16. Paige
— ? —
Paige
I’m at my original wedding, twelve years ago, standing at an altar that looks exactly like the one at the vineyard. The dress I’m wearing is different - simpler, cheaper, the one I actually got married in before Cole decided I deserved upgrades - but everything else is the same.
Except this time, I can see what I couldn’t see then.
Cole, checking his phone during the vows - a quick glance down, a tiny smile, before his eyes return to me with all that practiced sincerity. Tara, in the front row, wearing a pale blue bridesmaid dress, tears streaming down her face. I always thought those were happy tears.
In the dream, I know better.
And Wes. Standing behind his brother in a suit that doesn’t quite fit, staring at the altar with an expression I couldn’t read at twenty-two. Now, in the nightmare, I see it clearly: longing. Want. The careful suppression of something he’s spent twelve years hiding.
The dream shifts.
I’m in bed with Cole - our bed, in the house we’ve shared for ten years - but Tara is there too.
Not physically, but present. A shadow at the foot of the bed, watching, always watching.
I realize with dream-logic certainty that she’s been there every time.
Every intimate moment, every whispered confession, every time I thought I was alone with my husband. She knew. She was always there.
The dream shifts again.
Wes is in the doorway. He’s been there the whole time too - watching, wanting, never saying anything. And I’m surrounded. Watchers everywhere. Liars everywhere. People who saw me and let me keep stumbling blind.
I wake up screaming.
Wes is at the guest room door within seconds. He doesn’t knock, doesn’t ask permission. He just comes in, sits on the edge of my bed, and waits.
I can’t speak yet. My heart is racing too hard, my hands shaking too violently, the phantom presence of all those watching eyes still crawling across my skin.
“I keep seeing it,” I finally manage. “All the moments I thought were real. They’re all contaminated now. I don’t have a single memory that’s just mine.”
“I know.” His voice is quiet in the dark.
“The way she looked at our wedding - I thought she was happy for me. I thought she was crying because she loved me and she wanted good things for me. And she was actually-” I stop.
Start again. “And you. You were there the whole time, too. Wanting me and not saying anything, and I just - I can’t trust anything I think I remember. ”
Wes lets the silence sit. In the dimness, I can barely make out his features - the strong line of his jaw, the furrow between his brows.
“Then we make new ones,” he says finally.
“What?”
“New memories. Ones that are just yours. Ones where no one is lying to you about what they’re thinking or feeling.”
It’s not a proposition. It’s a promise. And something in my chest shifts - not romance, not quite, but possibility. The first green shoot pushing through scorched earth.
“Cole said something to you at the funeral,” I say. “I could tell. What was it?”
Wes takes a breath. “He reminded me of something I already know. That I’ve wanted you for a long time. And that wanting doesn’t make me noble.”
“What does it make you?”
“Human. Flawed.” He meets my eyes in the dark. “Honest, finally.”
I reach out and cup his face with my hand. His stubble scratches my palm. I feel his breath catch, feel the tension that runs through his body at the contact.
“Stay,” I say. “Not in my bed. Just in the room. I can’t be alone with the dreams.”
He doesn’t argue. Doesn’t make excuses or protestations about propriety. He just stands, moves to the armchair by the window, and starts to sit.
Then he stops. Crosses back to me. Bends down.
His lips press against my forehead - so soft, so careful, like I’m something precious and breakable. The contact lasts only a second, but I feel it spreading through my body like warmth.
“When you’re ready,” he says against my skin, “I’m going to kiss you properly. And I’m going to take my time. And you’re going to forget every other kiss you’ve ever had.”
He pulls back. Settles into the armchair by the window, his long legs stretched out, his head tipped back against the cushion.
I lie in the dark and watch him. The rise and fall of his chest. The shadow of his profile against the window. The way his hands rest on his thighs, completely still, completely controlled.
I want him to cross the room. I want him to climb into this bed and make me forget every nightmare, every memory, every ghost that’s taken up residence in my head.
I want to feel his weight on top of me, his mouth on mine, his hands doing things that would make both of us forget that Cole ever existed.
This is wrong, I think. He’s your husband’s brother. You’re lying in bed in your husband’s brother’s house, thinking about your husband’s brother’s hands.
