16. Jacob
— ? —
Jacob
I watch my wife’s taillights shrink down the drive and I cannot make myself move.
The dust from her tires hangs in the air, turning gold in the last of the sunlight.
The sky is going orange behind the tree line, that strange peaceful color that comes after storms. I’m standing on my own porch watching the woman I love drive away from me and I’m not doing a goddamn thing to stop her.
She told me not to follow. She looked me in the eye and said those words, and for once in my life I’m listening, and I don’t know if that makes me a better man or a coward.
“Jacob.” Daphne, closer now. Her hand on my arm again, fingers curling into the fabric of my shirt. “This is so unfair. You almost died in that storm and she just abandons you? What kind of wife does that?”
I look at her.
She’s still doing it. The soft eyes, the trembling lip, the wounded bird routine.
I’ve watched her do this since she was twelve.
To teachers who caught her cheating on tests in middle school.
To her father every time she wanted money she didn’t need.
To the boys she dated in high school and the men she dated after, every single one of them wrapped around her finger until she got bored.
I’ve watched her do this for fifteen years and I told myself since April that she wasn’t doing it in my house, to my wife, right in front of my face.
I’m done telling myself things.
“Pack your things.”
She blinks. “What?”
“You’re leaving. Tonight. Go to your father’s.”
“Jacob, that’s crazy.” She laughs, high and nervous, her hand tightening on my arm. “The storm just came through, the roads are a mess, there’s debris everywhere. I can’t possibly drive in that, it’s not safe.”
“I don’t care about the roads.” I pull my arm free of her hand, stepping back, putting distance between us. “I care about my wife, who spent the tornado alone in a basement while you were in the shelter with me.”
“That wasn’t my fault.” Her voice goes sharp before she catches it and softens it again, sliding back into the wounded bird. “Jenna was supposed to make sure everyone got out. If she didn’t do her job properly, that’s on her, not me. I can’t be responsible for the staff’s mistakes.”
“Jenna works for you now.” I take another step back. The porch boards creak under my boots. “Jenna does what you tell her. She has since the second week you were here. I’ve watched it happen and I didn’t want to see it.”
“That’s ridiculous. I barely even talk to her.”
“You talk to her every day. I’ve seen you. In the hallway, in the kitchen, out by the west wing. You give her instructions and she follows them, and when Ellie asks her for anything she checks with you first.”
“That’s not.”
“It is true. I’ve watched it since the day you got here and I told myself I was imagining it because I didn’t want to believe my wife was right about you.”
The mask slips. Just for a second, just long enough for me to see what’s underneath, and it’s sharp and cold and calculating.
The face of a woman who’s been running numbers this whole time, figuring angles, working out what she can take and how to take it.
I’ve seen that face before. I’ve seen it on men who tried to cheat me on cattle deals, on men who thought I was too young to read what I was signing.
I’ve never seen it on someone I let into my home.
“You’re choosing her.” Daphne’s voice has a different edge now. No more wounded bird. No more soft eyes and trembling lips. Just the real thing underneath. “Over me. Over my father. Over everything my family did for you when you had nothing.”
“Your father did things for me. You never did anything but take.”
“I loved you.” She says it the way you play a card you’ve been holding all night.
“I’ve loved you since we were kids, Jacob.
Since we used to ride together on my daddy’s land.
I came back for you. I came back because I thought if I could just show you what she really is, how dramatic and needy she is, how she’s not good enough for you, you’d finally see. ”
“Get out of my house.”
“Jacob.”
“Get out of my house, Daphne. I’m not going to say it again.”
We stand there in the fading light. The dust is still settling from the storm.
The tree is still jutting through my roof behind us, branches reaching into the foyer.
Somewhere down the county road a siren is still going, faint and far away.
She’s waiting for me to back down. She’s waiting for me to remember what I owe her father, what Jackson did for me when I was fourteen and had nobody who wanted me.
I don’t back down.
“Fine.” Her chin comes up. The mask is fully off now and what’s underneath is ugly, all the sweetness stripped away.
“I’ll go. But when she decides you’re not worth the trouble, and she will, Jacob, because you’re cold and you’re broken and you don’t know how to love anybody, don’t come crawling to me.
Don’t call my father asking for advice. You’re on your own. You and your precious sunshine.”
She turns and walks toward the west wing, her shoes loud on the porch boards, and I stand there and let her go.
I hear her down the hall a few minutes later. Drawers slamming. Closet doors banging. Things being thrown into suitcases without care, hangers clattering, fabric tearing. A sharp crack, probably on purpose. Glass, maybe, or ceramic. A thing she knows I’ll have to clean up.
I don’t follow her. I don’t care what she takes.
I don’t care if she takes the furniture and the curtains and the goddamn light fixtures.
I don’t care if she burns the whole west wing down on her way out.
