11. Imogen
— ? —
Imogen
Hendrix gave another interview.
Despite stopping myself, I still end up watching the clip in the dark, with the sound turned down so low I have to hold the phone close to my face to hear him.
I don’t mean to. That’s the lie I’m telling myself, anyway, thumb hovering over it for a full minute before I press play, as if pressing play is a thing that happens to me rather than a thing I choose.
His face fills the little screen, and it’s doing the thing it does when he stops performing, the softening at the edges, the drop of the armor, the man underneath all the polish finally showing up in front of a camera instead of behind a closed door where only I ever got to see him.
The words he said land in my chest and sit there, warm and unwelcome, taking up space I cleared out on purpose.
I hate that it affects me.
And I hate that his voice can still do this, that the sound of him being honest can walk straight past every wall I’ve spent weeks building and settle into the exact place I’ve been trying to keep empty.
I hate that it’s the truest thing I’ve heard him say in public in years, and that the truth of it sounds like the man I married instead of the stranger he turned into.
I set the phone face down on my knee. I pull the blanket up. I say it out loud, to the empty room, to the version of myself that is trying so hard to be finished with all of this.
“It changes nothing.”
I say it twice but I don’t believe it either time.
***
The thing that saves me, in the days after, is that teaching wrecks me in the best possible way.
My calves are screaming and my feet are on fire.
There’s a bruise coming up on my left hip from demonstrating a turn combination I am technically too old to be throwing myself into with that much commitment, and every muscle in my body is filing a formal complaint, and I have not felt this good in months.
The evening class just let out.
A dozen kids between seven and ten, all of them uncoordinated and fearless and trying so hard it makes my chest hurt, and I spent two hours correcting postures and counting beats and catching one tiny girl mid-fall when she got ambitious with a relevé.
By the time the parents came to collect them I was drenched and grinning and so tired I could have slept standing up in the corner.
This is the exhaustion I’ve been missing.
The kind that comes from pouring everything you have into a room full of people who need exactly what you’ve got. Not the other kind. Not the hollow, scraped-out tiredness of a woman who spent all her energy waiting for a man who never came home.
I forgot there were two kinds, I forgot the good one existed.
My body is remembering now, one screaming muscle at a time, and I am absurdly grateful for every ache.
Then I grab my bag from the office, pull on my jacket, and push through the studio’s front door into the cool evening.
But the moment I step outside, my world stops.
He’s standing on the sidewalk.
Hendrix.
Right there, ten feet from the door, holding a bouquet of pink roses in both hands and wearing a coat I’ve never seen and an expression I’ve seen exactly once before, the night he proposed.
Terrified certainty. A man standing at the edge of a thing he isn’t sure will hold his weight.
My feet stop before my brain catches up. Every muscle that was loose and warm from teaching goes rigid in a single heartbeat.
Keep walking. The thought fires through me, automatic, urgent. Keep walking, don’t look at him, don’t give him the opening he came here to find.
And I almost do it.
My left foot actually lifts, actually starts to angle past him toward the lot, and I am one committed step from pretending I never saw him at all.
“Imogen.”
He doesn’t grab me. Doesn’t step into my path, doesn’t do a single one of the physical things that would hand me a clean reason to be angry.
He just says my name with enough quiet weight to stop me mid-stride, and I hate that it works, hate that my own name in his mouth can still pin my feet to the concrete.
I turn. “What are you doing here?”
“Waiting for you.”
“How did you know I was here?”
“You took the teaching job.”
It’s not a question. He knows.
Of course he knows, he’s been paying attention to the pieces of my life in his own way, memorizing, filing every detail in that infuriating archive he keeps of me.
“There was a flyer in the window. And you told me once that you couldn’t walk past this studio anymore, on your way to the garage, because seeing it hurt too much.” He pauses. “So I thought, if you were teaching anywhere, it would be the place that used to hurt.”
The specificity of it sends a jolt through my chest that I refuse to let reach my face.
“You need to leave, Hendrix.”
“I know.”
He doesn’t move.
“But I need to say one thing first, and then I’ll go.
I’m not here to argue. I’m not here to explain or convince you or perform a speech.
I’m here to tell you that I’m going to earn your forgiveness.
However long it takes. Whatever it looks like.
