Chapter Twenty-Four
Casey
I DRIVE TO HIS HOUSE without calling first. Sienna is with Hettie. It’s a Wednesday evening, warm, an early-fall Asheville night that smells like wood smoke and cooling asphalt.
Sterling’s rented house is a bungalow on a side street off Merrimon Avenue, a place a graduate student might rent, with a small porch, peeling paint on the railing, and a mailbox that leans slightly left.
His Audi is in the driveway and is the only thing that suggests he makes more than an average income. The lights are on.
He answers the door in a T-shirt and jeans. No suit. No watch. I haven’t seen him in one since the hospital. He looks as though he’s been living alone in a rented house for six weeks and has stopped performing for anyone, including himself.
“Casey.” He steps back from the doorway but doesn’t ask why I’m here. He doesn’t ask if something is wrong with Sienna. He just steps back, having spent six weeks practicing the discipline of making room without demanding to know why.
I walk in.
The house is nearly empty. His laptop is on the kitchen table, as I expected from what Sienna has told me about Daddy’s place.
She said it was sad, and she’s right. There’s a sofa that looks rented, a kettle on the counter, one mug beside it, and a box of the tea I drink, not his tea, mine, bought and sitting on the counter of a house I’ve never been to.
“You bought my tea,” I say.
“It seemed practical.”
“For whom?”
He doesn’t answer that. He picks up the kettle, fills it, and sets it on the stove.
The motion is automatic, suggesting he’s had some practice making his own drinks.
It must be strange to go from having staff to taking care of himself.
I imagine him daily making tea so he doesn’t flub it when I’m in the room. The thought makes me smile.
I walk down the hallway of the two-bedroom house.
The first is his, with a bed, a lamp, and a phone charger on the nightstand.
It could be described as minimal, but sad works just as well.
It’s the bedroom of a man who has reduced his life to the essentials and isn’t sure yet which essentials to add back.
The second bedroom stops me. It matches the description Sienna gave me but is more.
There’s a child’s bed. A small one, wooden, with a bright orange comforter and a pillow that matches.
A nightlight shaped like a star plugged into the wall.
A shelf with three books, the bear counting book, the chapter book about the girl who talks to animals, and a new one I don’t recognize.
The bed is made. The comforter is smooth. The pillow hasn’t been dented.
Sienna has never slept here, though she’s visited for a few hours here and there. The bed has never been slept in, but the room is everything she loves, including a rainbow painted on one wall, and an accent wall in eye-searing green that she’s already told me she adores.
He set it up not knowing if or when she’d be allowed to sleep over.
He bought the comforter and the nightlight and the books based on her preferences, not his designer’s in Charlotte.
He made the bed and plugged in the star.
He did all of it on the possibility that I might someday say yes.
Until I did, the bed would stay made. The star would stay plugged in.
He’d walk past this room every morning knowing it was empty because he’d earned the emptiness.
“Why did you move here?” I ask. I’m standing in the doorway of Sienna’s room. He’s behind me in the hallway.
“For Sienna.”
“Is that all?”
The hallway is narrow. He’s three feet behind me. I can smell the soap he uses, a clean, unfamiliar brand, not the expensive one from the estate. It’s just an ordinary soap, bought from a shelf in a grocery store. It smells far better on him than it has any right to.
“No,” he says. “That’s not all.”
I turn around. He’s leaning against the wall, arms at his sides, not crossing them, and not reaching for me. He looks exhausted in a way that has nothing to do with lack of sleep. It looks like six weeks of restraint so absolute has taken its toll.
“Why else?” I ask it with a hint of challenge.
“I’ve loved you since dinner at a diner off Independence Boulevard.” He says it simply. “I loved you the whole four...almost five years you were gone, including the years I was telling myself you were guilty. Guilty was easier than the alternative.”
He stops. He takes a breath. “I don’t expect anything.
I don’t deserve anything. I moved here because my daughter lives here, and I’m never going to be more than a short car ride away from her again.
