7. Karlie
— ? —
Karlie
He doesn’t answer it.
I watch his hand hover over the phone, watch the screen glow with Helen’s name, watch him make a choice. His fingers curl into a fist, and he pulls his hand back and rolls toward me instead.
“It can wait,” he says, and his voice is rough with sleep.
I don’t say anything. I just lie there, my heart pounding, staring at the ceiling as the phone finally goes silent.
It’s not much, but I’ll take it anyway.
The morning light is gray through the curtains, and for a moment neither of us moves. His arm is still draped over my waist, heavy and warm, and I can feel his breath against my shoulder. This is the first time in months we’ve woken up in the same bed. The first time in months he’s chosen to stay.
The phone buzzes again. A text this time.
William sighs and reaches for it, and I feel my whole body tense. But he just glances at the screen, types something quick, and sets it face-down on the nightstand.
“What did she want?” I ask, keeping my voice neutral.
“She needs a ride somewhere.” He rolls onto his back and stares at the ceiling. “I told her we have plans.”
“And?”
“And she’s not happy about it.”
I sit up, pulling the sheet with me. “William, if you need to…”
“I don’t.” He catches my hand before I can pull away. “I promised you this weekend. I meant it.”
I want to believe him. I want so badly to believe him.
“Okay,” I say. “Then let’s get moving before she comes up with an emergency.”
We shower separately, him first, then me, and by the time I come downstairs, he’s already in the kitchen making coffee. He’s wearing jeans and a sweater, casual clothes I haven’t seen him in for months. He looks younger like this. More like the man I married.
“Mrs. Potts left muffins,” he says, sliding a plate toward me. “Blueberry.”
“My favorite.”
“I know.”
We eat in a silence that’s almost comfortable. The kitchen is warm and bright, and for a few minutes the house almost feels normal. Almost feels like the home it used to be.
His phone rings.
We both freeze. He looks at the screen, then at me. His jaw tightens.
“Helen,” he says.
“Of course it is.”
He answers, and I can hear her voice through the speaker, not the words, but the tone. Pleading. Urgent. The same tone she always uses when she needs something.
“I can’t,” William says. “We have plans… No, I told you, we’re going away for the weekend… Helen, I understand that, but…”
I set down my coffee cup and wait. This is the test. This is where I find out if last night meant anything at all.
William pinches the bridge of his nose. “Fine. We’ll pick you up on the way. But we’re dropping you off, and that’s it. I’m not canceling our plans.”
He hangs up before she can respond.
“We’re picking her up?” I stare at him. “William…”
“Drop-off only.” He holds up his hand. “I promise. She says she needs to get to her family’s country house. It’s on our way out of the city.”
“Nothing is on the way when it comes to Helen.”
“Karlie.” He crosses the room and takes my hands. His grip is firm, warm. “I promised you this weekend. Nothing is going to get in the way of that. Not Helen, not my parents, not anything. Okay?”
I search his face for the lie. I don’t find it, but I’ve been fooled before.
“Okay,” I say. “But if she pulls something…”
“She won’t.”
“She will. She always does.”
“Then I’ll handle it.” He squeezes my hands. “Trust me.”
I don’t trust him. I don’t trust anything about this situation. But I nod anyway, because what choice do I have?
“Let me finish packing,” I say. “Give me ten minutes.”
I head upstairs to grab my bag. I packed it last night, but I recheck everything anyway, toiletries, change of clothes, the lingerie I bought months ago and never had a chance to wear. I don’t know if this weekend is going to fix anything. I don’t know if anything can fix what’s broken between us.
But I have to try.
When I come back downstairs, William is waiting by the door with his own bag and the car keys. He takes my bag from me without being asked and carries it out to the car.
It’s a small gesture, but it counts.
We get in the car and pull out of the driveway, and I watch our house disappear in the rearview mirror. The house that used to feel like home. The house that’s felt like a prison for the past four months.
Maybe when we come back, it’ll be different.
Maybe.
Helen is waiting outside her building when we pull up.
She’s dressed like she’s going to a funeral, black dress, dark sunglasses, a delicate scarf wrapped around her throat. When she sees me in the passenger seat, her face falls.
“What is she doing here?” Helen asks as she slides into the backseat.
“Great to see you too, Helen,” I say without turning around.
“I thought…” She stops, recalibrates. “I thought it would just be you, Will. I didn’t realize Karlie was coming.”
“Karlie is my wife,” William says, pulling back into traffic. “We’re going away for the weekend.”
“Going away?” Helen’s voice climbs. “This weekend? But I need, I thought you said you’d help me with…”
“I said I’d drop you at your family’s place. That’s what I’m doing.”
“But Will.” She leans forward between the seats, and I catch a whiff of her perfume, the same cloying floral that was on that scarf. “Do you have to go this weekend? I really need you right now. You’re the only one who understands what I’m going through.”
“Helen…”
“Can’t you postpone?” Her hand lands on his shoulder, and I watch her fingers curl into his jacket. “Just for a few days? I’ve been barely holding on, and without you I don’t know what I’ll…”
“No.” William’s voice is flat. Final. “We’re not postponing.”
I turn around to look at her. “The woman with a chauffeur and six cars needs my husband specifically to drive her somewhere. On the one weekend we’ve managed to plan together in four months. What a coincidence.”
Helen’s eyes narrow behind her sunglasses. “I don’t have a chauffeur anymore. I had to let him go. Things have been… difficult since Logan disappeared.”
