9. Brooke #2
“The texts I stopped getting answers to. The muse announcement, that I found out about from the internet, with everyone else, my own husband writing my best friend into the story and forgetting to mention it. The night on the couch when I tried to kiss you and you turned your head.”
I watch each one hit him. “I have a whole collection of your promises, Adrian. Photographs of them. Little notes you left. More of that soon, I promise. I mean it this time. I kept them all, and not one of them ever came true, and somewhere in the last few weeks I stopped believing the next one would.”
“Brooke…” My name comes out of him wrecked. “Brooke, please. I hear you. I hear all of it, you’re right, you’re right about all of it, but I can fix this, I can, just tell me how, tell me what to do and I’ll do it, I’ll pull back from everything, I’ll…”
“I want a divorce.”
The words go into the room and just sit there.
For a second he doesn’t react at all, like the sentence has to travel a long way to reach him.
Then his face comes apart. I’ve seen this man win awards and stare down critics and stay perfectly composed through his own father’s contempt, and I have never seen him look like this, as if the floor genuinely just went.
“No.” He says it fast, almost a reflex. “No. Brooke, no, you don’t mean that, you’re hurt, you’re angry, and you have every right to be, but you don’t, you can’t just…”
He crosses the room and reaches for my hands and I step back and his fingers close on nothing. “Don’t do this. Please. We can fix this. Everything else in my life I have figured out, I can figure this out, just give me the chance, give me a month, give me a week…”
“Adrian.”
“A day. Give me one day, let me show you, let me just…” His voice breaks fully now, and he is not a man who cries, and his eyes are wet, and I have to look at the wall behind his head to stay standing in my own decision.
“I know I’ve been gone. I know. But I’m here now, I’m right here, I’m looking right at you, please don’t make me have been too late, please, Brooke, I’ll be different, I swear I’ll be… ”
“I can’t hear another promise right now.”
It stops him cold. His hands are still half-raised between us, reaching, and I watch him understand that he has spent all his currency, that the word promise means nothing in my mouth or his anymore, that he built that himself, one broken small vow at a time.
“I’m going to my mother’s tonight,” I say, and I pick up the bag, and my hands are steady, which surprises me. “The rest we do through lawyers. Don’t call me. Don’t send Wyatt to smooth it over. And do not, Adrian, do not send Layla.”
He says my name one more time as I pass him.
Just my name, cracked down the middle.
But I don’t stop.
***
My mother is standing in her open doorway when I pull up, in her robe, porch light on, and I know before I’m out of the car that Gemma called her, because that’s how my family works, the phone tree moves faster than grief.
She doesn’t ask a single question. She just opens her arms, and I walk into them, and the thing I have been holding together with both hands since I stood in the back of that ballroom finally, finally lets go.
I cry the way you cry when there’s no one left to perform steadiness for.
Ugly and loud and shaking, into my mother’s shoulder, in the doorway of the house I grew up in, while she holds the back of my head the way she did when I was small and rubs slow circles into my back and murmurs the same three words over and over, I’ve got you.
“He forgot me, Mom.” It comes out muffled and broken. “Two years and he just… forgot I was there and even replaced me in his life.”
“I know, baby.” She holds me tighter. “I know. Come inside. Come on, you’re freezing.”
She gets me over the threshold and out of the cold, and I realize I’m still in the launch dress, still in the earrings, and I reach up and take them out right there in her hallway, the earrings he stood in a shop an hour to choose and never once looked at tonight, and I close them in my fist so hard the posts bite my palm.
My mother watches me do it and doesn’t say anything.
She just holds out her hand, and I drop them into it, and she folds them away into the pocket of her robe like she’s keeping them safe, or keeping them away from me, and I love her so much in that second I could break all over again.
She gets me to the couch, the same couch, the one with the throw blanket that’s older than most of my memories, and she makes tea I don’t drink and sits with me while I fall apart in stages.
At some point, when the worst of it has passed and I’m just leaking quietly into a dish towel because we’ve run out of tissues, she takes my face in both her hands and makes me look at her.
“Listen to me,” she says. “I spent a lot of years understanding a man into forgetting I was a person. And I watched you start down the same road, and I said nothing, because I thought that was what a good mother does, keeps the peace, doesn’t meddle.
That was wrong. So I’m going to say it now, the thing I should have said a long time ago. ”
Her thumbs wipe under my eyes. “It’s okay to choose yourself now, Brooke. It’s okay. You are allowed. You have always been allowed.”
And I nod, because I can’t talk, and I let her hold me as the crying comes again, softer this time, the last of it working its way out.
But somewhere underneath the grief, while my mother rocks me on the couch I grew up on, I make myself a promise.
A real one, the first one I’ve believed in months, and it belongs to me and no one else.
I am going to grieve this marriage tonight.
All of it. Every missed dinner and broken vow and stupid hope I let myself have. I am going to cry it all out right here, in this house, in my mother’s arms, until there is nothing left.
But tomorrow, I will wake up and I will not grieve him again.
Not once. He doesn’t get any more of my tears than tonight, because he has already had two years of everything else.
This is the last time. I swear it to myself, in the dark, over my mother’s shoulder.
The very last time I cry for Adrian Ashbourne.