17. Hendrix
— ? —
Hendrix
She steals my coffee.
Imogen walks out of the bedroom in my shirt, bare legs and wrecked hair and the ribbon still looped around her wrist, crosses the kitchen in three steps, and lifts the mug straight out of my hand while I’m mid-sip.
“That’s mine,” I tell her.
“It was yours.” She takes a long, deliberate drink, her eyes on me over the rim, and the look in them is a specific brand of mischief I have not seen on this woman in over a year. “Now it’s community property.”
“We’re getting divorced. Community property is a contested concept.”
“Then contest it.” Another sip, slower, entirely to torment me. “After you make me a second cup.”
A laugh comes out of me before I can catch it, startled and genuine and far too loud for a quiet kitchen, and her mouth curves behind the mug, pleased with herself in a way that warms the whole beach house more than the light coming through the windows.
I make her the second cup.
A cup of tea, hot, because it turned cold weeks ago and she switches to hot the second the weather does, and I know that about her the way I know a hundred small useless things about her, and the knowing is the only currency I have left, so I spend every last coin of it.
She takes the cup and our fingers overlap on the ceramic and she doesn’t pull hers away and I don’t let mine go, and we stand in the kitchen of a beach house on the family coastline, holding the same warm cup between us, looking at each other with the peculiar shyness of two people who chose each other again in the dark and are now standing in the daylight with no idea what that’s supposed to mean.
“Hi,” she says quietly.
“Hi.”
“This is weird.”
“A little.”
“I’m standing in your kitchen wearing your shirt and nothing else, and I am also, technically, still filing for divorce from you.” She lifts the cup. “This is objectively weird.”
“The paperwork does add a layer.”
She bites her lip against a smile, and I watch it happen, the suppression, the losing battle, the way the corner of her mouth keeps trying to escape her control, and the watching does a thing to my chest I am going to be thinking about for the rest of my life.
“Stop looking at me,” she says.
“You’re wearing my shirt and nothing else. I’m going to need you to significantly lower your expectations about where my eyes go.”
“Your eyes can go wherever they want. Your commentary stays internal.”
But she’s grinning now, fully, unguarded, and the grin is the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in months, which is saying a great deal, because I have spent the entire night looking at the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known, so the bar was already set somewhere unreasonable.
We eat breakfast on the porch.
Toast and fruit and coffee, bare feet up on the railing, the ocean a gray murmur out in front of us and the morning stretching long and slow, in no apparent hurry to hand us back to the world we drove away from.
I catch her watching me three times.
The first, when I reach for the jam and my sleeve slides up my forearm, and her eyes track the motion and then snap away too fast to be innocent.
The second, when I lean back and shut my eyes against the sun, and I feel her gaze settle on my face with a weight that would be invisible to anyone else on earth and registers in my body with the precision of a struck tuning fork.
The third, when I turn and catch her mid-look, and she doesn’t bother pretending she wasn’t staring. She just holds my eyes, her expression half defiance and half tenderness and entirely her own.
“You’re watching me again,” I tell her.
“You’re watching me watch you. That’s worse.”
“I’m not going to argue with you on a porch this nice.”
“Smart man.”
“Tell me one more thing I don’t know about you.
” I say it lightly, reaching for another piece of toast, but she hears the real thing underneath it, the thread we picked up on the beach and haven’t put down.
“We’re still doing the beginning. I’ve got you afraid of the ocean and a childhood I know nothing about. Give me one more.”
She considers it, turning her cup in her hands.
“I can’t sleep in a completely silent room.
I need a fan, or the ocean, or traffic, some kind of sound.
Total silence makes my brain assume the world ended.
” She glances at me. “Which, for the record, is why I could never sleep well in that house. It was too quiet. All that space and money and nobody ever making a sound.”
“I could have bought you a fan.”
“You could have been in the room,” she says, not unkindly, just true, and it lands the way the true things always land with her, clean and without cruelty, and I take it, because I earned it.
“Noted,” I say. “Fan. Presence. In that order of importance, apparently.”
Her mouth twitches. “You’re learning.”
And neither of us says what happened last night.
Neither of us names it or labels it or tries to fold it into the story of the divorce or the reconciliation or whatever this is turning into.
We just let it sit there, a fact, a warm and undeniable and deeply complicated fact, resting on the porch between us alongside the toast and the coffee and the ribbon on her wrist, quietly changing the terms of everything without demanding that either of us define the new ones yet.
Both of us know. Right now, on this porch, in this light, with the whole reckoning still waiting for us back in the city, that’s enough.
The softness turns to focus over the second cup of coffee.
It starts when she pulls up the photos on my phone, the ones I took in the archive room, and lays them out on the porch table between us, scrolling through payment records and transfer confirmations with the focused, systematic attention of a woman building a case.
“Bridget stood on the sidewalk in front of my studio two days ago, in front of a camera she brought herself, and threatened me after she colluded with someone like Shane to ruin me.”
“She did.”
Imogen exhales. One long, controlled breath, and I have learned by now to read that breath, because it is the sound of a woman taking everything that was done to her and quietly converting it into fuel.
“Okay,” she says. “What are we going to do about it?”
We.
The word lands in my chest and stays there.
“I want to go public,” I tell her. “A press conference. Lay the evidence out on a table where everyone can see it, name Bridget, name Shane, and put the truth on the record in the same place the lie has been living rent-free for weeks.”
“To clear your name?”
“To clear yours.”
I lean forward, because this is the part that matters, and I need her to hear it in my voice and not just take it off my words.
