” She considered me. “You don’t have to do the doctor thing right now. I didn’t come here to be a patient.”
“I know. I asked as your friend.” I managed something close to a smile. “The doctor thing is just how I ask.”
“Then, better. Tired. Hungry all the time, which is new.” Her hand drifted to her side again, half-conscious. “I keep forgetting and then remembering. It’s a strange way to exist.”
“That part doesn’t really stop,” I said. “It just changes shape.”
She nodded, and let a small quiet sit between us before she spoke again. “You don’t have to talk,” she said. “I can just be here.”
“I keep trying to understand why he did it.” I hadn’t planned to say it.
“Not the cheating. That I can explain. But the way he ended it—showing up with a verdict and no room for my response. I know who he is. I know how he’s wired.
I just can’t stop trying to work out what he thought was going to happen. ”
Lilac wrapped her hands around her mug. “What do you think he thought?”
“That he was protecting me.” I looked at my tea. “That if he got there first, I wouldn’t have to make a harder choice later.” I set the mug down. “And I can see the inside of the logic. That’s the part I can’t get past — I can see exactly how he got there. And I still didn’t get a word in.”
Lilac was quiet for a moment, turning her mug.
“When Colt thought I was gone, he just—decided things,” she said carefully.
“For years. Didn’t ask anyone. Didn’t let anyone in.
He thought that was what it looked like to love someone.
” She paused. “I don’t know if it’s the club, or just the kind of person who ends up in it.
But I think some of them genuinely don’t know there’s another way. ”
I recognized what she was describing. It wasn’t an excuse. Just — context.
“That doesn’t fix it,” I said.
“No,” she agreed. “It doesn’t.”
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I had my first therapy appointment two weeks after he ended us.
Dr. Sally Batten had been on my professional radar for years—we’d referred clients back and forth, attended the same conferences.
Sitting in the patient’s chair across from her felt strange since I knew the mechanics all too well and had to remind myself that knowing how something works didn’t exempt me from needing it.
She asked me why I was there. What I wanted to get out of this. What had happened that had led me to her door.
I gave her the shape of it, not the specifics.
A close friend of his had died suddenly.
The night it happened my boyfriend had come apart in a way I hadn’t seen from him before, and I’d stayed with him until he was asleep, then left to be with the friend’s mother.
When I came home, he was waiting in my doorway to tell me he’d slept with someone else that night and that we were done.
I left out the club, the circumstances of the death, the names.
Sally let a moment of silence settle. “You said he ended it before you could speak,” she said.
“Yes.”
“How did that land?”
I thought about it. “Like I’d been handed a piece of news and a verdict at the same time, with no gap in between for my opinion.”
“And what would you have said, if he’d given you the gap?”
I opened my mouth. Closed it. My hands had gone still in my lap without my noticing — both of them, flat on my thighs.
“I don’t know,” I said finally. “I think I would have been furious. I think I would have needed time. I think I might have—” I stopped again.
“I might have tried to understand it. What was happening to him. What drove him to that.”
“And that bothers you?”
“That I might have stayed? No.” I looked at my hands. “He didn’t give me the chance to even decide. That’s what bothers me.”
Sally nodded slowly. “You’re a therapist. Your first instinct in crisis is to move toward the wound and understand it.”
“Yes.”
“And he preempted that.”
“He took the choice away before I could decide whether to forgive him.” I sat forward without meaning to, the anger rising in my throat, clean and clear. “Which I might not have done. I might have decided it was unforgivable. But I want that to be my decision.”
“I think,” Sally said, “that’s the thing we’re going to work on.”
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I kept seeing clients. Kept supervising Jessica, my graduate student, through the practicum hours she owed toward her license. Kept showing up.
Some days were fine. Some days I sat between sessions and thought about him—not about the infidelity, but about the way he’d looked standing in my doorway. The deliberateness of it. The grief on his face that had nothing performative about it.
I didn’t call him. He didn’t call me. But I thought about him more than I wanted to, in the quiet moments.