Chapter 4 #2
“I told the publicity department to lose his number and that any further contact from him or his representatives would be handled by our legal team. Then I called their legal team, which is also my legal team because I am very good at my job, and told them to send a cease-and-desist if he contacts the publisher again.”
“You sent a cease-and-desist to my ex-husband?”
“I threatened a cease-and-desist. There’s a difference. The threat is usually enough.” A pause. “Are you okay?”
I looked at my laptop screen. The cursor blinked at the top of the empty document, steady and patient and unbothered by the fact that it had been blinking in the same spot since May. “I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine. He sent you flowers, didn’t he.”
“And a jersey. And a check.”
“Jesus Christ.” More pacing. The click of heels got faster. “This is his playbook. This is what he does. Grand gesture, grand gesture, grand gesture — he throws enough at the wall and hopes something sticks. It’s the way he plays hockey.”
“Played. He retired.”
“He retired from hockey. He hasn’t retired from being Cade Calloway.
” Joss’s voice softened, which was worse than the sharpness because it meant she was about to say something true.
“The flowers and the check and the jersey — those aren’t apologies, Em.
Those are transactions. He’s trying to buy his way back into a conversation you didn’t agree to have. ”
I knew she was right. I’d known it before she said it, the way you always know the truth before someone says it out loud. Saying it out loud just makes it harder to pretend otherwise.
“I know.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Nothing. I’m going to do nothing. That’s the whole point. He can send whatever he wants. I don’t have to receive it.”
A silence. Then Joss laughed — not a funny laugh, a Joss laugh, the kind that meant she loved me and was worried about me in equal measure. “You’ve gotten good at this.”
“At what?”
“At being the person you were supposed to be before he got in the way.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. It was the kind of compliment that hurt — not because it was wrong, but because it implied a version of me that had existed before Cade and had been interrupted by him, like a sentence stopped mid-word.
And the truth was more complicated than that.
The truth was that I’d walked into that interruption willingly.
I’d put down the pen and picked up the calendar and organized the jerseys by season and learned every front-office employee’s name because that was love, wasn’t it?
That was what love looked like when you were twenty-four and certain — giving yourself to someone else’s life and trusting they’d give you back when the time came.
The time never came. He never gave me back. I had to take myself.
“I love you,” I said.
“I know.” She hung up.
After she hung up, I sat on the fire escape and stared at the empty document and didn’t write a single word.
The cursor blinked. The street below moved with its Saturday rhythm — couples walking to brunch, a man with a guitar case, two kids on scooters racing each other to the corner.
Brooklyn in September, warm and alive and indifferent to the fact that a retired hockey player was trying to buy back a woman who was no longer for sale.
I thought about calling him. Not to talk — not to give him the conversation he was buying his way toward — but to say the one thing that none of his gestures had earned: Stop.
Stop sending things. Stop trying to purchase the right to be in my life.
Stop treating our history like a deficit you can cover with a wire transfer and a signed jersey.
You didn’t lose me because you forgot to send flowers.
You lost me because you scored three goals and celebrated on live television while our baby died and I called you eleven times and you checked your phone and put it back in your pocket and kept pouring champagne.
No check covers that. No peony. No jersey.
But I didn’t call. Calling would be responding, and responding was what he wanted.
Cade Calloway’s grovel strategy was the same as his offensive strategy — keep shooting until something goes in.
My defense was absence. My defense was the thing I’d learned to do better than anything: not be there when he needed me to be there.
Eli came out onto the fire escape with two mugs of coffee.
He’d seen the flowers before I moved them — I knew because he’d paused at the kitchen counter for a half-second longer than normal, the way he paused when he was processing something he’d decided not to mention.
He hadn’t asked. He hadn’t needed to. The flowers were white peonies, my favorite, and Eli knew they were my favorite because he’d asked once, early on, and I’d told him, and he’d said, “Beautiful. Your ex had good taste in flowers, at least.” The “at least” had been doing the work in that sentence.
The “at least” was Eli’s entire position on Cade Calloway, compressed into two words.
Now he handed me a mug and sat in the other chair — the rusted metal one that creaked when you shifted your weight — and opened a book.
Not his book. Not student papers. A novel.
He was reading it for pleasure, which was the kind of thing Eli did on Saturday mornings, and the simplicity of it — a man reading a book on a fire escape because he wanted to — was so far from the life I’d lived with Cade that it felt like evidence.
Evidence that it was possible to love someone without losing yourself in the process.
Evidence that a relationship could be two people sitting in separate chairs, doing separate things, and being content with the silence.
“The cursor is blinking,” Eli said without looking up from his book.
“I’m aware.”
“Just checking.”
I looked at the screen. I looked at Eli. I looked at the street below, where the kids on scooters had made it to the corner and were turning around to race back.
I closed the laptop. Not in defeat — in recognition.
The blank page would still be there tomorrow.
It had been there for four months and it would be there for four more if that was what it took.
I’d written one novel in eleven months, fueled by grief and fury and the specific energy of a woman who had been erased and was writing herself back into existence.
The second one wouldn’t come from fury. It would have to come from somewhere else — somewhere quieter, harder to locate, like a radio frequency you can only pick up when you stop moving.
The second novel could wait. It had been waiting for four months.
It could wait one more Saturday morning while I sat on a fire escape with a man who read novels for pleasure and drank his coffee black and never once — not once, in eighteen months — sent me flowers as an apology for something he should have said with his mouth and his presence and the specific, irreplaceable currency of showing up.
That was the difference. Eli showed up. Cade sent things.
I’d spent three years learning which one mattered.