“Have they.” I don’t bother hiding my skepticism. “How tragic for you.”
“It has been tragic, actually.” Her voice sharpens. “Not that you’d understand. You barely knew him.”
“I knew him well enough to know he deserved better than you.”
“Karlie.” William’s voice carries a warning.
“She’ll invent an emergency before we reach the highway,” I say to him, not bothering to lower my voice. “Watch. Some crisis that only you can solve. Some reason why our plans have to change.”
“That’s not fair,” Helen says, but her voice has lost some of its wounded quality. There’s an edge underneath now, sharp and cold. “I’ve never asked Will to cancel plans for me.”
“You’ve never had to ask. You just show up, and he drops everything.” I turn back to face the windshield. “It’s impressive, really. The timing. The tears. The way you always need him at exactly the moment when I might actually get his attention.”
“Karlie,” William says quietly. “Please.”
“Please what? Please pretend I don’t notice? Please act like she hasn’t spent four months inserting herself into our marriage?” I shake my head. “I’m done pretending, William. I’m done acting like this is normal.”
Silence from the backseat.
Then Helen’s voice, small and hurt: “Do you have to go this weekend? I need you, Will. You’re being selfish.”
William’s hands tighten on the steering wheel. I watch his jaw work, watch him fight it out with himself.
“We’re dropping you off,” he says finally. “That’s the end of it.”
I stare at him. He took my side. He actually took my side.
Helen sits back in her seat, and I can feel the fury radiating off her even without looking.
Silence from the backseat again, but it has a different texture now. She isn’t regrouping this time. She’s radiating.
“There was a time,” Helen says at last, quietly, to the window, “when you would have done anything for me. When family meant something to you.”
“You’re not my family, Helen.” William doesn’t take his eyes off the road. “You were Logan’s girlfriend. That’s not the same thing.”
I watch her face in the visor mirror, the flash of rage, quickly suppressed, replaced by wounded dignity, and after that she doesn’t say another word.
The silence in the car is thick and uncomfortable, but I don’t try to fill it. I just watch the city give way to suburbs, then to countryside, and try to process what just happened.
He said no to her. He chose our weekend over her manufactured crisis.
It shouldn’t feel like such a victory. A husband prioritizing his wife shouldn’t be remarkable. But after four months of watching him drop everything for Helen, of coming last in my own marriage, this feels like a miracle.
The countryside opens up around us, all rolling hills and autumn colors.
Her family’s turnoff is still miles ahead somewhere, a green sign we haven’t reached yet, and I find I don’t even mind the wait, because right now, in this exact mile, I already have everything I wanted.
My husband beside me. Her behind us. The whole order of the world, corrected.
I crack the window and let the cool air wash over my face. For the first time in months, I feel like I can breathe.
“I’m sorry,” William says quietly, pitched low, for me, though the car is small enough that low is a courtesy, not a secret.
I look at him. “For what?”
“For everything. For the last four months. For making you feel like you didn’t matter.” His grip tightens on the steering wheel. “I know I’ve been… absent. I know I’ve hurt you. And I don’t have a good explanation for any of it.”
“You could try.”
“I can’t.” His jaw works. “Not yet. But I will. I promise you, Karlie, I will explain everything. Just… not this weekend. This weekend I just want to be with you. I want to remember what it feels like to be your husband instead of…” He stops.
“Instead of what?”
“Instead of someone who’s failing at everything that matters.”
I don’t have an answer ready for that. So I just reach over and put my hand on his, where it rests on the gearshift. He turns his palm up and laces his fingers through mine.
“This weekend,” I say. “We’re just us.”
“Just us,” he agrees.
He lifts my hand to his mouth and kisses my knuckles, and hope flutters up in my chest, or maybe just the memory of it.
The road stretches out ahead of us. The woods rise up on either side, golden and red and beautiful. His hand is warm in mine, and for a few perfect minutes we’re almost the couple we used to be.
I watch him almost smile, a real smile, not the tight, controlled expression he’s worn for months. The tension in his shoulders eases slightly, and there he is again, the man who put his jacket around my shoulders on a cold terrace and promised to treat me well.
“Do you remember the first time we drove out of the city together?” I ask.
“Our honeymoon,” he says. “That awful bed and breakfast with the leaky roof.”
“The owner kept calling you ‘Mr. Hunk.’”
“She was ninety years old and half-deaf.”
“She knew what she was doing.” I laugh, and it feels strange, rusty from disuse. “You were so horrified.”
“I was trying to maintain some dignity.”
“You had no dignity. You spent three days eating her terrible cooking and pretending to like it because you didn’t want to hurt her feelings.”
“The woman was ninety,” he says, but he’s smiling now, a real smile. “What was I supposed to do, tell her the eggs tasted like rubber?”
“Yes. That’s exactly what you were supposed to do.”
“You didn’t tell her either.”
“I’m not the one she kept pinching.”
He laughs, actually laughs, and the sound goes straight through me. I can’t remember the last time I heard him laugh. From the backseat, Helen’s silence gets louder with every mile, all that fury with nowhere to land, and I find I don’t mind it in the slightest.
“I missed this,” I say quietly. “I missed us.”
“I missed us too.” He squeezes my hand. “I know I haven’t shown it. But I have.”
The woods slide by, golden and red, and I let myself believe him. Just for this moment. Just for this drive.
He glances at me, his expression soft in a way it hasn’t been in months. “When we get there, I’m going to leave my phone in the car. The whole weekend. No calls, no texts, no…”
The deer explodes from the tree line.