20. Josh
— ? —
Josh
I knew I should stay away from Raven. I knew it the way you know you shouldn’t touch a stove, cellularly, with the full authority of prior experience.
And it made exactly no difference, because she was in my blood, in the rhythm of my breathing.
Three weeks since the wall and I could still taste her, still hear the exact pitch of the sound she’d made against that plaster, and it had been a shaft of sunlight after two years of being starved half to death in a cave and calling it a diet.
I’d spent those years telling myself I was fine.
That was the diet part. You convince yourself the hunger is discipline, that wanting her is a weakness you’ve successfully managed, that the flat gray nothing where your life used to be is a kind of peace you’ve earned.
And then she turns up at your door at midnight and puts her mouth on yours, and the whole starvation reveals itself for exactly what it was, and you understand you haven’t been at peace for a single day.
You’ve only been getting very slowly used to going without light.
My doorbell rang at nine in the morning. I opened it to find Mia on my porch holding two coffees, a grenade in each hand.
“One of these is for you,” she said. “It’s a peace offering. It’s also a hostage. Sit down.”
She invited herself in, which appeared to be non-negotiable, and did a slow circuit of my living room with the eyes of a building inspector looking for code violations.
“Nice place,” she said. “Where are all the awards? You used to have a whole shrine. A little Josh Gardner Hall of Fame right there, I remember it, it was nauseating.”
“Donated them. Turned the room into an edit bay for the kids’ class.”
She stopped. Filed that somewhere. “Interesting.”
“Mia-”
“Here’s my problem, Gardner.” She set the coffees down and started to pace, which I recognized from Raven as the family method of thinking out loud, except Mia paced, winding herself up to the point.
“Everything you’ve done for two years is perfect.
The fund. Firing your entire team. Staying single when every model in this zip code volunteered.
The cottage. It’s all flawless. Which leaves me exactly two options for what’s actually happening here. ”
She stopped in front of me.
“Option one, you genuinely changed. Option two, you’re running the single longest, most expensive PR campaign in Hollywood history with an audience of one.
” She folded her arms. “So which is it? Are you different, or are you performing penance and calling it love because that’s a nicer word for it? ”
I didn’t answer fast. That’s what got her, I think. I actually sat with it, turned it over, looked at it from the angle that didn’t flatter me.
“At the beginning?” I said finally. “Probably penance. Punishing myself felt like the only thing I had left that I could still do for her. It was the last chore on the list. But somewhere in the middle of it I stopped keeping score.” I looked at her.
“I teach those kids on Saturdays and I don’t tell her.
I fund those movies and her name is nowhere near any of it.
If she never speaks to me again as long as I live, none of it stops.
That’s the difference between now and the old me.
The old me needed the audience. I just need her to be okay, whether I’m in the room for it or not. ”
It was the truest thing I’d said out loud to another human being in two years, and I’d said it to Raven’s best friend at nine in the morning over a hostage coffee, which isn’t how I’d have scripted the moment.
But that was the entire point. There was no script anymore.
Dr. Reyes had spent two years teaching me that the version of me who scripted every interaction, who calculated every line for its effect, was the exact man who’d forgotten his own wife’s face across a dinner table.
So I stopped calculating and told Mia the plain truth and let her do whatever she wanted with it, and that felt more like being well than anything I’d managed in years.
Mia stared at me for a long, weighing moment.
Then she stood up. “If you hurt her again, they will never find your body. I want to be clear that this is not a figure of speech. I know people. Specifically, I know makeup people. They have access to chemicals and a professional understanding of how to make a face unrecognizable.”
“Understood.”
At the door, she paused with her hand on the frame. “She watched your Grant Levy apology eleven times.” She didn’t turn around. “You didn’t hear that from me.”
The door clicked shut, and I stood in my kitchen holding a hostage coffee while the number went off in my chest, a depth charge.
Eleven times.
She wasn’t indifferent. She wasn’t healed-and-moved-on, filed-and-closed.
