10. Josh
— ? —
Josh
I paced my childhood bedroom calling myself every kind of idiot in multiple languages, including some I’d learned specifically for international press tours where I’d smiled and lied about being happy.
My mother had lied. Of course she’d lied.
And Paige had lied. Dad probably knew and said nothing, which was a lie of its own.
All of them still hoping for some fairy-tale reconciliation that wasn’t coming.
That couldn’t come, because I’d burned that bridge so thoroughly there weren’t even ashes left to examine.
Raven was a goddess. Not just beautiful, but luminous in a way that hurt to witness.
Powerful. Herself in a way she’d never been during our marriage, and I hated that I was probably responsible for that.
The platinum hair that caught the light and turned it into armor, the posture of someone who knew her worth down to the penny.
The way she’d looked through the window at me, a ghost haunting a place I didn’t belong.
Which I was. A ghost she’d successfully exorcised who’d shown up anyway, uninvited and unwanted.
I’d promised myself I wouldn’t do this. Wouldn’t stand there memorizing her.
Two years of work with Dr. Reyes had built a whole framework for exactly this moment, a set of tools for wanting a person you have no right to want, and I’d left every last one of them on the mainland.
One look through a window and I was sixteen again in this same bedroom, aching over a girl who hadn’t even said hello.
My brain, which had a graduate degree and not one functioning survival instinct, immediately got to work: estimating the load rating of the trellis under her window, calculating whether it would hold a grown man bent on a gesture he had no business making.
This was the part the magazines never printed about me: not the brooding star with the good jaw, but a man who’d fallen for a woman’s mind, spent a decade too rattled by it to sit in the same room, and was now, at thirty-six, running structural math in his childhood bedroom over a woman who hadn’t said hello.
The bedroom hadn’t changed since high school.
Same navy walls my mother had called “sophisticated” when I was sixteen.
Same desk where I’d written college essays about wanting to change the world through art, back when I thought art was about truth instead of box office numbers.
Same twin bed, comically too short for my current frame.
I sat on that ridiculous bed and opened the journal Dr. Reyes made me keep. Two years of entries, started the week after Raven left, each one an attempt to understand how I’d destroyed the best thing in my life. The leather was soft from handling, pages thick with my attempts at accountability.
The journal took me back to that first session.
The emergency appointment I’d booked the night everything ended, after I’d gathered the place cards and understood what I’d done.
I’d walked into Dr. Reyes’s office wrecked, unshaven, still wearing the clothes I’d worn to the fish market.
I probably smelled of regret and seafood.
“Tell me about your marriage,” she’d said, notepad ready, professionally neutral in a way that made me want to confess everything.
I’d started with the interview, the disaster on Grant Levy that had ended it all. She’d stopped me with a raised hand.
“No. Start with when you met.”
So I did. I talked a long time about the brilliant, chaotic girl who’d spilled an entire latte on me at craft services and then quoted Kurosawa at me while trying to clean my shirt with paper towels that mostly spread the damage around.
How she’d made a theory about his use of weather being based on the Fibonacci sequence, total nonsense delivered with so much conviction that the shirt was a loss and so was I, long before she stopped apologizing.
How she made me laugh when I took myself too seriously, which was always, and how her ADHD brain made connections my linear MIT thinking could never make, jumping from point A to point Q in ways that shouldn’t work but always did.
How she’d stay up until 4 AM helping me run lines even when she had her own auditions at seven, doing every other character with increasingly ridiculous voices until Hamlet turned up from Jersey.
“She believed in me when I was nobody,” I’d told Dr. Reyes, my voice cracking. “Celebrated every tiny victory like I’d won an Oscar. A callback was champagne. A one-line role was dinner at a real restaurant. She made me feel like success was inevitable, just a matter of time.”
“And when you became somebody?”
“I stopped returning the favor.”
Reyes didn’t write anything down. She just let it sit in the room with us, which is most of what I pay her for, the leaving of a silence open until I have no choice but to climb down into it.
“When did it change?”
“Gradually, then suddenly. Like bankruptcy.” I’d laughed, bitter. “The first superhero movie. The schedule went insane. I was gone six months. When I came back, she’d booked a small recurring role on a network show. Three episodes. She was so excited. I was supposed to be happy for her.”
