25. Josh
— ? —
Josh
I knew it was wrong, the way we were doing it. The secret meetings, her leaving before I woke, both of us calling it physical when we were drowning in each other and lying about the water level. But having pieces of her was better than having none, even when the pieces were slowly taking me apart.
My father showed up in LA unannounced on a Thursday, claiming he was in town for a boat auction. Complete fabrication. Arthur Gardner hates flying, hates Los Angeles, and didn’t need another boat. He needed another boat the way I needed another franchise.
He’d flown to Los Angeles, a city he holds in open contempt, on an airplane, which he trusts about as far as he trusts a used-car salesman, to stand in my backyard and watch me ruin steaks.
My father does not do subtle. The boat auction was the polite fiction that let both of us pretend he hadn’t crossed the entire country specifically to look me in the eye about something, and I let the fiction stand while I ruined a ribeye, because I wasn’t ready yet to hear whatever he’d come all this way to say.
We stood around my grill while I overcooked expensive steaks and checked my phone too many times in an hour, and he watched me do it with the patience he’d once used to teach me to sail, by letting me capsize.
“You’re letting her use you and calling it penance,” he said finally, taking the tongs out of my hand and salvaging what he could of a ribeye I’d left on too long. “Those aren’t the same thing, son.”
“Maybe penance is all I’ve got coming.”
“Horseshit.” He flipped the steak. “I told you two years ago to let her go with dignity, and you did. You did the work. I’m proud of that - I don’t say it enough, so I’m saying it.
But this thing you’re doing now? Being her secret?
Taking whatever’s left over after she’s done needing you for the night?
That’s not the work. That’s a man setting himself on fire to keep somebody else warm and calling the smoke love. ”
I didn’t have an answer for that, mostly because he was right, and my father is unbearable when he’s right, which is always.
“It is love.”
“I know it is. That’s exactly why it deserves daylight. Both of you deserve daylight.” He clapped a hand on my shoulder, heavy and warm. “Your mother wants grandchildren and I want to stop watching my son walk around like a kicked dog. Figure it out.”
Driving him to the airport the next morning, I finally made the call I’d been sitting on since Raven stood in my doorway.
That was the other thing the work had changed.
The old Josh would have called Sloane in a rage the same night, would have made it a scene, a performance of righteous fury I could feel good about starring in.
I’d sat on it for weeks instead, not to protect her, but because I wanted to be able to say what needed saying without a single raised voice, and I wasn’t there yet, and I’d finally learned the difference between being ready and just being loud.
By the time I called her, I was quiet, and the quiet did more than any shouting ever could have.
I asked Sloane to meet. She picked a crowded café, clearly banking on witnesses to keep it civil.
She didn’t need witnesses. I was quiet. Surgical.
I laid it all out: the theft, the after-party photo she’d captioned to draw blood, the Variety interview, the story she’d whispered all over town to make Raven’s whole comeback look bought, ten years of small poisonings she’d dripped into my ear that I’d swallowed because they flattered me.
She started to build a defense, and I dismantled it by refusing to play the part she’d cast me in.
“You didn’t steal me,” I said. “Nobody steals a husband who’s paying attention. I left the door wide open and you walked through it, and we both fed on her, in our different ways. I’m not here to be the victim with you. We don’t get to be victims, either of us. We were the ones who did it.”
“Then what do you want?”
“You already gave the necklace back, at her own door, before I could make you. That part’s done.
” I let a beat go by. “This is the part that matters. You’re using her name to climb back into the room.
Every interview, every party, every sisters photo you angle for on a carpet.
She’s the only door you’ve got left and you’re leaning your whole weight on it, and it will break her open again to keep you propped up.
So stop. Find your own way back in or don’t come back at all.
You don’t get to climb out on her a second time. ”
“You don’t get to tell me that.”
“I’m not telling you. I’m asking, once, like an adult. And then I’m going to spend the rest of my life making sure she never has to.”