She was circling the exact same drain I’d been circling for two years, and I’d been standing perfectly still the whole time, out of what I’d told myself was respect, calling it penance, making her do every inch of the work of crossing the distance between us.
Waiting to be forgiven the way you wait for a bus, sure it would pull up to my stop if I just stood there long enough.
Enough.
I got the journal Dr. Reyes makes me keep and wrote the shortest entry in two years: New plan. Stop waiting to be forgiven. Start being worth choosing.
There’s a difference between the two, and it had taken me two years and a serious amount of money to feel it in my body instead of just understand it on a page.
Waiting to be forgiven puts her on the hook.
It makes her the one with the job, the granting or withholding of absolution, while I stand around being sorry at her until she cracks.
Being worth choosing put the whole weight back where it belonged, on me.
It asked her for nothing. It only required me to become, daily and without an audience, a man a woman like that might reasonably want, and then to leave the choosing entirely to her.
One of those is penance. The other is love.
I’d been confusing them for two solid years.
I was going to court my ex-wife. Deliberately, patiently, with no pressure and no expiration date.
I was going to show her, one small true thing at a time, exactly how good we were when we were good, and I was going to enjoy it, because pining had been miserable and wooing Raven had always, always been the best job I’d ever had.
From here on, nothing I did was going to be an accident, even while she was still telling herself she had no idea what to do with me.
Move one was honesty. I called that night to apologize (properly: for the party, for the wall, for making all of it more complicated than she needed) and got voicemail, which meant I got to leave the message, which meant I got to hear myself do this:
“Hi. It’s me - Josh. Which you know, obviously, from the - anyway.
I’m calling to apologize. For the other night.
The party, not the - well. Also maybe that too, if you want me to apologize for it, though I’d be lying, so.
You deserve space to heal without me making it harder, and that’s the whole message, that’s it, I’m going to stop talking now.
Bye. It’s Josh. You know that. Okay. Bye. ”
That same week, the whisper reached me, the one that I’d bought her comeback, and within ten minutes I understood I was going to have to spend real capital to kill it.
David wanted the loud version: a statement, an interview, my name welded to the correction, the devoted ex setting the record straight for the optics.
I sat with that only long enough to see that a loud, Josh-Gardner-branded defense would do the exact thing the whisper did. It would drag me back into the center of her story. It would make even her exoneration one more thing I’d handed her.
So I did the quiet thing instead, which cost more and showed less.
I stepped all the way back from her. Every room I’d ever quietly stood in the corner of on her behalf, every good word I’d put in where it might reach her, every door I’d leaned on in the dark and never once mentioned, I let all of it go, and I let the people who’d watched me do it watch me stop.
Being the man who believed in her before anyone else, who put his thumb on the scale in the dark and never took the credit, was the last way I had left to love her, and I gave it up on purpose.
Keeping it meant leaving her to wonder for the rest of her life whether she’d earned her own name.
I’d rather she never knew I’d loved her than have her doubt she’d done it herself, so I disappeared from every part of her world that wasn’t the two of us in the dark, let it look like I’d finally lost interest, and told no one why.
Nobody would ever know I’d done it, and that was the entire point.
I wanted to throw the phone into the sea.
It was, objectively, the worst voicemail in the recorded history of the medium.
I’d stammered, contradicted myself, said my own name three separate times, in case she’d somehow forgotten it.
And I didn’t call back to fix it, didn’t fire off a cleaner text to smooth it over.
The old me would have workshopped the apology until it was polished enough to admire, and the entire disaster of us had been built out of me always reaching for smooth over real.
So I let the terrible voicemail stand. It was honest, and it was mine.
It was the least performed thing I’d handed her in a decade.
Two days of silence. Then, at midnight, it rang.
“I liked the wall,” she said, no hello.
I stared at my dark ceiling, afraid to move, afraid a wrong breath would end the call. “I liked it too. But you deserve better than complicated.”
“What if complicated is what I want?”
“Then we’ll get complicated. I’ll be whatever you need me to be.”