10. Adrian #3
“Adrian.” Her voice drops, careful now. “I don’t, are you serious? Do you understand what that penalty looks like at this stage? We’re talking about a number with a lot of zeros. You would be personally liable for…”
“I know exactly what it looks like. I don’t care. Send me the paperwork and I’ll sign it.”
“Can I ask why?”
And I sit in my car outside my best friend’s building, or the woman I thought was my best friend’s ally, and I tell Priyanka the truth I’ve been circling for two days.
“Because it isn’t mine,” I say. “The whole thing. The version of the book you’re selling, the muse, the campaign, the story everyone fell in love with, none of it is the thing I actually wrote.
It got built by other people for other reasons while I stood there flattered, and it cost me the only reader whose opinion ever mattered.
So no. I’m not going to let it keep making money on the wreckage. Pull it.”
She’s quiet for a long moment. “You know I have to try to talk you out of this.”
“I know. Consider it done. Send the papers.”
I hang up before she can try harder, and I sit there, and I have just set fire to the biggest professional success of my life, and I feel lighter than I’ve felt since the promo started, and I understand that this is what it feels like to want the right thing for once instead of the flattering one.
Some time after, I don’t plan to drive to Laura’s. My hands just do it.
I end up parked outside the house where Brooke grew up, the small warm house with the porch light on, and I sit there for a while working up the nerve, and then I get out and I stand on the sidewalk at the edge of the yard, because I don’t have the right to walk up to that door and I know it.
There’s a light on upstairs. Her old room, maybe. I don’t know which window is hers, and the not-knowing is its own small indictment, two years married and I never learned which room she slept in as a girl.
I don’t ring the bell. I just stand at the edge of the yard and I say it, loud enough to carry, loud enough that a neighbor could hear, because I have spent two years being careful and quiet and it has bought me nothing.
“Brooke. I’m not going to knock, because you didn’t ask me to come, and I’ve spent our whole marriage showing up for everyone but you, so I’m not going to make you deal with me on your doorstep too.
” My voice cracks and I let it. “But I need you to hear this once, so I’m going to say it to the house and you can do whatever you want with it.
I found your sketchbook. I read it. I finally read it.
Two years too late, I read the whole thing, and I know now exactly what I had and exactly what I did, and I am not going to insult you by promising you I’ve changed, because you have a folder full of my promises and not one of them held. ”
The upstairs curtain moves.
Just barely. A shift of shadow behind the glass. I keep going.
“So I’m not promising. I’m just telling you what I’m going to do.
I’m going to show up. Every day, if you’ll let me, and probably some days you won’t, and that’s fair.
I’m going to earn back one inch at a time the thing I spent two years failing to notice I had.
And I am not signing those papers, Brooke, not because I get a say in whether you leave, you do, it’s yours, but because I refuse to agree that we’re over before I’ve done a single honest day of fighting for us.
You can divorce me. I can’t stop you. But I won’t help you do it.
Not until I’ve shown you the man I should have been the whole time. ”
The curtain is still. The door doesn’t open. I didn’t think it would.
“Okay,” I say, quieter, mostly to myself. “Okay. Goodnight, Brooke.”
I stand there another minute in case, and the door stays closed, and eventually I get back in my car.
I don’t drive home right away. I sit at the curb for the better part of an hour, watching that upstairs light, until it finally clicks off and the house goes dark, and only then do I let myself leave.
Back at the penthouse, the silence is waiting for me exactly where I left it.
But I don’t pace this time, and I don’t reach for the pen, and I don’t stand in the middle of rooms listening for a sound that isn’t coming.
I go to my desk.
Above it, pinned to the wall, is the outline for the book, the one I’m now paying a fortune to erase, the beats and the arcs and the whole architecture of the thing that ate my marriage. I take it down.
All of it. I pull the pins out one by one and I let the pages fall in the trash where they belong.
In the empty space where it was, I pin up the only page I kept from her sketchbook before my mother took it away.
The house. The low warm house with the good kitchen and the reading nook and the garden out back, and the tomatoes, and the little note in her handwriting.
tomatoes (Dad’s)
It sits down at my desk under it and I don’t feel like a man waiting to be forgiven. I feel like a man with a thing worth building.
I just have to convince the architect to let me help.