I have no idea if any of it landed on her the way I meant it.
I wasn’t there to run her program for her.
But two years of rooms like the ones she was presumably sitting in now had taught me this much: an amends you make to feel better isn’t an amends, it’s a performance with a self-improvement label stuck on it.
The real one costs you. It means giving up the very thing the hurt was buying you, with no guarantee you get anything back for the loss.
I was asking my ex-wife’s sister to do the hardest version of the exact thing I was still, daily, trying to do myself.
Sloane, months into her own work, didn’t deflect. Much.
“You really think she’ll forgive me?”
“I think she’ll decide. That part was never yours or mine to control. That’s the part we both have to sit in.” I paid for two coffees neither of us had touched and left her sitting with it.
Walking out of that café, I felt none of the triumph I’d have felt two years earlier, delivering a speech that good to a person who deserved it that much.
I just felt tired, and clear, which I was learning were the two reliable side effects of doing a hard thing correctly.
The old me had needed his confrontations to feel like victories, needed to walk away having won something off the other person.
This one had walked in wanting only to set the truth in front of her and walk out having controlled nothing about how she took it.
Turns out that’s the harder version, and the only one that ever actually works.
That night I cooked Raven’s favorite dinner on the chance she’d come.
She never confirmed. She never confirms. That’s the arrangement: hope without a guarantee, a table set for a maybe.
The food went cold. I was scraping it into containers at two in the morning when the doorbell rang, and instead of reaching for me, she just started crying.
Really crying, years of it coming down all at once.
I’d never once seen her cry like that in ten years of marriage.
Raven cried at commercials and weddings and the specific betrayal of a well-made film, freely, without shame, the way she did everything else.
But this was different, this was the cracking-open of a foundation, and it frightened me precisely because I’d never earned access to it before, not even when we were married.
She’d kept the worst of her grief hidden from me for years, performed okay in our own bedroom the way I’d performed present.
And here she was, finally, coming apart on my couch, and being trusted with someone’s real crying is a thing you don’t get to demand.
You can only make yourself safe enough, for long enough, that it eventually arrives on its own.
“Hey.” I pulled her inside. “Hey. What happened?”
“I don’t know. Everything. Nothing. I saw you today.”
“When?”
“Driving. You were stopped at a red light on Fountain, singing along to something, full performance, hand gestures, the works. And I thought - I know that entire routine. I know every word he’s singing and every gesture he’s making before he makes it.
And it broke me. That I still know you that well and I’m not allowed to. ”
I held her on my couch while she cried out years of loss and fury and confusion, and I didn’t try to fix a single second of it. She fell asleep in my arms fully clothed, then woke with a jolt, panicked.
“I didn’t mean-”
“It’s okay.”
“This isn’t what we do.”
“Maybe it could be.”
She looked at me for a long moment in the dark. “I’m scared.”
“Of what?”
“That you’ll make me small again. That I’ll let you.”
“I’m scared too.”
“Of what?”
“That I’ll never be enough to make up for what I took from you.”
We stared at each other in my dark living room, two people holding the pieces of a marriage we’d both broken, neither of us sure how the reassembly went.
Then she kissed me. Soft, and sad, and real.
“We’re a mess,” she said.
“The worst.”
“How do people do this? Get over each other?”
“I don’t think we’re those people.”
She studied me, taking her time about it, and I made myself hold still under it, hands to myself, and let her look her fill.
“So what do we do?”
“I don’t know. But I know I love you. Still. Always. Even if you never forgive me, that doesn’t have a shutoff valve. I checked.”
She left, but for the first time, she kissed me goodbye. A real one, chosen this time, nothing stolen or desperate in it.
I stood in my doorway watching her taillights shrink down the street and thought about what my father said. Daylight. We deserved better than shadows and secrets and containers of cold pasta. Both of us did.
The only question left was whether we were brave enough to try it with the lights on.