“I don’t care about my name, Imogen. My name can take the hit.
Yours has been out there with no armor on it at all, and every single day that lie gets to stand is another day a stranger gets to tell you who you are.
I want to be the one who ends that. Or, more accurately, I want to hand you the thing you need to end it yourself. ”
She studies my face. Looking for the performance in it, the angle, the Carver machinery she has spent three years learning to spot and step around. Looking for Shane’s fingerprints on the plan, the strategy dressed up in feeling.
“And what’s my part in this press conference?”
“Whatever you decide it is.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“It’s the only answer I’m allowed to give.
” I hold her eyes. “It took me three years and a burned-down marriage to learn it, so please make allowances for the slow student. I can open the door. I can put the evidence on the table and own my failures out loud and name the people who weaponized them. But I cannot speak for you. I will not make you a supporting character in my own redemption and call that justice. You have a voice, Imogen. The last thing on this earth I am going to do is stand at a podium and take it out of your hands.”
Whatever she was searching my face for, she finds it, because the guard comes down another inch and the steel in her expression melts into a thing much closer to trust.
“So you go first,” she says slowly, working it out as she speaks. “You lay it all out. You own your piece of it. And then…”
“And then I step aside. You walk out on your own terms, and you say whatever you need to say, in your own voice, and I stand off to the side and let you.”
“You’d actually do that? Stand up there and hand over the microphone?”
“I would do anything you asked me to do.” I reach across the table and take her hand, and she lets me.
“But this one I’m not doing because you asked.
I’m doing it because it’s right. You spent years making yourself smaller, and I let you so I am not going to let that name be the thing that disappears you one more time. ”
The ocean fills the quiet between us. Waves and wind and the entirely new sound of two people sitting on the same side of a problem, aimed, for once, in the same direction.
“Okay,” she says finally. “We do it. Together, but separately. You open the door and I walk through it on my own feet.”
“Then the people who did this find out exactly what happens when they aim at a woman who doesn’t break.”
That earns me the smallest smile.
A smile with teeth. Underneath it, unmistakable, the particular warmth of a woman watching her husband become, late and imperfectly and only after losing everything, the man she’d been waiting the whole time for him to be.
“We should go back,” she says. “Today. Before we lose the momentum.”
“I know.”
“I’m going to need my own clothes. A shower. And roughly four hours of sleep that does not take place on a museum bench.”
“You slept on my chest. Not the bench.”
“The bench was involved. My back has filed several opinions.”
“Your back can take it up with the Carver Foundation,” I tell her. “We funded the benches.”
She laughs, full and warm and real, and the sound of it fills the porch and the morning and every hollow space in my chest I’ve been hauling around for a year.
And I sit across from her and let it move through me and I do not reach for my phone, and I do not think about the blank page, and I do not run the math on what comes next.
I just sit here. With my wife. On a porch, watching her laugh.
Being present, it turns out, is easier than I spent three years telling myself it was.
All it ever required was losing everything first.
***
We pack the beach house in under half an hour, and there isn’t much to pack.
My shirt, which she is still wearing and shows no sign of returning. Her dress, wrinkled past any hope of salvation.
The two cups, rinsed and set back on the shelf. The bed, which she remakes with the crisp instinctive precision of a woman who folds hospital corners without thinking about it, the dancer’s discipline reaching all the way down into how she squares a pillow.
I watch her do it, and I think about how many mornings I missed watching her do exactly this. How many small, ordinary, unremarkable moments I handed away for a blank page that never once gave me anything back.
“Stop staring and help me with the pillows.”
“I’m supervising.”
“You’re useless.”
But she throws a pillow at my head, and the throw is accurate, and the laugh that comes after it is better than any sentence I have ever managed to put on a page.
The drive back takes an hour.
We don’t play music. We don’t draft talking points or rehearse statements or run strategy.
We just drive, and talk, and don’t-talk, and drive some more, and the ease of it sits in the car between us, warm and fragile and real, a thing neither of us wants to jostle.
Somewhere on the highway her voice slows.
Her sentences shorten. Her head tips toward the window, and then her cheek is against the glass, and then she’s gone, asleep between one word and the next, the way she has always fallen asleep in cars, sudden and complete, her body surrendering the war between exhaustion and consciousness in a single exhale.
I reach across and take her hand.
Carefully. Threading my fingers through hers without waking her, the way I used to on long drives before I forgot that the driving and the holding were the entire point, and the destination was just where the driving happened to stop.
Her fingers curl around mine in her sleep.
Instinctive. A little possessive.
The grip of a woman whose body has already decided to trust a man her waking mind is still, carefully, reserving judgment on.
I let that be what it is. I don’t read more into it than it is.
She gave me one day and a promise of an answer at the end of it, and the answer hasn’t come yet, and I would not insult everything we clawed back last night by pretending the sleeping grip of her hand is the verdict.
It isn’t. It’s just her hand. It’s just, for now, enough.
I drive one-handed.
The city rises on the horizon, glass and green, the place we built a marriage in and nearly lost each other in and are now driving back into on purpose, together, pointed straight at the people who tried to take us apart.
The calm that settles over me surprises me.
Because the people who did this have no idea what’s driving back toward them.
Imogen’s fingers tighten around mine in her sleep, and I take us home with the shape of a press conference building in my chest and the weight of her hand in mine with a certainty, steady and brand new, that whatever is waiting for us on the other side of this, we are walking into it side by side.
That’s a sentence I haven’t been able to say in a while.
Together.
It’s about time.