20. Christine
— ? —
Christine
There are moments that change everything.
Not the obvious ones - not the screaming matches or the slammed doors or the night I packed a bag and walked out. Those are the earthquakes. The destruction you can see and name and point to later when someone asks what happened.
But then there are the quiet moments. The ones that slip beneath your defenses like a blade between ribs. The ones you don’t recognize as turning points until you’re looking back months later, wondering how you missed it.
This is one of those moments.
My mother’s kitchen. Isabella asleep in the next room, her soft breaths audible through the baby monitor. The evening light turning everything gold and amber and warm. And Benedict is standing at the sink with a dishtowel over his shoulder.
Drying dishes.
Because I washed them, and he refuses to just stand there.
It’s such a small thing. Benedict Morgan, billionaire CEO, with a dishtowel over his shoulder and soap suds on his wrists - but it makes my chest ache in ways I don’t want to examine.
“There’s a place,” he says, not looking at me. “Italian. Your mother mentioned it once. Hole in the wall, apparently. Best lasagna in Queens.”
“Marinello’s?”
“That’s the one.” He sets down a plate with excessive care. “I thought maybe. If you wanted. We could-”
“Are you asking me on a date?”
He finally looks at me. There’s something vulnerable in his face, something I haven’t seen since the early days. Before the company consumed him. Before we forgot how to reach each other.
“I’m asking if you’d like to have dinner with me. Just dinner. No expectations. No-” He swallows. “I just want to sit across from you and talk. Like we used to.”
I should say no. We’re still technically in the middle of a divorce. The papers are sitting in my lawyer’s office, waiting for signatures I keep finding reasons to delay. Going to dinner feels like a step toward something I’m not sure I’m ready for.
“Okay,” I hear myself say.
His whole face changes. Not a grin - something softer, more fragile. Like I’ve handed him something precious and he’s terrified of dropping it.
“Okay?”
“Don’t make me regret it.”
“I won’t.” He sets down the dishtowel. “I’ll pick you up. If that’s - is that alright? Picking you up?”
“That’s fine.”
“Good. That’s - good.”
He’s nervous. Benedict Morgan, who once negotiated a hostile takeover without breaking a sweat, is nervous about dinner at a neighborhood Italian restaurant. The realization does something dangerous to my resolve.
***
He shows up in jeans.
I open the door and stare. I’ve seen him in jeans lately - soaked through, kneeling on my mother’s bathroom floor with a wrench in his hand. I have never once seen him in jeans for me.
But tonight, Benedict Morgan is standing on my mother’s weathered doorstep in dark wash jeans that probably still cost more than most people’s rent. A cashmere sweater in heathered gray. A leather jacket I’ve never seen before - soft, worn, human in a way his usual armor never is.
He looks… approachable. Touchable. Like a man instead of a magazine cover.
“You look…” I trail off, searching for the right word.
“Like a normal human?” He grins - actually grins, boyish and self-deprecating. “I’m practicing.”
“It suits you.”
“That’s the nicest thing you’ve said to me in months.”
“Don’t get used to it.”
But I’m smiling when I say it, and he’s smiling back, and something warm uncurls in my chest despite my best efforts to keep it contained.
***
Marinello’s is everything my mother promised - cramped and loud and smelling of garlic and decades of accumulated love. The owner greets us at the door like family, settles us in a corner booth with worn leather seats, and brings a basket of bread so fresh it’s still steaming.
“No menus,” she announces, her accent thick enough to spread. “I bring you the good stuff. You eat. You’ll see.”
She disappears before either of us can respond.
“I like her,” Benedict says.
“She just commandeered our entire meal.”
“Exactly.” He tears off a piece of bread, and I watch his hands move - capable, unhurried, so different from the man who used to check his phone between every course. “When’s the last time someone made decisions for me? I forgot what it felt like.”
“Probably when you were five.”
“Earlier. I’m told I was a very opinionated toddler.”
I laugh. It surprises me - the ease of it, the way it comes without thought. We used to do this. Before. Sit across from each other and make each other laugh like the rest of the world didn’t exist.
I’d forgotten.
The food arrives in waves - antipasto, then pasta, then something involving eggplant that makes Benedict close his eyes in what might be religious ecstasy. We talk between bites. About Isabella, at first - safe territory, common ground. Then about other things. Harder things.
“I gave up my business for you.” It falls out somewhere between the pasta and the eggplant. “My event planning company. I was building something. And then we got married, and your world was so big, and mine started to feel small in comparison, and I just - stopped.”
Benedict sets down his fork. “I didn’t ask you to do that.”
“You didn’t have to. It was implied. Every charity gala, every foundation event, every dinner with investors where I had to smile and be charming and pretend I didn’t have opinions. I molded myself into what your life needed.”
“Christine-”
“I’m not blaming you. Not entirely.” I take a breath. “I made choices. I chose to support your career instead of building my own. I chose to believe that your success was our success. I chose-” My voice cracks. “I chose to disappear, and then I was angry at you for not seeing me.”
His hand finds mine across the table. I let him take it.
“I should have seen you.” His voice is rough. “I should have noticed what you were giving up. What it was costing you.”
“You had a company to run.”
“That’s not an excuse. It was never an excuse.” He squeezes my fingers. “Tell me about it. Your business. What did you love about it?”
So I tell him.
