19. Brooke
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Brooke
Here is a thing I have stopped lying to myself about: I forgave Adrian Ashbourne weeks ago, and I have just been too stubborn to do anything about it.
I know the exact moment it happened, which is annoying, because I wanted forgiveness to be a long dignified process I could be proud of, and instead it snuck up on me in a car in a parking lot when a man who forgot I existed for two years came apart over three words about a heartbeat.
That was the moment. I just refused to call it what it was, because calling it forgiveness meant admitting I was going to have to act on it, and acting on it meant risk, and I have spent this whole time treating my own heart like a structure I had to keep condemned for safety reasons.
But you can’t live in a condemned building forever. Eventually you either tear it down or you fix it, and I am an architect, and I have never in my life been able to walk past a thing worth saving and leave it to rot.
So. Forgiveness. Done. Weeks ago. The only question left is the one I’ve been avoiding, which is what I’m going to do with it, and I know the answer to that too, I’ve known for a while, I’ve just been making both of us wait because a small mean part of me felt like he owed me the waiting.
He doesn’t. That’s the thing I finally understand. Making him wait isn’t justice, it’s just more punishment, and I am so tired of punishing us both for a man who doesn’t exist anymore.
The Adrian who forgot me is gone. I watched him leave, slowly, over months, replaced one cardboard house and one allergic rash and one piece of hillside at a time by a man who sees me so completely it makes my chest hurt.
I don’t want to punish that man. I want to build a life with him.
I have wanted that for weeks, and I’m done pretending I don’t.
Gemma figures it out before I say a word, because of course she does.
“You’ve decided,” she says. We’re in my mother’s kitchen and I’m sketching, again, the house, again, and she’s watching me over a mug of tea with the expression of a woman who has been waiting a long time to be right. “Look at your face. You’ve decided. You’re going back to him.”
“I haven’t decided anything.”
“Brooke. You’ve drawn that man a kitchen four times this week.” She points her mug at my sketchbook. “You don’t design a double oven for a man you’re divorcing. Admit it.”
And here’s the thing, I don’t fight her, which tells her everything, because a month ago I’d have fought her.
“I forgave him,” I say instead, quietly, out loud, for the first time to another human being. “A while ago. I’ve just been sitting on it because I was scared.”
Gemma sets her mug down very carefully, like the moment might break.
“Scared of what.”
“Of being wrong about him again. Of walking back in and finding out the last few months were just a very long, very convincing performance, and the second I let my guard down he goes back to being the man who reads at the desk while I eat alone.”
I press the pencil flat against the page.
“But then I think about the cardboard house. Nobody performs a cardboard house, Gem. You don’t perform driving an hour for fruit you’re allergic to.
You don’t perform buying a woman two acres and putting it in her name only so it can never be a rope.
Those aren’t the moves of a man doing a bit.
Those are the moves of a man who finally gets it. ”
I look up at her. “And I’m done being scared of the one good thing that’s happened to me in two years because I’m afraid it’ll go bad. Everything goes bad if you refuse to touch it. That’s not caution. That’s just a slower way of losing it.”
Gemma is quiet for a moment, and then her eyes go suspiciously bright, and she says, in a voice that’s trying very hard to stay normal, “So what are you going to do about it?”
“I don’t know yet. I’ll know when I know.
” I go back to the drawing. “I want to be sure. Not sure he’s changed, I’m sure of that.
Sure that I’m choosing this because I want it, and not because I’m pregnant, or lonely, or tired of being angry.
I want to walk back to him standing all the way up, on my own two feet, because I decided to. Not because I fell.”
“That,” Gemma says, “is the most you thing you’ve ever said.” She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand and pretends she isn’t. “Okay. Whenever you know. But Brooke? Don’t make him wait so long you talk yourself back out of it. You do that. You think a thing to death.”
“I’m not going to think this one to death.”
“Good.”
***
The last thing that has to happen, happens that night, at eleven o’clock, in my childhood bed, and it happens because of the book.
I’ve been reading his manuscript for weeks, the one he leaves on the passenger seat like a coward and a genius, one stolen page at a time, at stoplights, while he gets coffee, a paragraph here, a scene there, telling myself I’m not really reading it, I’m just glancing, the way you glance at a car crash.
