1. Imogen #4
Then Hendrix left for school somewhere far, another city, another country, I never kept the details straight because they never seemed to matter, and for years he was just a name that came up at dinners and a chair that stayed empty at every event.
Whatever life he was living, he was living it a long way from me.
We had orbited each other since before we could walk and somehow never once collided, and with an ocean between us it was easy to forget I’d been promised to a stranger at all.
For most of our lives, we were a punchline.
Then Mabel Carver got sick.
She was gone before he made it home. That was the part that undid him, I’d learn later, though he never said it in those words.
His mother slipped away while he was somewhere across the world, and by the time he stood in our lives again, he was a different shape than the boy who’d left.
Quieter, harder to read, carrying a grief he wore as if it were a coat he refused to take off.
I went to see her near the end, before all that, because she’d asked for me, which surprised everyone including me.
Her room smelled of flowers and antiseptic, and she was so small in the bed, but her eyes were the same, quick and knowing.
She held my hand in both of her papery ones and looked at me as if she was reading the last page of a book.
“He doesn’t know how to want things out loud,” she told me.
“His father taught him that. Wanting something is how they find the soft place to press.” Her thumb moved over my knuckles.
“But he feels everything, my Hendrix. Twice as hard as he lets on. You’ll have to be patient with him, and you’ll have to be brave, because he won’t be, not at first. Promise me you’ll be brave. ”
I didn’t understand yet what she was asking.
But I promised anyway. You promise a dying woman anything.
I found out what it cost after she was buried, at a stiff dinner where our parents laid the whole arrangement out on the table as if it were a contract. Terms and timelines, the word obligation used more than once. Mabel had made her request in her last days.
‘Marry the Hearst girl. Give me that before I go.’
And Hendrix, who would have walked into traffic for his mother, had said yes.
We had all gone to my recital first, both families filling a whole row, and I’d danced Coppélia not knowing it would be one of the last times I ever stood on that stage.
Afterward we were meant to go straight to dinner together.
Hendrix didn’t. He disappeared somewhere between the theater and the table, sliding into his chair late, collar undone, hair windblown, a smudge of green dried into the cuff of his white shirt, the kind of stain you get from a stem crushed in your fist. I noticed it because I noticed everything about him by then, even from across a lifetime of tables.
I didn’t think anything of it that night. I think about it more now than I should.
Later, when the families steered us into the study to see if we’d spook, we were left alone.
“You weren’t with the others,” I said. Not quite a question.
“No.” He didn’t explain. He had the specific stillness of a person who’d been somewhere quiet and wasn’t ready to leave it.
“You made it before dessert, at least.”
“You danced Coppélia.” He said it evenly, giving away nothing, and I couldn’t tell if he’d been there or only heard. “You looked like a doll.”
“I was the doll.” A laugh caught in my throat, nervous, because this was the most he’d ever said to me at once. “That was rather the point.”
His eyes moved over my face, then off, out to the dark window, as if looking at me straight-on cost him a thing he wasn’t willing to spend.
“You were a pretty doll,” he said, quieter, almost to the glass.
Heat climbed into my cheeks before I could stop it, which was absurd, because I was too old to blush at a boy calling me pretty, and yet there I was, warm to my ears in front of a person I’d been engaged to since the womb.
Then he reached into his coat and took out a single pink rose, slightly crushed from the pocket, one petal bruised brown at the edge, and held it out to me. It wasn’t a bouquet. No card, no photographer, none of the theater our families ran everything through. Just the one flower.
“For the recital,” was all he said.
I took it. And it was strange, holding it, because I knew that rose.
Not that stem exactly, but its kind, that exact soft pink.
My mother grew them along the south wall of our garden, the ones the gardeners were forever fussing over, and I stood there turning it in my fingers and told myself it was some coincidence.
“Thank you,” I said. “That’s very gentlemanly of you.”
An emotion crossed the corner of his mouth, there and gone.