I tell him about the weddings and the corporate events and the one disastrous birthday party that involved an escaped parrot and a very angry clown.
I tell him about the rush of pulling off something impossible, the satisfaction of watching a vision come together, the joy of making people’s important moments feel magical.
He listens like every word matters.
“You should start again,” he says when I’m done.
“What?”
“Your business. You should rebuild it. You’re brilliant at it - I’ve seen you manage an event, remember?
You turned our wedding from a society circus into something that actually felt like us.
” His eyes hold mine. “You gave up something you loved because you thought my dreams were bigger. But they weren’t. They were just louder.”
My throat tightens. “It’s not that simple.”
“I know. But maybe it’s a start.” He traces circles on my palm with his thumb. “What do you want, Christine? Not what you think you should want. Not what makes the most sense. What do you want?”
No one has asked me that in years.
I think about the question. Really think, past all the layers of expectation and obligation and the careful compromises I’ve made with myself.
“I want to stop being afraid,” I finally say. “I want to trust that the people I love won’t disappear. I want to build something that’s mine - not yours, not ours, just mine.” I meet his eyes. “And I want to stop hating you for failing me.”
“And I want to call Nadia.” The name surprises me on the way out. “She was my maid of honor. I haven’t spoken to her in three years and I couldn’t tell you why. That isn’t something you did to me. That’s something I did.”
“I want that too.”
“I know.” I take a breath. “That’s part of why I need to forgive myself before I can forgive you.”
“Forgive yourself for what?”
“For giving up too. On us. On myself.” The admission costs me something. “You weren’t the only one who stopped trying, Benedict. You just stopped louder.”
His fingers tighten around mine. “Then we’ll heal together.”
The words hang between us - a promise, an offering, something fragile and new.
“I’d like that,” I whisper. “I think I’d really like that.”
“Can I tell you something you’re going to hate?” he says.
“Probably.”
“I’ve been seeing someone. A counselor. Since the week you filed.
” He turns his water glass a quarter turn on the tablecloth.
“The first four sessions I talked about the company. She let me. Then she asked me to describe your face the night I told you I didn’t have time for this, and I couldn’t do it.
I sat there eleven minutes and I could not put your face together. ”
I don’t say anything. I’m not sure I could.
“I’m not telling you so you’ll be impressed. I’m telling you because you asked me once why now, and I gave you a good answer instead of a true one.” He looks up. “The true one is that somebody spent three months making me sit still and look at it.”
“Is that where the shower tutorials came from?”
“No,” he says. “Those are just YouTube.”
***
We walk after dinner.
No destination. Just the two of us on a quiet Queens street, our shoulders almost brushing, the city humming its endless song around us.
It feels like something out of a memory - those early days when we’d wander for hours, talking about everything and nothing, drunk on the novelty of being together.
He stops under a streetlight.
“Can I tell you something?”
I turn to face him. The light catches the angles of his face, the silver threading through his dark hair, the lines that have deepened around his eyes. He looks older than he did when we met. More human. More real.
“Yes.”
“I fell in love with you the night we met.” His voice is quiet, certain.
“When you ruined my suit and tried to fix it with napkins and looked at me like I was being ridiculous for caring about it. I fell in love with you right there, in the middle of a room full of people who were terrified of me, because you weren’t.
You saw through every wall I’d ever built. ”
“I knew.”
“You knew?”
“I always knew.” I smile, something bittersweet tugging at my chest. “You weren’t exactly subtle. Sending dresses. Showing up at my coffee shop. The first-edition Pride and Prejudice.”
“You kept that book.”
“I kept more than I let on.” The admission slips out before I can stop it.
“The book. Every note you ever left on my pillow. The letter.” I shake my head.
“I sent back the dress and the orchids, and I tore up the one you left the morning you flew to Budapest. But the rest of it is in a box under my old bed. Even when I hated you. Even when I wanted to burn all of it.”
He steps closer. Close enough that I can smell his cologne, feel the warmth radiating from his body.
“I have been falling in love with you since that night.” His hands come up to cup my face - gentle, careful, like I’m something precious. “Deeper. Harder. Even when I was too stupid to show it. Even when I let work and fear and my own failures convince me that you’d always be there.”
“Benedict-”
“I will spend the rest of my life making sure you feel it.” His thumbs trace my cheekbones. “Every single day. Whether you take me back or not. Whether you sign those papers or burn them. I will spend every day showing you what I should have shown you all along.”
I rise on my toes.
He meets me halfway.
The kiss is different from the one in the bathroom - softer, sweeter, less desperation and more promise. His lips move against mine like a question, and I answer it with my hands in his hair and my body pressing into his and all the words I’m not ready to say.
When we finally break apart, we’re both breathing hard.
“I should take you home,” he murmurs against my forehead.
“Probably.”
“Your mother will worry.”
“She’s already texted me twice.”
He laughs - that real laugh, the one I’ve been falling in love with all over again - and takes my hand.
We walk back toward his car. The night air is cool on my flushed skin, and his palm is warm against mine, and somewhere along the way I realize I’m not afraid anymore.
I’m not ready. Not completely. But I’m not afraid.
We reach the lot. His car is three spaces away.
I stop walking.
He turns, a question in his eyes.
“Don’t take me home yet.”
His hand tightens around mine. The streetlight catches something dark in his expression, something hungry he’s been trying to hide.
“Christine-”
“I’m not asking.”