Chapter Twenty-Four #2
“I convinced myself you didn’t need me from the first week.
You were complete before I met you, with your apartment, your job, your friends, and a life that worked without me in it.
You kept the apartment after we married.
You kept your car. You kept Marnie and your coworkers and your weekday runs.
I was never sure you needed me, because you made sure you could function without me, and I didn’t understand that independence was something other than a contingency plan. ”
“It wasn’t a contingency plan.” Except, maybe it was, at least a little.
“I know that now. I didn’t then. I needed you, and the imbalance terrified me.”
“I was scared too.” I give him the truth as freely as he gave his.
“I’d never let myself get so close to anyone before because I liked being independent.
Loving you scared me, and...there was more than just my independence involved with keeping the apartment.
I guess I was afraid you’d change your mind.
Our lives were so different, and one day, you’d surely realize you’d made a mistake.
Then I met your mother, and those fears grew... ” I bit my lip.
He frowns. “But you gave up your apartment after meeting her?”
I nod. “Two weeks before Brittany’s accusation, but partly to prove to myself I didn’t need it, and that I fully trusted you.”
He flinches. “Then I blew it the first chance I got. I’d been bracing myself for you to leave me, so when Brittany handed me a reason, I took it. It was easier to leave you first, and being right about losing you was less frightening than waiting for it to happen.”
The thought hurts on a deep level. “So you made it happen?”
He closes is eyelids, and his expression is full of pain when he reopens them. “Yes. I chose the version of reality where you were guilty because guilty meant I could be angry instead of afraid. Angry was controllable. Afraid wasn’t.”
I study him, looking for any lies, but he’s telling me exactly how he failed me and naming every piece of it without asking me to make it smaller. He’s not apologizing. He’s taking it apart piece by piece and letting me see exactly how it broke.
For almost five years I carried the ring under my shirt while I carried Sienna alone.
I handled everything alone, and part of me was relieved that I didn’t have to rely on anyone else.
I’ve never liked needing anyone’s help. I was hurt and angry when he believed Brittany without even asking, but I can’t pretend there wasn’t a little relief on my side either that I could go back to making my own decisions and standing on my own two feet.
I realize he’s stopped making me prove I deserve to be believed.
For the first time since the courthouse, I’m not carrying both of us.
The weight shifted when he signed Martin’s authorization, when he said what do you need instead of here’s what I want, when he moved to Asheville and didn’t pursue me, when he bought my tea and put it on a counter in a house I’d never been to.
That’s what I was waiting for. I didn’t know it until it was already true.
The trust wasn’t as strong between us as it should have been five years ago.
We rushed into marriage, wanting to be together, but not yet learning how to make that work.
Gretchen and Brittany’s interference caused the marriage to collapse, but it was already built on shaky foundation.
I want to rebuild it, stronger and more solid this time.
I cross the three feet between us and put my hands on his chest. The ring is on my wrist now, the chain wrapped twice, visible.
He sees it but still doesn’t mention it.
He puts one hand over it, over the ring, the chain, and the pulse in my wrist. That’s the entire acknowledgment either of us will ever make about what the ring meant, means now, and will mean in the future.
“We didn’t trust each other enough last time.” I say it plainly. “We both failed.”
“I failed more.”
I don’t argue. “Yes, but I should have told you I was afraid too. If we had started stronger, the lies wouldn’t have torn us apart.”
He doesn’t respond, but I don’t give him a chance to. I kiss him instead. It’s slow and nothing like the night in his office, which was fury, grief, and four years of wreckage crashing into each other. This is deliberate. This is a choice made with the lights on.
He kisses me back carefully. Not like I’m fragile but careful, knowing exactly what he almost lost. His mouth is warm.
His hands come up to my face, both of them, holding me without pulling me closer, letting me set the pace.
I’ve forgotten this about Sterling, that before the estate, before the ambush, and before everything went wrong, he was the most attentive lover I’d ever been with.
He paid attention. He noticed what I responded to, remembered it, and used it, not as strategy but as care.
The attention got buried under four years of anger and control, but it’s still there, redirected now from managing me to actually seeing me.
I take off his shirt. He lets me. I push him toward the bedroom, my bedroom vocabulary intact, my body remembering things my conscious mind hasn’t allowed me to think about in four years.
The bed in the rented house is smaller than the one at the estate.
The sheets are plain white. The room is spare, but it has all we need for the moment.
He’s careful with every piece of my clothing. He puts his mouth on my collarbone, on my neck, and the hollow of my throat. He nips me, and I say, “Sterling,” letting the words flow this time.
He finds the chain. The ring is on my wrist, the chain wound twice. He finds it with his fingers, tracing the metal links without commenting. “Is this okay?” he asks.
“Yes. You don’t have to keep asking.”
He doesn’t. He touches me, and I touch him, remembering moments from the past while building moments for the future. When we’re both at the edge of losing control, stripped naked from clothes and all artifices hiding our emotions, I pull him in.
I wrap my legs around his waist. He enters me slowly, watching my face, and I look back at him because I’m choosing this with my eyes open.
Every thrust is deliberate and unhurried.
He keeps his forehead against mine. My breath and his breath mingles in the narrow space between us.
I can feel his restraint, the effort it takes him to stay slow, to let me control the rhythm, and resist the urge to take over.
This doesn’t erase what happened. Nothing ever will.
What Sterling did to me can’t be absorbed, ignored, and put away.
It lives in my body, in the months I spent alone in the apartment, in the delivery room where Marnie held my hand instead of my husband, and in every blood draw and transfusion and terrified 3 a.m. when I sat beside Sienna’s crib wondering if she was going to live.