11. Andrea
— ? —
Andrea
Pounding on Melissa’s door drags me out of fitful sleep.
I stumble to the living room, pulling on my robe, and peer through the peephole.
Kirk stands in the doorway.
Soaking wet. Rain dripping from his hair, from his jaw, from the hem of his coat. His white shirt is plastered to his chest, transparent with moisture, clinging to every line of muscle underneath.
My mouth goes dry.
Don’t look at his chest. Don’t notice what the wet fabric is doing.
I’m looking. I’m noticing. The rain has darkened his hair, and droplets cling to his eyelashes, and his breathing comes fast and shallow as if he ran here.
“I need to tell you why.” His voice is ragged. Wild. “Why I believed my mother. Why I’ve always been afraid of losing you.”
My brain says: Tell him to leave. It’s two in the morning. You owe him nothing.
My body says: Look at his chest. Look at his hands. Remember what those hands feel like on your skin.
“You’re soaking wet.” The words choose themselves.
“I don’t care.”
“You’ll catch pneumonia.”
“Andrea-”
“Come in.” The words escape before I can stop them. “Come in before you freeze.”
I step aside to let him pass, and the scent of him hits me: rain and cold air and underneath it all, his cologne. That familiar sandalwood-cedar combination that weakens my knees every single time.
Damn him, I think. Damn him for still smelling like home.
I hand him a towel from the bathroom and watch him dry off. Water streams from his hair, his collar, the sleeves of his ruined coat. His movements are jerky, uncoordinated. He’s shaking - not from cold.
The shirt still clings. The outline of his abs shows through the wet fabric. The definition of his arms as he raises them to towel his hair.
Stop staring, I tell myself. You’re not a teenager.
But I can’t stop. My eyes are traitors, drinking him in, cataloging every familiar detail. The birthmark on his right forearm. The scar on his knuckle from a long-ago kitchen accident. The vein that pulses in his neck when he’s emotional.
He catches me looking. Our eyes meet, and a current passes between us.
“Don’t,” I say, though I’m not sure which of us I’m warning.
“I’m not doing anything.”
“You’re standing in my sister’s apartment at two in the morning, dripping on her floor, looking like-” I cut myself off.
“Looking like what?”
Like everything I want and can’t have. Like the worst mistake of my life and the only man I’ve ever loved.
“Like a man who needs dry clothes,” I finish instead. “Sit down. Talk. But make it quick.”
We sit on opposite ends of the couch. Maximum distance.
“Talk,” I say.
He’s quiet for a long moment, staring at his hands. When he speaks, his voice barely rises above a whisper.
“My mother has been telling me I’m not enough my entire life.”
I blink. That’s not what I expected.
“She had a plan.” He looks up at me, and his eyes are wet. “From before I was born, probably. The right schools. The right friends. The right career. The right wife.” He swallows. “Katherine Ellis. Do you know that name?”
“Your mother’s mentioned her.” Pointedly. Often. Usually while explaining how much better Kirk’s life could have been if he’d made different choices.
“My mother has been pushing Katherine at me since we were nineteen. Family friends. Old money. ‘Appropriate.’” He says the word as if it tastes sour.
“My nineteenth birthday party. I’ve never told you this.
My mother sat us next to each other, and halfway through dinner she stood up and toasted ‘the kind of match that builds legacies.’ Nineteen, Andrea.
Katherine stared at her plate. I stared at mine.
Two kids being auctioned by our mothers over sheet cake, and everyone applauded.
She never stopped, Andrea. Even after we got married.
Every time you weren’t in the room, she’d mention Katherine.
How Katherine was still single. How Katherine asked about me. How Katherine would never-”
He stops. Breathes.
“Would never what?” I push.
“Would never leave me.” His voice cracks. “That was her favorite line. ‘Women like Andrea, they’re temporary. They get bored. They find better. Katherine would never do that to you, Kirk.’”
The words hit low and keep hitting. Six years. Six years of marriage, and his mother spent all of them planting doubt.
“She said it every visit. Every phone call. ‘When Andrea leaves.’ ‘After Andrea realizes.’ ‘Once Andrea gets what she wants.’” He meets my eyes.
“It got into my head. I didn’t want it to.
