Chapter 4
The flowers arrived on a Tuesday.
Two dozen white peonies — my favorite, because of course he remembered that much — in a glass vase with a card that said Emory.
I’m sorry. — C. No last name. As if there were multiple C’s in my life who owed me apologies and he wanted to make sure I knew which one this was.
As if the handwriting itself wasn’t a signature, the same cramped block letters he used to leave on notes stuck to the bathroom mirror before road trips: Gone four days.
Left money on the counter for groceries. Miss you already.
I found them on the hallway table inside the building entrance, where Mrs. Alvarez on the second floor left packages that were too big for the mailboxes.
The delivery guy had set them against the wall between a stack of Amazon boxes and a recycling bin.
They looked expensive and out of place, the way Cade’s apologies always looked — big and polished and aimed at the wrong target.
I stood in the hallway and looked at the peonies for a long time.
They were beautiful. That was the problem.
Cade Calloway’s apologies were always beautiful.
They arrived wrapped in ribbon and smelling like good intentions and costing exactly enough to suggest he’d thought about it without suggesting he’d thought about it too hard.
They were the apologies of a man who believed the right gesture at the right moment could undo the wrong one, the way a goal in overtime erases every missed shot that came before it.
They were hockey apologies. They were scoreboard apologies.
They assumed that enough points on the board would erase the deficit.
I carried them upstairs. I set them on the kitchen counter, which was a mistake because it was Eli’s kitchen too — Eli’s apartment, technically, the one he’d lived in alone for two years after Margaret died and then shared with me when I moved in eighteen months ago — and putting another man’s flowers on the counter of the life we’d built together felt like tracking mud across a clean floor.
I stared at the peonies. They were perfect.
Full and white and slightly open, the way peonies look right before they bloom completely — that moment of held breath, petals pulling apart.
I’d told Cade once, in the kitchen of the Nashville condo, that white peonies were the most honest flowers because they didn’t try to be anything they weren’t.
He’d laughed and said, “A flower can’t try to be something,” and I’d said, “That’s the point,” and he’d looked at me the way he sometimes did — like I was a book he was reading in a language he almost knew.
That was the thing about Cade remembering the flowers. He remembered the fact. He didn’t remember the context. He remembered that I liked white peonies the way you remember that someone takes their coffee black — as data, not meaning. The why of it was gone. The why was always gone with Cade.
I carried them back downstairs and left them on the table in the common area with a note that said For anyone who wants them, and Mrs. Alvarez had them in her apartment by the time I made it back to the third floor.
The jersey arrived on Thursday. A Nashville home jersey, pristine, still in the official team packaging, with his name across the back and a number that I refused to look at because the number would make it real in a way the fabric alone didn’t.
The accompanying card — same handwriting, same block letters — said: For whatever charity you’re involved in.
Auction it or sell it. I know it’s worth something.
He’d signed it, too. In silver Sharpie, across the front, where the crest was.
I held the jersey in my hands and felt the weight of it — the thick fabric, the stitching, the heft of a professional athlete’s uniform that has been washed and worn and sweated through and carried off the ice in triumph and defeat.
I knew what it was worth. I’d managed the merchandise side of his brand for three years.
I knew the secondary market for signed game-worn jerseys.
I knew that this particular jersey — from his championship season, the one that ended with a hat trick and a trophy and eleven unanswered calls — would fetch five figures at auction, maybe six if the buyer was sentimental or drunk.
I folded it neatly, put it back in the packaging, and dropped it off at the thrift store on Atlantic Avenue on my way to get coffee. The woman behind the counter held it up and said, “This is an NHL jersey.”
“Yes.”
“Signed.”
“Yes.”
“You sure you want to—”
“Positive.”
She looked at me with the particular expression of a woman who recognizes that another woman is making a point and decides not to get in the way. “All right, then.”
I walked home past the corner sports bar where Cade’s face used to appear on the screen above the taps.