The only thing in this house I care about is already gone, driving toward town in a car full of everything she owns that matters, and I let her go.
I let her go.
An hour later Daphne’s white car pulls out of the drive. She doesn’t look at me as she passes. Doesn’t slow down, doesn’t wave, doesn’t offer any parting shot through the window. Just drives, fast, kicking up dust, toward her father’s place on the other side of the county.
Good.
I go back inside.
The house is quiet in a way it’s never been quiet before. Not peaceful quiet. Not the comfortable silence of two people who don’t need to fill every moment with words. This is empty quiet. Hollow quiet. The quiet after a death.
I walk through the foyer, stepping over branches, kicking debris out of my way.
The tree is massive up close. It’s the swing oak.
Torn up by the roots and thrown through my roof, right into the heart of my house.
In the morning I’ll have to call someone about it.
Get a crew out here, tarp the roof, start the repairs.
Tonight I don’t have the energy to care.
The kitchen is mostly intact. Some glass on the floor from the window over the sink, some dust on the counters, but nothing structural.
The bedroom is fine. The living room has water damage from the hole in the roof, puddles on the hardwood, the rug soaked through, but nothing that can’t be fixed.
It’s just a house. Just walls and floors and a roof with a hole in it.
It doesn’t mean anything without her in it.
My phone. I pull it out of my pocket and the screen is black. Dead. It died on me at the far shed and I didn’t even notice, too busy thinking about the fight this morning, about the door I walked out of and didn’t come back through.
I find the charger by the kitchen sink and plug it in. The screen stays black for a long moment, then lights up with the battery icon. I stand there waiting for it to come back to life, staring at it, the only thing in this house that might have answers.
The screen finally wakes up. One notification.
A text from Ellie, sent at three forty-seven this afternoon.
I’m still in the house. Where are you.
I read it four times. Five. Six. I read it until the words stop being words and become just shapes on a screen, and then I keep reading because I can’t make myself stop.
She was alone. She was scared. She reached for me, the way she’s reached for me a hundred times in the last year, the way she always reaches for me when it’s gone wrong, and I wasn’t there.
I was fifty yards away with my hand on a bunker door and five men holding me down, and I never got this message, and she sat in the dark thinking I’d forgotten her.
Three forty-seven. Eight minutes after that text, the storm was directly overhead.
The roar was so loud we couldn’t hear ourselves think, and the walls were shaking, and I was fighting five of my own men to get to that door, and she was at the front window typing this message to a phone that was dead in my pocket, and then she was running for a basement.
Where are you.
I slide down the cabinet until I’m sitting on my own kitchen floor with my back against the wood and my phone in my hand.
She doesn’t know I fought them. She doesn’t know I screamed her name into every face in that bunker. She doesn’t know Hollis had to pin my arm behind my back to keep me from going through that door. All she knows is that she was alone when it mattered, and I was somewhere else.
I sit there for a long time.
The light through the windows goes from orange to gray.
Gray to purple. Purple to black. I sit on my kitchen floor in the dark with my phone in my hand and I don’t move.
My legs go numb. My back aches from the angle against the cabinet.
The cut on my cheekbone throbs where I must have hit it on the bunker wall during the storm.
I think about calling her. I think about getting in the truck and driving to the Bellingers’ and banging on the door until she talks to me. I think about standing in their front yard yelling her name until she comes to the window, until she sees me, until she knows I’m here and I’m not leaving.
I don’t do any of it.
She said don’t follow me, and she meant it, and I’ve spent two months ignoring what she told me.
I’ve spent weeks dismissing her concerns and calling her petty and paranoid and choosing everyone else’s comfort over hers.
If I show up at that house tonight, I’m doing it again.
I’m making this about what I want instead of what she needs.
So I sit on the floor. And I wait. And I don’t know what I’m waiting for.
Eventually I get up. My knees crack. My back screams. I’m twenty-seven years old and I feel like sixty.
I can’t sleep in this house. Not tonight.
Not in a bed that still smells like her shampoo, in a room where her side of the closet is empty and her book is still on the nightstand and her side of the bed is still twisted from where she lay awake last night, turned away from me.
The Grand Hotel is the only option in town, and calling it grand is generous.
Three stories of peeling paint, a lobby that smells like mildew and old cigarettes, a neon sign that’s been missing its D since I was in high school.
But it’s not here, and right now that’s all I need.
The woman at the front desk has known me since I was a kid.
She hands me the key without meeting my eyes, and I realize the whole town already knows.
Word travels fast in a place this small.
Ellie left Jacob Walker. Packed a suitcase and drove to the Bellingers’ and left him standing in a house with a hole in the roof and no way to fix what he broke.
I take the key and I go upstairs and I lie on a bed that’s too soft and I stare at a water stain on the ceiling that’s shaped like Texas, and I don’t sleep.
I think about every single thing I did wrong.
The list is long. It takes me most of the night.