10. Karlie
— ? —
Karlie
“You have some nerve.”
My father’s voice doesn’t rise this time. It doesn’t need to. The words come out level and cold, and William stops in the doorway like they physically hit him.
“Mr. Pembleton.” William’s voice is rough. “I need to see my wife.”
“You needed to see her yesterday. You needed to see her the day before that, while she was lying in that bed unconscious and I was the only one in this room.” My father takes one step toward him.
“Do you know what I told her when she woke up? I told her that her husband was fine. I stood here and delivered that news like it was good.”
“Howard…”
“Mr. Pembleton,” my father corrects him, and I have never heard him use that voice on anyone, not a boardroom rival, not a waiter who dropped a tray. It’s quiet the way winter is quiet.
“Dad.” My voice scrapes, but it carries. They both turn. “Give us a minute.”
My father weighs me for a moment. I can see the argument he wants to make sitting right there behind his teeth.
“I’ll be in the hallway,” he says finally. To William, on his way past: “The door stays open.”
He goes. I listen to his footsteps stop about six feet down the hall, which is my father’s idea of privacy, and I decide not to fight it.
William stands in the doorway with his crushed roses and his sling and his stitches, and for a moment neither of us says anything at all.
“You can come in,” I say. “I’m not contagious.”
“Your father seems to think I am.”
“My father watched me wake up alone. Draw your own conclusions.”
He crosses the room slowly, like the floor might give.
He sets the roses down on the side table, next to my father’s unopened newspaper, and then he just stands there, looking at me.
His eyes move over the bruising I can feel stiffening across my face, the tape on my hand, the monitor wires, and his face does the thing where it tries to close and can’t quite manage it.
“How are you?” he asks.
“I broke a couple of ribs. How’s Helen?”
He flinches. It’s small, but I’m watching for it.
“Karlie.”
“It’s a fair question. You’d know better than anyone.
” I shift against the pillows, and my ribs light up, and I keep my face still because I am not spending my pain in front of him.
“She came by, actually. You just missed her. In a wheelchair, which was a nice touch, given that her bandage is roughly the size of a postage stamp.”
“She’s being discharged tomorrow,” he says quietly, and I watch him decide against the lie, watch him understand there is no version of this where I do not already know. “I told her I’d drive her home.”
There it is. He doesn’t even try to hide it, and I don’t know whether that’s honesty or surrender.
“Of course you did.”
“Karlie, she was in the accident too. She doesn’t have anyone…”
“She has parents with a house full of staff. She has an entire adoring society that thinks she hung the moon.” My breath catches on the next rib-pull and I ride it out. “But you’ll drive her home. You’ve been with her. Two days I’ve been in this bed, and you’ve been with her.”
“I’ve been here the whole time.” His voice cracks on it. “Both days, Karlie. Your father wouldn’t let me past the waiting room, and I couldn’t blame him, so I sat there. Ask the nurses. I sat in that waiting room until they threw me out at night.”
“And when they threw you out? Where did you go, William? Two floors down?”
He doesn’t answer, and the not-answering is its own answer, and we both stand in it for a moment.
“You know what the strangest part is?” I say. “I used to think the worst thing would be finding out you were sleeping with her. I used to lie awake doing that math. And now I almost wish that were it, because at least that would be a story I understood. At least it would have a shape.”
“I have never touched her.”
“I know.” And I do, which is the insane part. Three years of reading this man, and that particular truth reads clean. “That’s what I can’t figure out. You don’t want her, and you still keep choosing her, and I can’t make those two things live in the same house.”
He opens his mouth. His jaw works, and nothing comes out of it, and he looks away.
“And there’s my answer.” I look at the roses. Crushed stems, white petals already bruising at the edges. “I saw you, William.”
His head comes up.
“At the crash. I was awake.” My voice wants to shake and I don’t let it.
“I couldn’t move, and I couldn’t talk, and I couldn’t open my eyes more than a crack, but I was awake for all of it.
I saw you get out. I heard your door open.
I heard your feet on the gravel.” I make myself look at him. “I saw you walk past my window.”
“Karlie…”
“I saw you open the back door. I saw you carry her away. I remember everything.”
The room is very quiet. Somewhere down the hall a cart rattles past. William has gone completely still, the way he goes still in negotiations when the other side says the thing he was hoping they didn’t know.
“Did you help me?” I ask. “At all?”
“The paramedics were already…”
“That’s not what I asked.” I hold his eyes. “Before the paramedics. Before the sirens. When it was just us and that wreck and you were the only person on earth who could do anything. Did you help me? Did you even try? Did you come back to my window even once?”
The silence stretches.
He runs his free hand over his face. When he finally speaks, he speaks slowly, laying each word down like he is crossing ice.
“It was a snap decision,” he says, and it comes out level and rehearsed, like he’s been saying it to himself all week. “I was disoriented. I hit my head. Helen was screaming, and I just, I reacted. I wasn’t thinking.”
I watch him say it.
I’ve been married to this man for three years. I’ve watched him lie to his mother about liking her redecorating, to his father about agreeing with a strategy, to a hundred dinner guests about being glad they came. He’s good at it. It’s smooth and effortless and his eyes stay easy.
His eyes are not easy now. He’s looking at a spot just past my shoulder, and his jaw is set the way it sets when he’s holding a door closed, and every instinct I have is ringing at once.
“You’re lying,” I say.