“But?”
“It filmed during my press tour. She couldn’t come to London, Tokyo, Sydney. I went alone. People kept asking where my wife was like I’d failed some test. My costar was single, beautiful, available for every event. The photos looked better with her. The narrative was cleaner.”
“So you started leaving her behind.”
“I started choosing the narrative over the truth. The truth was my wife was working, building her own career that I’d unconsciously decided was worth less than mine. The narrative was that I was alone, maybe available, a leading man who didn’t need anyone. The narrative sold tickets.”
“And the interview?”
“The interview was just the culmination,” I said, and heard my own voice go flat. “Me not caring how she’d feel because I’d stopped considering her feelings at all. I thought she wouldn’t care either. I thought we were both playing parts by then. I never thought she’d leave me.”
“How does that make you feel?”
“Like I killed the best part of myself for applause from strangers.”
Two years of twice-a-week sessions since then.
Two years of picking apart every choice, every moment I’d chosen image over marriage.
I’d fired everyone who’d enabled my worst self.
Turned down sixty million dollars in franchise money to teach acting to kids who reminded me why I’d loved it before it became about being famous.
Stayed single despite my team’s new pressure, despite the actress who’d made it clear she was interested, despite a loneliness heavy enough to drown in.
I’d been building the life I should have built with Raven, just without her. Which made it an elaborate performance for an audience that would never see it.
Dr. Reyes had a phrase for it. Living amends.
You don’t get to apologize your way back into someone’s good graces; you become the person you should have been the first time, and you do it whether or not she ever notices.
Most days I believed in it. Tonight, watching Raven eat my mother’s pie in my mother’s kitchen, I could feel how thin the line was between living amends and just quietly hoping she’d walk back into the room.
I wrote in the journal: “Saw R today. Still can’t breathe properly. Still love her. Will always love her. Need to not ruin Paige’s wedding with my presence.”
A commotion downstairs interrupted my self-pity spiral. Voices raised in what sounded like controlled chaos, which was Paige’s default setting three days before her wedding.
I walked down to find the kitchen full of people.
Paige was gesturing wildly about something involving centerpieces.
Dad was pretending to care about centerpieces.
And Raven was eating a slice of my mother’s chocolate cream pie, the one she only made for special occasions, the one that had been Raven’s favorite.
My heart stopped. Actually stopped, then restarted at double speed, scrambling to make up the missed beat.
Then my mother’s words stopped it again.
“The cottages are infested with ticks,” she announced to the room. “Just discovered them this afternoon. Need fumigation immediately. And wouldn’t you know, the hotel in town is completely booked. Some corporate retreat taking every room.”
This could not be happening. This was not happening. This was a conspiracy orchestrated by a woman who’d raised me on romantic comedies and believed love conquered all, including divorce papers and public humiliation.
“So we’re doubling up,” Mom continued, not meeting my eyes because she knew I knew she was lying. “Raven, darling, I hate to say this but you’ll have to share Josh’s room. Only two rooms with space and working plumbing now. Josh, you’ll take the air mattress, of course.”
Raven’s fork stopped halfway to her mouth. A bit of chocolate cream fell back onto the plate. “Meg-”
“It’s that or the couch in the main house with Great Aunt Mildred’s snoring. You remember her snoring.”
I stood up. “I’ll take the couch.”
“Nonsense. You’re both adults. It’s three nights. You can certainly manage to be civil for three nights.”
“Mom, this is inappropriate.”
“What’s inappropriate is making Raven sleep with Mildred’s snoring. It sounds like a freight train having an existential crisis.”
“Then I’ll sleep on the beach,” I said.
“You’ll do no such thing,” Raven said, finding her voice. “We’re not teenagers. We can share a room without drama.”
“But-”
“It’s fine.” She stood, pushed her chair in with careful precision. “I’ll go pack.”
She left, and I turned on my mother.
“This is manipulation.”
“This is opportunity.”
“You lied to her. You told her I wouldn’t be here.”
“I said you confirmed you couldn’t make it,” she said, entirely unrepentant. “You did confirm that. Then you changed your mind.”
“Because you guilt-tripped me for three hours!”
“I expressed maternal disappointment. There’s a difference.”