I tried so hard to ignore it. But it was always there.
This voice saying I wasn’t enough. That you’d figure it out eventually. ”
“Kirk-”
“So when she showed me those photos-” His voice breaks completely. “When she showed me evidence that you’d found another man, it felt like the moment I’d been dreading finally arrived. Like all her warnings coming true at once.”
A hairline fracture runs through the anger I’ve been living inside. Not forgiveness - nothing close. But the first place where his voice gets through.
“That’s not proof,” I say through tears I didn’t notice starting. “That’s paranoia.”
“I know that NOW.” He’s crying too, tears streaming down his face, and Kirk doesn’t cry.
In six years of marriage, I’ve seen him cry maybe twice.
“I know it doesn’t excuse anything. I just needed you to understand.
It wasn’t because I didn’t love you. It was because I loved you so much and never believed I deserved you. ”
The confession hangs between us. I drag my wrist across my cheek.
“You let your mother poison our marriage for six years.”
“Yes.”
“And when it came down to it, you chose her fear over my love.”
“Yes.”
“Do you understand how much that hurt?” My voice rises. “I stood in our kitchen and begged you to believe me. I showed you the ultrasound of our child. And you looked at me like I was dirt and told me to get out.”
“I think about it every day.” His voice is wrecked.
“Every hour. I hear myself saying those words, and I want to-” He presses his palms to his eyes.
“I can’t undo it. I know that. But I need you to know I never stopped loving you.
Not for one second of it. I was broken in a way I didn’t understand. ”
“That’s not my fault.”
“No. It’s not.” He drops his hands. “It’s my mother’s fault. And it’s my fault for not seeing it sooner. For not protecting you, protecting us, from her poison.”
Melissa’s door opens. She stands in the hallway in pajamas, hair wild, eyes alert.
“It’s three AM.” Her voice is flat. “Either figure this out or Kirk leaves.”
Kirk stands immediately. “I’ll go. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have come this late-”
“Wait.” The word comes out before I can stop it. He freezes, half-turned toward the door. “What are you going to do now? About your mother?”
“I haven’t spoken to her since the country club. I don’t know if I ever can again.”
“She confronted me in the park tonight.”
His face goes pale. “What?”
“She found me. Said I was ruining everything. Said you’d come back to her eventually.
And she said-” I stop, because repeating it gives it power, and then I repeat it anyway, because he should know what his mother is.
“She said I’ll spend the rest of my life knowing that when it counted, her voice was louder than mine. ”
Kirk’s jaw tightens. His eyes harden into a thing I’ve never seen in them before.
“I need to handle this,” he says quietly. “I need to make sure she never comes near you again.”
“Kirk-”
“I’ll wait.” He meets my eyes, and for the first time tonight, hope lives in them. “I’ll wait as long as it takes. But I need you to know I’m choosing you, Andrea. Over her. Over everything.”
He turns toward the door.
“Kirk.”
He stops.
“Come to the Foundation gala Saturday. I need to see - I need to know if you can do this in public. Around everyone who knows what happened.”
He turns back. Nods once.
“I’ll be there.”
He leaves. Through the front window I watch him stop halfway down Melissa’s walk and stand in the dark for a moment, shoulders rising and falling, a man putting himself back together before he can drive.
Then he squares up and goes, and doesn’t look back at the window, and I don’t know why that lands harder than if he had.
Melissa appears at my elbow.
“You okay?”
I’m shaking. My face is wet. My heart is doing complicated and terrifying gymnastics.
“I don’t know.” I press my hand to my belly. “I think I might be.”
Melissa looks at the door he just left through, then at me, for a long moment.
“For the record,” she says, “I listened to every word from the hallway, because I’m not made of stone and the walls are made of paper.
” She crosses the room, takes the throw blanket off the chair, and wraps it around my shoulders the way Mom used to.
“The Katherine thing. Six years of that, in his ear, every visit.” Her jaw works.
“I’m not forgiving him. I want that minuted.
But I’m downgrading him from villain to casualty, effective tonight, and that’s the largest concession this administration has ever made. ”
“Noted for the record.”
“Go to bed, warrior.” She kisses the top of my head. “You have a gala to win.”