If you never want to see me outside of Sienna’s schedule, I’ll still be thirteen minutes away.
That’s my choice. It has nothing to do with yours. ”
The words sound right and feel good, but there’s still too much pain around all of it for me to just blithely believe him and move forward. “Why did you believe Brittany?”
He’s quiet. This is the question I’ve been asking myself for five years, not the what, not the how, but the why. Why did a man who loved me look at his mother and his sister and choose their version over mine without asking me a single question?
“Because I always thought you loved me less than I loved you,” he says.
I take a step back, genuinely shocked by that.
I want to protest immediately, but I don’t because I can see the words are true to him.
I can hear the truth in them, in the precision of the phrasing, and in how he delivers them without decoration or apology.
He’s been feeling this way for a long time.
He’s examined it from every angle. He’s decided it’s accurate, and he’s giving it to me without wrapping it in anything softer.
“There’s something I never told you,” he says. “On our wedding night, you asked me if there was someone before you. Someone who left. I told you I’d tell you, and I never did.”
I remember. The catch in his voice on forsaking all others. The old sound that came from somewhere he’d never shown me.
“Her name was Abigail Crane.” He says it like something distasteful he’s held in his mouth for years and is finally spitting out. “We were together for two years. I was twenty-two, and I had proposed. We were engaged.”
He stops and looks at the floor of the hallway, at the scuffed hardwood of a rented house that costs less per month than his dry cleaning used to. “She left with my father, but hey, she returned the ring.”
The sentence is so small for what it contains. She left with my father. Richard Hollingsford didn’t just abandon his family for Fiji. He took his son’s fiancée with him. “Oh, god, Sterling.”
He nods once. “I came home from a board meeting where he was supposed to show up but didn’t, and she was gone.
She left the ring on my pillow and a ‘I’m sorry,’ note beside it.
My mother called to tell me Richard had left.
It didn’t take long to realize they were on the same flight for the same day.
He cleaned out his personal accounts, resigned from the board, and took Abigail with him.
No warning. No conversation. No note. I guess I should be grateful that he didn’t embezzle company funds. ”
He pauses. “There’s a trust document Martin puts in front of me every quarter.
It requires Richard’s signature as primary trustee.
The signature line has been blank for almost twelve years because my father is on an island with the woman I was going to marry, and I can’t bring myself to file the waiver that would make his absence official.
Martin handles it every time. He’ll keep handling it, because signing that waiver means admitting my father isn’t coming back, and I’ve apparently preferred the fiction. ”
He firms his shoulders. “I’m ready to sign now.”
I lean against the doorframe of Sienna’s room, stunned that my husband’s first love left him for his own father, and every piece of the last five years is rearranging itself in my head.
“Your mother knew?”
He nods. “She had it figured out within hours. My mother orchestrated the aftermath. She handled the board, the press, and the social fallout. She made it disappear. She was magnificent at it, and she’s been holding it over me ever since.
Protecting Sterling became her purpose, and her price was control. ”
“And when Brittany told you I cheated...”
“I was already primed.” His voice is steady, but his hands aren’t.
He puts them in his pockets. “I’d already survived someone I loved choosing someone else.
When Brittany gave me the accusation, it confirmed what I’d been waiting for since the day Abigail’s side of the closet was empty.
Everyone leaves. Everyone finds someone better.
The only question was when you’d do it.”
I shake my head, hollow and aching at the same time for paying for another woman’s sins. “I never would have.”
“I know that now, but I didn’t then. I didn’t know it because I’d never told you about Abigail, which means I never gave you the chance to prove me wrong. I kept the wound closed and let it fester, and when my mother poured poison into it, I let her, because the poison felt familiar.”
He just told me the thing he’s never told anyone, the thing that made his voice catch at the courthouse, the thing that turned forsaking all others into a prayer instead of a promise.
Abigail Crane left with his father, and Sterling spent the next seven years building walls so high that when a nurse from Hickory climbed over them, he couldn’t believe she intended to stay.