18. Christine
— ? —
Christine
The fire escape is cramped and rusted and technically a safety hazard, but it’s become my favorite place in my mother’s apartment.
Out here, the city sprawls beneath me like a living thing - lights blinking, traffic humming, a million lives unfolding in a million windows.
Out here, I can breathe. Can think. Can pretend, for a few hours, that I’m not a woman whose entire existence has been reduced to diaper changes and sleepless nights and the constant, gnawing question of what comes next.
Tonight, I’m not alone.
Benedict climbed out after me without asking, folding his long frame into the space beside mine with a grace that shouldn’t be possible for a man his size.
His shoulder almost touches mine. Almost. That careful distance he’s been maintaining, the one that makes me want to scream and close the gap in equal measure.
Isabella is asleep inside. My mother too, finally, after insisting three times that she didn’t need help with the dishes. The apartment is quiet. The city is loud. And I’m sitting on a fire escape with my almost-ex-husband, about to ask the question I’ve been avoiding for weeks.
“Did you ever want her?”
The words come out smaller than I intended. More fragile.
Benedict doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t look away. Just turns his head slightly, meeting my eyes in the dim glow of the streetlights below.
“No.”
“Not once?”
“Christine.” His voice is steady, certain in a way that makes something loosen in my chest. “I could be in a room with a hundred women and I would only see you. I’m not-” A small, self-deprecating laugh.
“I’m not trying to sound poetic. I know how that sounds.
But it’s the truth. I am physically incapable of wanting anyone else. I tried, once.”
My breath catches. “What? When?”
“When we first met. After the gala, after you sent back the dress. I convinced myself you were too good for me. That I should move on, find someone in my world, someone who understood the life I was building.” He shakes his head.
“I took a woman to dinner. Some heiress my mother had been pushing at me for months. Beautiful. Accomplished. Exactly the kind of woman I was supposed to want.”
I don’t want to hear this. I need to hear this.
“What happened?”
“I couldn’t even hold a conversation.” His mouth twists, rueful.
“Kept thinking about what you would say. What you would laugh at. Whether you’d find the restaurant pretentious - you would have, by the way, it was unbearable - and what face you’d make when you tried the overpriced wine.
” He looks at me. “I excused myself before dessert. Called you the next day. You didn’t answer, so I showed up at your coffee shop like a stalker. ”
“I remember.”
“That’s who I am, Christine. That’s who I’ve always been. Yours. Even when I was too stupid to show it.”
The words settle into me like stones into water. I want to believe him. I do believe him - that’s the terrible part. I believe that he never touched Pauline, never wanted her, never strayed in the way the tabloids suggested.
But that’s not the question that keeps me awake at night.
“Then why did you let her get so close?”
He’s quiet for a long moment. Below us, a taxi honks. Someone laughs on the street, bright and careless. The city keeps moving, indifferent to the two people sitting on a fire escape trying to excavate the ruins of their marriage.
“Because she made me feel like I was enough.”
The honesty of it steals my breath.
“She made my life easier,” he continues, his voice rough.
“When I was failing - at work, at home, at us - she told me I was brilliant. Capable. That everything I was doing was right. That the sacrifices I was making were noble, necessary, the mark of a true leader.” He turns to look at me, and there’s something broken in his face.
“I know that’s not an excuse. But you were trying to tell me what I was doing wrong, and I didn’t want to hear it.
So I listened to the person who told me I was perfect instead. ”
My throat tightens. The words that want to come out are defensive - I wasn’t criticizing you, I was trying to reach you, I was drowning and you couldn’t see it - but I swallow them down. Because he already knows. I can see it in the devastation written across his features.
“I failed you in every way a husband can fail.” His voice cracks. “And I hate myself for it. Every day. Every hour. I look at what I did - what I didn’t do - and I don’t know how you can even stand to be in the same room with me.”
“You didn’t fail me by being with her.”
“No.” He meets my eyes. “I failed you by not being with you.”
I let that sit between us.
“I didn’t call you,” I say. “The night she couldn’t breathe.
I stood in my mother’s hallway with the phone in my hand and I thought, he wasn’t there for her birth, he doesn’t get to be there for this.
” The words taste foul on the way out. “That wasn’t about you.
That was me deciding our daughter’s emergency was mine to hand out. ”
“Christine-”
“No. I need to say it.” I press my palms flat against my knees. “You get the call. Always. Whatever we are or aren’t, whatever happens with the papers, you get the call. I’m not doing to her what was done to me.”
He doesn’t answer right away. When he does, his voice has gone somewhere low and careful.
“Thank you.”
The fire escape creaks as he shifts, leaning back against the railing. The movement brings his shoulder closer to mine. I don’t pull away.
“I missed the birth of my daughter.” The words come out quiet, devastated.
Like he’s confessing to a crime. “What she did with my phone is hers to answer for. Making myself dependent on her version of my own life is mine. I chose to be unreachable. I chose to let someone else run my days while I ran everyone else’s. ”
He swallows hard.
“Not her fault. Not yours. Mine.”
I look at him, past the guilt and the grief to the man underneath.
The man who showed up in pajama pants when Isabella was sick.
The man who walked four blocks through a monsoon to be on time.
The man who sits on my mother’s fire escape night after night, not asking for forgiveness, just asking to be present.
He’s still in there. The man I married. Buried under years of wrong choices and misplaced priorities, but still there.
“I don’t hate you,” I say.
His head snaps toward me. “What?”
“I don’t hate you.” The words feel strange in my mouth. True, but strange. “Maybe I should. God knows you’ve given me enough reasons. But I don’t.”
His exhale sounds like a sob.
“But I’m not ready to forgive you,” I continue. “I don’t know if I ever will be. Some things you can’t unfeel, Benedict. Some wounds don’t close just because you want them to.”
“I know.” His voice is barely a rasp. “I know.”
“But I don’t hate you.”
“That’s-” His voice breaks. He presses the heels of his hands against his eyes, and he doesn’t try to hide what’s happening to his face.
That’s the part that undoes me. A year ago I’d never seen this man cry.
Now I’ve watched him do it in a hospital room, in my mother’s living room, and here.
He looks like his heart is being pulled out of him by the roots.
Maybe it is.
Maybe mine is too.
Something gives in my chest. A softening. A crack in the wall I’ve built so carefully around my heart.
My hand moves before I can stop it.
I brush my fingers against his. Just barely. Just enough to feel the warmth of his skin, the slight tremor running through him like an earthquake only I can sense.
He freezes. Stops breathing. Stops existing, I think, for one suspended heartbeat.
I don’t pull away.
“Baby steps,” I whisper.
He nods, throat working. When he finally speaks, his voice is wrecked. Completely and utterly wrecked, like someone took sandpaper to his vocal cords.
“Baby steps.”
Neither of us says anything for approximately forty-seven seconds. We sit there in the dark, my fingers barely touching his, the city breathing around us. Two broken people on a fire escape, trying to work out whether the rubble of their marriage contains anything worth salvaging.
I think it might.
I’m terrified it might.