But that word - husband - doesn’t mean what it used to mean. Cole isn’t my husband anymore. He’s the man who lied to me for twelve years. And Wes-
Wes is the man who told me the truth. Who punched his own brother in the face for me. Who’s sitting in an armchair right now because I asked him to stay, and who hasn’t once tried to take advantage of my vulnerability even though I can see how much he wants to.
When you’re ready, he said. I’m going to kiss you properly.
I press my thighs together under the blanket and bite my lip to keep from making a sound.
It doesn’t help. It makes it worse - the pressure, the ache, the shape of him ten feet away in that armchair with his head tipped back and his hands, those hands, resting open on his thighs. When you’re ready, I’m going to kiss you properly. My whole body has opinions about ready.
My hand slides down my stomach before I’ve authorized the trip.
This is insane - he’s right there, he’s RIGHT THERE, asleep in the chair he took so I wouldn’t be alone, and I am under his blanket in his guest room with my fingers slipping beneath the waistband of my sweatpants, and I should stop, God, I should stop.
I don’t stop. I find myself soaked and swollen and already halfway gone, and the first slow circle of my own fingers punches a breath out of me that I have to bury in the pillow.
Quiet. Be quiet. Be so quiet.
Behind my closed eyes it’s his hand, rough-palmed, deliberate as everything else he builds - his mouth at my ear promising to take his time, his weight pressing me into this mattress, twelve years of patience coming apart all at once.
My hips roll against my fingers. The blanket whispers.
In the chair, he shifts, and I freeze with my pulse hammering in three places, and the room holds still, and then I can’t stop, I’m too close, working myself in tight, desperate silence with his name locked behind my teeth until the wave breaks - long and shuddering and soundless, my face pressed into the pillow that smells like his detergent, my whole body pulsing around nothing and wishing it were him.
The room settles. My heart declines to.
From the armchair, his breathing continues - slow, deep, even.
Too even. A sleeping man’s breath wanders. His keeps perfect time, in and out, a metronome of a man very carefully being asleep, and I lie in the wreckage of what I just did with heat crawling up my throat and one unhinged, delinquent thought circling the dark:
He knows. He heard. And he stayed in that chair anyway, because he said when you’re ready, and the man keeps his word even when it’s killing him.
I lie awake for another hour, not from nightmares this time, but from the promise in his voice - and from imagining, in explicit detail, exactly how he might keep it.
In the morning, a text from Cole: I’m not signing the divorce papers until you give me one conversation. You owe me that after twelve years.
I stare at the message for a long time. I don’t owe him anything. But I’m starting to understand that Cole doesn’t want a conversation.
He wants an audience for whatever he’s planning next.
***
Maria calls while I’m elbow-deep in dish soap, and the first thing she says is my name, and the second thing she says is, “I need you to drive me somewhere on Saturday, and I need you to not ask questions until I’ve finished talking.”
“Okay.”
“There’s a party.” Her breathing does careful work between the words. “For the baby. The gender reveal. Tara’s cousin is hosting it in her backyard, and an invitation came to the house, addressed to Frank and me, in Cole’s handwriting.”
The plate in my hands goes down into the water very gently.
“Frank threw it away. He says we’re not crawling to a party thrown by the woman who…
he says a lot of things. But Paige, that baby is my grandchild.
Whatever its parents are, that child is going to be born into this family, and I will not have its first family story be that its grandmother stayed home.
” A pause, and the steel in her voice buckles just once.
“And I cannot walk into that yard alone.”
Down the hall, the shower shuts off. Wes will be out in five minutes, and if I tell him where Maria wants me to take her he will move the earth to come with us, and his presence in that backyard would hand Cole a gift wrapped in a bow.
“What time Saturday?” I say.
Wes comes into the kitchen towel-drying his hair, and lying to him turns out to be a physical skill I don’t have yet.
“Who called?”
“Your mom.” True. “She needs me Saturday.” True. “Errands. Paperwork from the estate, some of your grandmother’s boxes.” A lie with true things stapled to it, assembled exactly the way Cole would assemble it, and knowing that is a stone I swallow whole.
“I can come. I’ll move the Hargrove walkthrough.”
“It’s a mother-in-law thing.” Drying the same clean plate twice. “She asked for just me.”
His eyes hold on me a moment longer than the sentence deserves. Water drips from his hair onto his collarbone and slides, and my gaze follows it south before I can revoke its clearance, and that, at seven in the morning, while lying to him, is a new personal low.