I know words don’t mean anything to you from me anymore, and I understand exactly why, so I’m not going to try to talk my way back into your life. ”
He takes a breath. “I’m just going to show up.”
“Show up?”
“Every day. Here. Until you forgive me or you tell me to stop. And if you tell me to stop, I’ll probably just stand further down the block.”
A laugh almost gets out of me. Almost. I catch it behind my teeth and hold it there, because laughing at Hendrix Carver right now would be a crack in a wall I cannot afford to crack.
“It’s too late,” I tell him, and my voice comes out steady, and my hands are jammed in my jacket pockets so he can’t see them shaking. “It’s three years too late. You don’t get to show up with flowers and a promise after everything and expect me to…”
“I don’t expect anything.” He says it calmly, no argument in it, no defense.
“I’m not here because I think it’ll work.
I’m here because you deserve a man who shows up for you, and I should have been that man for three years, and I wasn’t.
Standing on this sidewalk is the smallest possible piece of what I owe you. ”
Damn him.
Damn him and his careful, chosen, precisely aimed words, the ones that slip past every rational defense I’ve built and land in the exact spot I’ve been working hardest to keep sealed.
“I don’t want your flowers.”
“I know.” He holds them out anyway. Not pushing, not pressing. Just extending his arms with the patience of a man offering a thing he expects to be refused and has already forgiven the refusal. “Take them or don’t. I’ll be here tomorrow either way.”
I should leave them. I should turn around and walk to my car and let the roses wilt on the concrete and prove to both of us that I am well past the point where a bouquet and a speech can reach me.
My hands come out of my pockets and take the flowers before I’ve given them permission.
The weight of them settles into my arms, familiar in a way that undoes me a little.
Pink roses.
Stupid freaking pink roses.
Always pink roses. He’s known they were mine since the very first one he ever handed me, a crushed, half-wrecked bloom he’d torn off a garden wall with his bare hands and given to me in a study the night our families made us official, when I was too young to understand that a boy who couldn’t say a single true sentence had just said everything he had.
He never explained it, he never had to. Between the two of us, pink roses have only ever meant one thing, and he knows I know it, and that is the whole cruelty of choosing them now.
My fingers curl around the stems without asking me first, the involuntary grip of a body that remembers exactly what it feels like to be handed a gift by this man and has never once learned how to let go.
“Tomorrow,” he says. And he turns, and he walks away.
No backward glance, no lingering pause engineered to make me watch him go.
He just leaves, down the sidewalk and around the corner and gone, and I understand that the leaving without drama is the entire point, that the restraint is the message he came here to deliver.
I stand on the sidewalk holding a bouquet I didn’t want.
Hating, more than anything, that my arms didn’t refuse it.
***
I brace for the Carver playbook.
The check, the jewelry box. The grand, public gesture engineered to buy reconciliation the way his family buys everything, with enough money to make the problem vanish and enough spectacle to make the solution look like romance.
I know the playbook. I married into it. Shane probably keeps a whole chapter titled “How to Win Back the Estranged Wife,” filed between “How to Spin a Bad Review” and “How to Leverage Personal Tragedy for Brand Engagement.”
Monday, I come out of the studio expecting a limo.
A publicist, a lawyer with a revised settlement and a fruit basket.
Hendrix is on the sidewalk. Same spot, holding a single cup.
“You should go home,” I tell him, not slowing down.
“I will. After this.” He holds the cup out. “Medium. One sugar. Oat milk, because it’s cold enough now that you’ll have switched over from iced.”
And that stops me, just for half a step, because he’s right, I did switch over, I always switch the second the weather turns and I never told him that, he just learned it the way he learned everything about me, quietly, over years, filing it away in that archive he keeps.
I take the tea, because the alternative is making a scene in front of the studio, and I refuse to give him a scene. He nods before he goes.
Tuesday. Roses again, pink, smaller this time, just three stems. He hands them over without a word, waits to see whether I’ll say anything, accepts my silence like it’s a fair answer, and leaves.
Wednesday, his hands are empty. He’s just standing there, hands in his pockets, watching the door, and when I come out he says, “Good class?”
“How would you know?”
“You look tired in the good way. You used to look like that after rehearsals.” He pauses. “I’ll let you go. Goodnight, Imogen.”