11. Megan
— ? —
Megan
The boring Tuesday is harder than I expected.
I’m three weeks into being a free woman and I still don’t know what to do with an afternoon that nobody’s threatening.
So I’m practicing. I take Charlotte for a babyccino which is a steamed milk and cocoa powder in a tiny cup and we sit at a sidewalk table in the thin spring sun while she gets foam on her nose and tells me a very long story about a dog she saw that may or may not have existed.
This is the dream. The one I described to Gray on a floor weeks ago. A Tuesday with no war in it. I keep reminding myself to feel it.
“Mama, look. A mustache.” Charlotte presses the foam above her lip and beams.
“Very handsome.” I wipe it off with my thumb and she shrieks in protest. “Drink your coffee, sir.”
That’s when I see them.
Across the narrow one-way street, through the window of a restaurant nicer than anywhere I eat now, Bradley and Dixie are having lunch. The couple the tabloids swore moved on together, the great romance, the wedding rumored.
And you can tell they are just completely miserable together. It’s not like they’re screaming at each other or making a scene, it’s that heavy, silent kind of misery.
I can’t hear them through glass and traffic, but I don’t need to. I read this language for years.
Dixie is talking at him, fast, her face set hard, her hand flat on the table between them like she’s pinning down a thing that won’t stay put.
Bradley isn’t looking at her. He’s looking through her, past her, at the middle distance where men go when the life they fought for turns out to be a cell.
There’s no tenderness in the frame. They might as well be strangers seated together by a hostess with a grudge.
A waiter passes and for a second the door swings and a few words carry across the street.
“You don’t get to be quiet at me.” Dixie’s voice, brittle and rising. “I gave up everything for this.”
And Bradley, dead flat, not even turning his head: “So did I. Look what I got.”
The door swings shut. The frame goes silent again. Two people who burned the world down to be together discovering that the world was the only thing they had in common.
I wait to feel it. The sight of Bradley trapped in a relationship to the woman who helped destroy mine, paying for it one wordless lunch at a time. I wait for triumph, or grief, or even a small mean spark of satisfaction.
There’s nothing. A clean, cold nothing, the emotional equivalent of a healed-over scar you can press as hard as you like and feel only smooth skin. He is no longer a man who can do anything to me. Not even the favor of letting me enjoy his suffering.
“Mama.” Charlotte tugs my sleeve, following my stare across the street with her unsettling focus. “Who’s the sad man?”
I turn her chair gently so her back is to the window, so she never has to look twice at the man whose gray eyes she wears.
“Nobody, bug.” I tap her tiny cup. “Drink up. We’re going to the park.”
***
He comes for me three nights later.
It’s almost ten. Charlotte’s down and Gray and I are on the couch with a movie when the intercom buzzes. My whole body goes to ice, the bracing I can’t switch off because the last time that panel lit up at night it was Bradley screaming and Eleanor underneath.
But it’s Carl’s voice, apologetic and careful.
“Ms. Hughes, I’m sorry to bother you. There’s a gentleman on the sidewalk, it’s Mr. Lawson. He’s had quite a bit to drink, and he won’t move along, and he’s beginning to draw a crowd. I can call someone, but I thought you’d want to know first.”
Gray is already up, already reaching for his shoes. “I’ll handle it.”
“No.” I put my hand on his chest. “You won’t. I will.”
“Megan-”
“I built this whole thing, Gray. Every piece of it. I get to be the one who ends it too.” I hold his eyes until he understands I mean it. “Stay with Charlotte. If she wakes up, she needs a face she knows in the apartment, not an empty one. Let me go down.”
He doesn’t like it. I watch him hate it and let me anyway.
I take the elevator down alone.
***
Bradley is a wreck on the sidewalk under the awning lights.
His tie is gone, his collar open, his hair wrong, and he’s swaying. A couple coming back from dinner slows to watch. A woman with a small dog has stopped pretending to check her phone. Carl hovers in the doorway, ready.
And there in the middle of it is the golden boy of the city, the Lawson heir, falling apart on a public sidewalk for everyone with a phone to see.
“Megan.” He lurches toward me and Carl shifts and I lift a hand to hold Carl back. “Megan, thank God. You came down. I knew you’d come down.” His voice cracks. “You were always the one who came down.”
“You’re drunk on a sidewalk, Bradley. Go home.”
“I can’t.” His eyes are wet, red-rimmed, and the worst of it is that the grief looks real, it always looks real. That was always the problem. “I ruined it. I know I ruined it, I’ve known for three years. Just tell me you don’t hate me. Please. I can carry anything but that.”
