10. Paige
— ? —
Paige
The key still works.
Standing on my own porch with my own key in my own lock, waiting for it to feel normal, is the strangest part of this entire week.
The dead roses in the beds along the walk need cutting back.
The porch swing Cole never fixed still hangs crooked on one chain.
Nothing here knows that the marriage ended.
The house is still waiting for us to come home.
My phone is pressed between my shoulder and my ear, and Wes’s voice fills the silence while I stand there not turning the key.
“You don’t have to do this today,” he says. “Your mom just got out of the ICU. Give it a week.”
“The bag Cole packed for the honeymoon suite has three shirts in it. I’ve worn all of them twice. If I have to put on that green blouse one more time, I’m going to set it on fire in the hotel parking lot, and then I’ll be the crazy ex-wife from the vineyard AND an arsonist.”
A low sound comes through the phone that might be a laugh. “Noon, then. I’ll bring the truck and the good boxes.”
“There are good boxes?”
“There are boxes that don’t collapse when you fill them with books. In my business that counts as good.”
“Noon,” I agree. “And Wes? Thank you.”
“Stop thanking me.”
The line goes dead, and the quiet he leaves behind is easier to carry than the quiet in front of me. Turning the key takes three tries.
Inside, the house smells the way it always smells, lemon polish and coffee grounds and the cedar sachets I keep in every closet, and my chest caves in on the first breath.
Twelve years live in this smell. Every Christmas morning.
Every Sunday I spent arranging peonies at the kitchen island for the studio’s weekend orders while Cole read me headlines in his terrible newscaster voice.
That voice was one of the first things I loved. The reason why still sits on the counter, this month’s jar of honey, bought the way he’s bought one every week since our third date.
Whether he was texting her from that same farmers market is a question with claws, so I leave it alone, take the empty suitcase upstairs, and start with the closet.
Packing goes fine until the photo albums.
They live on the bottom shelf of the linen closet, eleven of them, one for each year Cole remembered to have the pictures printed.
My grandmother taught me to keep paper photographs.
Screens die, sweetheart, paper waits. Pulling the albums into a canvas bag, spines up, takes two minutes, and I’m zipping the bag closed when a door opens downstairs - the kitchen one, off the garage.
“Paige?”
Every muscle in my body forgets its job.
His footsteps come up the stairs unhurried, a man walking through his own home, and by the time he fills the bedroom doorway I’ve put the bed between us without deciding to.
Unshaven, gray T-shirt, the split in his lip gone yellow at the edges.
Soft. Rumpled. Cole dresses for every occasion, and today the occasion is looking harmless.
“Mrs. Keller called me,” he says. “The second your car pulled in. She thought we were being robbed.” A careful smile. “I told her the truth. I said, that’s just my wife.”
“The locks were changed the day you left this house.”
“The doors, sure.” A small, patient smile. “The garage code is still our anniversary. You rekeyed every lock in the place and kept the code, Paige. I choose to find that hopeful.”
“You need to leave.”
“It’s my house, Paige.”
“Then I need to leave.” The canvas bag goes over my shoulder. “I’ll come back for the rest with a moving company and a witness.”
“Wait.” Both hands come up, palms out, the gesture he uses on nervous clients and skittish dogs. “Five minutes. You won’t take my calls. You blocked me everywhere but the phone company. Five minutes in the house where we built a life, and then I’ll carry your boxes to the car myself.”
“You don’t get the house as a stage set, Cole. Say what you came to say from over there.”
Instead of answering, his eyes drop to the bag on my shoulder, and everything harmless drains out of his face.
“Those are the albums.”
“They’re mine.”
“Half of those photographs are mine.” A step around the bed. “That’s our honeymoon. That’s the trip to Maine. That’s your thirtieth birthday, the party I planned for four months. You don’t get to walk out with twelve years in a bag, Paige, half those memories belong to me.”
“Which half?” The bag strap cuts into my palm where I’ve wrapped my fist in it. “Show me the pages you weren’t lying on. I’ll tear those out and leave them on the counter next to the honey.”
“That’s not fair.”
“Which trip to Maine was it, Cole? Year four? There’s a picture in here of you on the lighthouse steps, on the phone, waving me off because it was work. Was it work?”
“Paige.”
“The anniversary in year seven, when you surprised me with the bed and breakfast and then drove back to the city for one night because of the pipe burst at the office. Was there a pipe?”
“You want to talk about performances?” His voice climbs a register, and there he is, there’s the pivot.
“You knew for two months, Paige. Two months of playing my wife while you rehearsed a hit piece into that notebook. You let me plan a party, you let my mother buy a dress, you stood at that altar and executed me in front of everyone we know - and I’m supposed to be the only liar in this marriage?
And now you’re in our bedroom cutting yourself out of your own good memories like she didn’t do enough cutting for all of us. ”
“She was jealous of what we had.” Repeating it slowly is the only way to fit the whole lie in my mouth. “The woman carrying your child was jealous of the marriage you kept her on the side of. Do you rehearse these, or do they just come to you?”
His jaw works. Under the wounded softness, under the gray T-shirt and the yellowing lip, the other Cole surfaces for just a breath. The one who plans four months ahead. The one who books a vineyard as an alibi.