The TV was showing baseball now — September, the last weeks of the regular season, nobody in Brooklyn caring about hockey yet.
In three months the hockey coverage would start again and his face would be back on that screen, not as a player but as a commentator or a retirement-ceremony honoree or a “where are they now” segment, and I would walk past it the way I always walked past it.
Eyes forward. Jaw set. The particular discipline of a woman who has trained herself not to look.
The check arrived on Friday. I don’t know how he got our address — our address, mine and Eli’s, the apartment that was supposed to be the place where no part of my old life could reach me.
The check was made out to Emory Tate in the amount that doesn’t matter because the amount was the point.
It was the kind of number that said I know I can’t fix this but I can make your life easier, which was the same thing as saying I think your life is hard, which was the same thing as saying I think you need me to make it better. The memo line said: Whatever you need.
Whatever I needed. I turned the check over in my hands and thought about what I needed.
I needed to not be standing in my kitchen holding a check from my ex-husband while my fiancé graded papers in the next room.
I needed the last three years to not have happened.
I needed to not have been twelve weeks pregnant and alone in a hospital while a stadium full of people screamed his name.
I needed a lot of things, and not a single one of them had a dollar sign in front of it.
I tore the check in half. Then in quarters. I threw the pieces in the recycling bin, not the trash, because apparently I was the kind of woman who recycled even her ex-husband’s guilt money.
In the other room, Eli turned a page. He was grading midterm papers from his intro seminar — eighteen-year-olds writing about Flannery O’Connor with the confidence of people who had never experienced the kind of grace O’Connor was writing about.
He graded with a red pen, always red, and he held it the way a surgeon holds a scalpel — precisely, with respect for the damage it could do.
When he found something good he underlined it twice and wrote yes in the margin, which was the highest compliment in Eli Strand’s critical vocabulary.
When he found something bad he simply wrote try again, because Eli believed in second chances the way other people believed in gravity. Not as a philosophy. As a fact.
He had not mentioned the flowers. He had not mentioned the jersey packaging I’d left by the door.
He had not mentioned the check, though I was almost certain he’d seen the return address on the envelope — the Nashville postmark, the embossed stationery that screamed money and management and the kind of life where your letters came printed, not handwritten.
Eli noticed everything. He was a professor of creative writing; noticing was his profession.
But he had a gift for choosing which noticings to keep and which to set down, and he’d set this one down with the quiet grace of a man who understood that sometimes the kindest thing you can do for someone you love is pretend you haven’t seen what you’ve seen.
I stood in the kitchen with the torn check in the recycling bin and the silence of a Saturday afternoon pressing against the windows, and I thought: This man. This quiet, patient, book-reading, red-pen-holding man. This is the one I chose. This is the right choice.
Joss called on Saturday morning. I was sitting on the fire escape with my laptop, trying to write the opening chapter of a second novel that had been a blank document for four months, and her name appeared on my phone with the urgency of a woman who has information that can’t wait for a polite hour.
“He called your publisher,” Joss said. No hello. No preamble. This was Joss in crisis mode — efficient, furious, protective.
“Cade called Diane?”
“He called the main office. Asked for contact information for Maren Hale’s representatives.
Said he was a ‘friend of the author’ and wanted to pass along a personal message.
” I could hear Joss’s heels clicking against a hard floor — she was pacing, which she only did when she was angry.
“The receptionist put him through to the publicity department, who put him through to Diane’s assistant, who put him through to me because they know I’m the Maren Hale contact. ”
“What did he say?”
“He asked for your email. Your personal email. He said he’d tried your old one and it bounced.”
It bounced because I’d closed that account the week I left Nashville.
I’d closed everything — the email, the shared credit cards, the joint phone plan, the Instagram account that had twelve thousand followers who wanted to know what it was like to be married to Cade Calloway.
I’d closed my entire digital life and rebuilt it the way you rebuild a house after a fire: from the foundation up, with nothing salvaged from the old structure.
“What did you tell him?”