He looked at me then, finally, straight on, and for half a second there was an expression underneath the flat quiet of him that I couldn’t name, that I wouldn’t be able to name for years.
Then it closed over, and he nodded, as our fathers came back in talking about dates and estates.
The moment folded itself up small and vanished.
But I kept the flower.
Standing there while they carved up our future in the next breath, I made my own private peace with the whole arrangement, because here was the truth I’d carried since I was nine on my mother’s velvet stool.
I was always going to marry someone I didn’t choose.
It was only ever a question of who. And of all the men my family could have handed me to, this one had shown up windblown, grieving and wordless, and looked at me as if I was a real thing and not a merger, too shy to hold my eyes while he said so.
Hendrix was familiar. He was sad in a shape I recognized.
Some reckless part of me thought, if it has to be anyone… let it be him.
Because maybe, given time and enough of me poured into it, this becomes the real thing.
So I kept the rose until it fell apart.
I never told him it matched the ones on our garden wall.
His lips press to the top of my head, warm and sudden as the kitchen rushes back around me, the stove light and the humming refrigerator and the man actually holding me now instead of the boy in the study I’ve been living inside.
“You’ve gone quiet again,” Hendrix says, the hum trailing off, his chin still resting on my hair. “That’s usually a bad sign.”
I don’t lift my head. I’m not ready to give the moment back yet.
“Just counting,” I lie.
Ever since that study, that crushed rose, pink roses have meant the one thing in this marriage that neither of us ever says out loud.
He shifts, and his hand comes up to my jaw, tipping my face out of his shirt so he can look at me. His thumb drags slowly along my cheekbone. Whatever he sees makes his expression go serious, that steady, unguarded thing he only ever lets out when no one’s around to press on it.
“Did you have a good day?”
“Hendrix…”
“I know we don’t get many. I know that’s on me.” His thumb moves again, and he doesn’t look away this time, doesn’t spare himself the discomfort of asking. “I wanted today to count for something. I need to know it did.”
And there it is, the closest this man comes to laying himself open, a question instead of a confession, guilt worn plain on his face because he can’t make his mouth form the softer words underneath it. My chest aches with how much I want to give him the easy answer and how much I mean it.
“It was a happy day,” I tell him, and my hand flattens over his heart where I can feel it going. “The happiest one I’ve had in a long time. Don’t ruin it by fishing for more.”
His mouth curves, and his shoulders let go until he’s not careful anymore.
Hendrix kisses me, and it isn’t the lazy good-morning kiss from the bed this morning.
This one has a year of distance packed into it, hungry and unhurried at the same time.
His hand fisting in my hair and mine dragging him down by the shirt.
He backs me into the counter and then his hands drop to my waist as he lifts me clean up onto it, settling himself into the space between my knees.
The melting groceries, the dead phone in the glove compartment, and every cold night of the last year all cease, entirely, to exist.
I get both hands into his hair. He makes a deep sound against my mouth that I feel everywhere, one palm splayed hot and certain up the length of my spine, and I lose track of which of us is pulling who closer because there isn’t any closer left to get.
“Upstairs,” I manage against his mouth.
“In a minute.” He doesn’t stop. He kisses the corner of my jaw, the side of my throat, thoroughly, until I’m the one who can’t remember what I was waiting for.
“Hendrix… Upstairs…”
He pulls back just enough to look at me and his eyes go dark and certain.
Suddenly, he hooks one arm low under me and lifts me off the counter as if I weigh nothing at all, and I wrap my legs around him. My arms go around his neck and I let him carry me, still kissing him, out of the warm little pool of stove light.
Behind us the kitchen goes dark, and the rest of the night belongs to nobody but us.
For one whole day, I let myself believe we’d found our way back.
***
The next time I open my eyes, I wake up reaching.
My hand slides across the sheets before my eyes are even open, feeling for the warm solid breathing weight of him, for the arm across my waist and the chest against my back and the mouth at my shoulder.
But it’s cold.