“You want to punish me,” he says quietly. “Fine. I’ve earned it. But think about what you’re doing before you burn it all down. Your mother almost died this week.”
“Do not.”
“She’s sixty-eight, Paige, and her heart gave out watching you get humiliated.
What do you think a divorce circus does to her?
Depositions. Both families dragged in. Every friend we have forced to pick a chair.
” His voice drops into the register he saves for closing.
“Or we handle this quietly. You and me, one real conversation, and I’ll sign whatever your lawyer puts in front of me.
I keep telling you I’ll sign. All I’m asking for is the conversation first.”
There it is. Five days of missed calls stacking into the dozens, and it was never about apology.
“You held my mother’s cardiac ward over my head to get a meeting.” Saying it out loud makes it worse, makes it real, makes the honey jar and the newscaster voice curdle all the way back to our third date. “You should write that one down, Cole. That might genuinely be your best work.”
“That is not what I said.”
“It’s exactly what you said. You just said it in the font you use for caring.”
The doorbell rings.
Neither of us moves. It rings again, and then the door opens anyway, because I texted Wes the address change an hour ago and the man is chronically early, and his voice comes up the stairwell level and easy.
“Paige? Truck’s here.”
Cole’s whole posture reassembles. Shoulders square, chin up, wounded husband becoming wronged brother between one breath and the next. Watching him do it in real time, watching the costume change I spent twelve years missing, hollows out my stomach.
“Of course,” he says. “Of course you called him.”
“He has a truck.”
“He has a truck.” Cole laughs, one dry note with nothing in it. “Sure, Paige. It’s the truck.”
Wes reaches the doorway and stops. For a moment the room holds two brothers and a bed and a bag of photographs, and nobody breathes. Wes’s eyes go from me, to Cole, to the distance between us, doing arithmetic he doesn’t share.
“Boxes in the hall?” he asks me, as though his brother is furniture.
“And the suitcase. The bag stays with me.”
“You’re not taking the albums.” Cole angles himself into the space between Wes and the hallway. “Take the clothes, take the jewelry, take the espresso machine your mother gave us, but the albums stay in this house until we’ve divided them like adults.”
“Move,” Wes says.
“This is my home. You don’t give orders in my home.”
“You’re right.” Wes picks up the suitcase in one hand, lets the pause sit there, and looks at his brother the way he looked at him at the altar. “Your home. Twelve years, and I can count on one hand the number of times you were actually in it after dark.”
“Careful.”
“Or what?” The suitcase hangs easy at his side.
“You’ll tell Mom? She cried through your voicemails and deleted them.
Dad hasn’t said your name since the vineyard.
You’re running out of family, little brother, and you’re standing in the last room that’s still yours, screaming about property rights. ”
Air leaves the room. Cole’s face does its complicated shuffle, rage and calculation and a plea for an audience, and he chooses me, of course he chooses me, pivoting away from the brother who can hit him toward the wife who never has.
“You know what this is, right?” Both hands spread wide, reasonable, reasonable, reasonable. “You see what he’s doing. He waited twelve years and now he’s carrying your suitcase out of our bedroom. Ask him why he really came, Paige. Ask him what he told me at Christmas three years ago.”
“Cole.” Wes’s voice stays flat, and the flatness has an edge to it now.
“Ask him.”
My hand finds the strap of the bag. Whatever grenade is buried in Christmas three years ago, he wants me to dig for it, wants me down in the dirt with both of them, and the wanting is exactly why I won’t.
“Get the boxes, Wes. I’m done here.”
Going down my own stairs for the last time takes eleven steps.
Cole follows the whole way, voice climbing behind me, offers and warnings braided together, I’ll sign everything, one conversation, you owe me one conversation, don’t do this, you’re being managed and you can’t even see it, and by the time we reach the truck he’s standing barefoot on the front lawn of the home we built, arms out, shouting at the closed passenger window.
“One conversation, Paige! That’s the price! You want your freedom, you know what it costs!”
Wes puts the truck in reverse without a word. His knuckles have gone pale on the wheel.
“What happened at Christmas three years ago?” The question leaves me before I decide to ask it.
“Nothing that changes anything today.”
“That’s not a no.”
“It’s not a no.” His eyes stay on the mirrors, on the road, anywhere that isn’t me.
“It’s a not-yet. When you’re ready to hear it, you’ll hear it from me and not from him, and you’ll hear all of it.
Today you’ve got a suitcase, a bag of photographs, and a mother who needs you to eat an actual dinner. That’s the whole list.”
“You’re managing me.”
“I’m driving you.” A pause, then, quieter, “There’s a difference. I promise you’ll learn it.”
There’s a muscle ticking in his jaw, and it’s not my business, none of it is my business, the width of his hands on that wheel is not my business five days after my marriage died on an altar.
Grief first. I’m allowed to notice safety. I’m not allowed to notice him.
The truck swings back into the street, and the front lawn slides across the windshield one last time.
Cole isn’t watching us leave. He’s crossed the lawn to the rose beds, my rose beds, the ones we replanted together the spring after everything died, and he’s got the first bush in both bare hands, and as the truck straightens out he tears it out of the earth by the roots and drops it on the grass.
He looks up. Finds my eyes through the windshield.
Then he reaches for the next one.