“I don’t hate you.”
I say it evenly and watch the hope leap up in his face. I let it land before I finish.
“Hate would take energy. It would mean you still get a piece of me.” I hold his gaze. “You don’t get my energy anymore, Bradley.”
He sways. He grabs for the one thing that’s kept him upright his whole life, the assumption that he’s the main character in everyone’s story, including mine.
“She’s the one I’m stuck with now.” It comes out wretched and low.
“Dixie. I can’t stand her. I can’t even look at her across a table.
And I can’t get out, because if I leave her too the whole city says I’m exactly what you proved I am.
” His voice breaks. “So I’m trapped, Megan.
I’m trapped with her and you got the better life.
You got out, you got the kid and the apartment and him. ”
His face twists on the word.
“And I’m the one who’s stuck. You won. You actually won.” He leans in, his breath sour. “Doesn’t that scare you?”
“No. Winning doesn’t scare me. Only losing did, and I already survived that.”
“It should scare you.” Something shifts in him. The wounded-animal cunning of a man who can’t hurt me with grief, so he reaches for the knife instead. “Because you didn’t win clean. You think Gray saved you? Gray used you.”
He steps closer.
“I’ve known him for more than a decade, Megan. He doesn’t lose. Dixie left him for me and he has spent every day since planning how to take everything I have. And you, you were just the last piece. The wife. The thing he could take that would hurt the most.”
His eyes glitter in the awning light.
“He didn’t fall for you. He found a weapon that came with a pretty face and a grudge that matched his.
The second he’s done beating me, the second there’s nothing left of mine to take, watch how fast you become the woman he was kind to once.
” A cruel smile. “You’ll be his Dixie. The one he keeps around until something better walks in. ”
The sidewalk goes very quiet. The woman with the dog has stopped all pretense.
I will hate myself for this thought later when I am alone but his words hit me hard. Bradley is a liar and he is not being honest now. But he found the exact doubt I already had and he used it against me.
I was already worried that my feelings were just gratitude. I was already afraid I was a consolation prize. He did not create that fear. He only said it out loud. Now I cannot forget it.
But I have spent three years learning not to let my face do what my chest is doing.
“You want to know the difference between you and Gray?” My voice is so steady. “It’s not that he’s a better man, though he is. It’s that when Gray wanted something from me, he sat me down and told me to my face exactly what the deal was. And let me set the terms.”
I step toward him.
“You never once told me the truth about anything. You let me sit in clinics blaming my own body.” I hold his eyes.
“So even if every poisonous word you just said is true, Bradley. Even then, he gave me the choice and you gave me a lie. I will take an honest knife over your kind of love every single day for the rest of my life.”
I step back.
“Being sorry isn’t a gift you give me. It’s a weight you’re trying to set down on my side of the table so you can walk home lighter. I won’t carry it. Go home. Sober up. You picked her. Lie in it.”
I look at him one last time, the disgraced golden boy crumpling under awning lights.
“And don’t come back here. Carl knows your face now. The next time, it won’t be me who comes down.”
I turn around. I walk into the building with my spine straight and the doors close on the sight of Bradley Lawson alone on a public sidewalk, watching the only woman who ever loved him properly leave without looking back.
***
Gray is at the window when the elevator opens, and I know he watched all of it, the whole thing, silent through the glass. He saw me not need him. He saw me be magnificent and untouchable and completely alone down there, by choice, because I sent him away from the fight.
He turns from the window and opens his arms, no demand in it, just an offer leaving the choosing to me.
And I walk into them, because I’m too tired to keep choosing not to, and I press my face into his chest where it’s warm and solid and smells like the one safe thing in my life, and I feel his arms close around me careful and sure.
For a second it’s perfect. For a second I let it be.
Then the thing rises up in me that’s been rising all night, and I say it into his shirt, muffled and terrible.
“I don’t know how to stop bracing.”
My hands fist in the fabric.
“The war’s over. Bradley’s a drunk on a sidewalk. Eleanor’s done. I won everything I came here to win, and I’m standing in your arms and some part of me is still waiting for the floor to drop. I can’t turn it off. Not even here.”
I make myself say the last of it, the worst of it, into the warmth of him.
“Especially here. Especially with you. I don’t know how to love something I’m that afraid of losing.”
His arms don’t loosen. But I feel him go still around me, both of us hearing the same thing in what I just said. The one fight that’s only mine. The war that didn’t end when all the others did.