“Karlie…”
“You’re lying to me right now. I can see it.
” I push myself up straighter against the pillows, and the ribs scream, and I let them.
“A snap decision. You were disoriented. You expect me to believe that a man who has never made an undisciplined decision in his entire life, a man who color-codes his closet, just randomly stumbled to the wrong door?”
“That’s what happened.”
“That makes it worse.” My voice cracks and I hate it and I keep going anyway.
“Do you understand that? If it was a snap decision, if it was pure instinct with no thought in it at all, then that makes it worse. Because that means when everything was stripped away, when there was no time to think or calculate or weigh anything, your instinct chose her. That means deep down you love her more than me.”
“Karlie.”
“Tell me I’m wrong. Look at me and tell me the man who checks the weather in three cities before breakfast just happened to stumble to the wrong door of a two-door problem.”
“That is not true.” He comes toward the bed, and his voice finally breaks open, the flat control gone. “You’re my wife! You’re my first priority!”
“Since when?” I don’t yell it. I don’t have the ribs to yell it.
It comes out quiet, which is worse. “The anniversary you forgot? The office where you told me to give you two a minute? Every midnight phone call you took, every emergency you ran to, every hour of the last four months that belonged to her before it belonged to me? Which part of that was me being your first priority?”
He opens his mouth. He closes it.
“The hours,” I say, quieter now. “The middle-of-the-night calls you took in the other room. The way you could leave a board meeting for her and couldn’t leave the office for our anniversary. I stopped keeping the list months ago, William. It got too long to carry.”
“I have sat across from this for four months telling myself there was an explanation,” I say.
“Telling myself you were grieving, you were overwhelmed, you were doing your best. I defended you to myself every single night, William. And then a deer ran into the road, and I got to watch what your best looks like when nobody has time to perform.”
“Karlie, please…”
“Do you love her?”
The question lands in the middle of the room. He stops.
“No,” he says. “I never have.”
And here’s the terrible thing: that one doesn’t sound like a lie. It sounds like the truest thing he’s said since he walked in, and it makes everything else make less sense, not more, and I am so tired of doing this math.
“Then give me a reason.” I hear my own voice go thin.
“Make me understand. Because right now there are only two stories, William. Either you love her, or there’s something you’re not telling me.
Pick one. Give me anything. One reason that makes this make sense, and I swear I will try to believe you. ”
He looks at me.
And I want to be wrong. That is the part nobody tells you about moments like this, that even now, flat on my back with my ribs taped, some stubborn, stupid part of me is leaning toward him, waiting for him to open his mouth and say the thing that saves us.
I watch him fight it. I actually watch it happen, some war behind his eyes, his hand flexing at his side, his breath coming shorter, and for one second I think he’s going to do it, I think the door is going to open.
He looks away.
The silence goes on and on and on.
“Okay,” I say.
“Karlie…”
“No, it’s okay. It’s fine.” It is not fine. My eyes are burning and my ribs are on fire and there is a roaring in my ears like the ocean. “You can’t give me a reason, or you won’t, and from this bed those are the same thing.”
“I need you to trust me,” he says, low and wrecked. “I know I have no right to ask. But I am asking. Trust me.”
“I trusted you at that guardrail.” The words are out of me before I decide on them, and they land harder than anything else has.
He actually rocks back half a step. “I trusted you while I was bleeding. I lay in that seat telling myself a story about you coming back for me, right up until the dark took me. So don’t stand there asking for my trust like it isn’t a thing you already spent. ”
I turn my face toward the window, toward the flat gray light, because I cannot look at him for the next part. “Go back to your girlfriend. Nothing has to change now. You can be wherever you want, whenever you want, with whoever you want. You don’t even have to lie about it anymore.”
“She is not my…”
“I’m tired.” I close my eyes. “I’d like you to leave.”
For a long moment he doesn’t move. I can hear him breathing. I can feel him standing there, three feet away, the whole ruin of us filling up the room.
“This isn’t over,” he says quietly. “I’m not letting this be over.”
“That’s the entire apology, then.”
He leaves.
The door doesn’t slam. Of course it doesn’t. It closes with a soft, careful click, because even now, even destroyed, William Hunt doesn’t slam doors, and somehow the gentleness of it is the thing that finally puts tears on my face.
I wipe them with the back of my taped hand before they get far.
My father comes back in. He moves the roses off the side table first, sets them on the windowsill out of my sightline without being asked, which is either kindness or strategy, and with him I genuinely cannot tell.
He doesn’t say anything about the tears, or about whatever he heard from the hallway, which was probably everything. He just walks to the window and stands there with his hands behind his back, looking out at the parking lot, and lets me put myself back together in peace.
“The doctor came by while you two were talking,” he says eventually. “They’ll discharge you at the end of the week, if the concussion behaves.”
“Okay.”
“You’ll need help. The ribs. Someone to drive you, cook, keep you from lifting things.” He pauses, straightens the newspaper on the table without reading it. “The doctor asked where you’d be staying.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her that was my daughter’s decision.”
I look at the ceiling. At the end of the week I am supposed to go home to that beautiful empty house, with the guest room down the hall and the candle wax still on the tablecloth, and wait to see which evenings my husband can spare me.
My father turns around. He looks at me for a moment, and his jaw works, and his hands are steady now, folded in front of him, and he asks it the way another man might ask about the weather.
“Do you want to come home?”
I nod.