Tonight, unable to sleep, I finally admit that I photographed the whole thing over the last month, page by page, at every red light, and it’s all here on my phone, and I lie in the dark and I read the last chapter.
It’s about the man learning to see.
That’s the whole book, I understand now, holding my breath in the dark, the man who had everything and looked past it, and the last chapter is him, finally, learning to read the language his wife had been speaking to him the whole time.
It’s not a fantasy where she takes him back.
He doesn’t let himself off that easy. In the book she’s gone, and stays gone, and the man just becomes the person he should have been anyway, for no reward, because it’s the right thing and not because it wins her, and the last line, the last line undoes me completely, lying there at eleven at night in the room I grew up in.
He learned to love her in the past tense, which is the only tense a coward ever masters, and he spent the rest of his life becoming a man who could have loved her in the present, in the hope that somewhere, some version of her, in some kinder story, might feel it and know it was meant for her.
I read it four times.
Adrian wrote himself an ending where he doesn’t get me.
He wrote it honestly, without flinching, without making himself the hero, a whole book that is nothing but a three-hundred-page apology he never once expected me to accept, left on a passenger seat where I could find it or not, asking me for nothing.
And I lie in my childhood bed with my husband’s confession glowing on my phone and my child turning over inside me and I stop, finally, all the way, being afraid.
I get up. I get dressed. It’s eleven-thirty at night and I am thirty-one years old and pregnant and I have a job and a spine and two acres of hillside in my own name, and I know exactly what I want, and I am done making either of us wait for it.
I text Gemma one word so someone knows where I’ve gone.
Deciding.
Then I get in my car, and I drive to the glass box that was never my home, to tell the man inside it that I want to build a new one.
***
Adrian opens the door at midnight in a t-shirt and the wary hope of a man who has learned not to want things too loudly, and for a second he just looks at me standing in the hallway, and I watch him decide not to ask why I’m here, because asking would be reaching, and he doesn’t reach anymore.
“Brooke.” He says my name like it’s a fragile thing. “Is everything okay? Is the baby…”
“The baby’s fine. I’m fine.” I walk past him into the penthouse before I lose my nerve, into the cold glass box I lived in for two years and never once called home, and I turn around in the middle of it and I look at him standing by the open door, and I say the thing I came to say, all of it, before I can overthink a single word.
“I read your book.”
Whatever he was braced for, it wasn’t that. His face does a complicated thing, alarm and hope and a flush of what looks like shame. “Brooke, that wasn’t, I never left that out for you to…”
“You left it on the passenger seat every single morning for a month, Adrian.” I fold my arms. “You are the least subtle genius I have ever met. Of course you left it out for me. You wanted me to read it and you were too much of a coward to hand it to me, so you left it where I’d find it and pretended you didn’t, and I read it, all of it, I photographed it at stoplights like a lunatic, and I just finished the last chapter an hour ago. ”
My voice catches, and I let it. “You wrote yourself an ending where you don’t get me.”
“Because I don’t get to assume I do.” He says it quietly, still by the door, still not reaching.
“That’s the whole point of the book. A man like that doesn’t get a happy ending handed to him just because he finally noticed what he had.
He just has to become better and hope it mattered.
That’s all I get to hope for. That it mattered. ”
And that’s it. That’s the thing that breaks the last of it loose in me, him standing there having written three hundred pages of an apology that expects nothing, ready to accept an ending where he loses me because he’s decided that’s the ending he deserves.
“I forgave you,” I say.
He goes completely still.
“Weeks ago. In the parking lot, when you came apart over the heartbeat. That’s when it happened, I just wouldn’t admit it, because admitting it meant I’d have to act, and I was scared, so I made you keep waiting and I told myself you deserved to wait.”
I take a step toward him. “You didn’t. That was me being cruel and calling it justice.
I’m sorry for that. You’ve been standing at my curb every morning for months asking for nothing, and I’ve been making you audition for a part you already got, and I’m done.
I forgave you weeks ago, Adrian. I should have told you weeks ago. ”
His mouth opens. Nothing comes out. His eyes have gone bright.