2. Liliana #2
“I know he is. I actually like him, remember? I’m the only one in our family who does.
” She leans in. “That’s exactly why I can say this.
Tristan being a good man and Tristan doing right by you are two different things, and lately he’s only managing the first one.
Good isn’t the same as present. You can love a man to death and still be starving next to him. ”
I stare at my water glass. She’s not wrong, and that’s the worst part.
“You do this every time,” she goes on, gentler now.
“You wait. You wait through the cold stretches for one of his fits of sweetness, one good morning, one grand romantic night, and it fills you up just enough to keep waiting through the next drought. But that’s not a marriage, Lil.
And it’s going to run you dry. I can already see it running you dry. ”
“So what am I supposed to do? Give him an ultimatum? I don’t want to be needy. I want us to work.”
“I’m just saying you shouldn’t have to shrink yourself down to fit in the gaps of his schedule.
” She holds my gaze. “You are the only one adjusting here. Every single time. And he doesn’t even have to notice because you’ve made it so convenient for him not to.
If he’s really the good man you keep defending, then he’d notice. ”
“He says he will. He promised, okay? That this one is almost over.”
“Sweet words are easy, Lily. He’s a songwriter, words are literally his job.
” She reaches across the table and takes my hand, her grip warm and solid.
“Hopefully he really keeps one of those promises he keeps making. Be consistent for longer than a single perfect day. That’s the bare minimum, you know? Maybe talk it out.”
The waitress sets our plates down and I busy myself pushing lettuce from one side to the other, building it into little piles I have no intention of eating.
Part of me wants to argue. Part of me keeps circling the same worry, that Tristan is already stretched so thin he might snap, that dropping this on him mid-launch would be one more weight on a man who’s carrying too many. The last thing I want is to be another problem on his list.
But burying it hasn’t worked either. That’s the thing I keep skating past. Every time he comes home glowing and apologetic, every time he pulls me in and says all the right things, I let it dissolve the hurt and I never actually say what’s wrong.
Then the sweetness fades, the distance comes back, and we’re right here again, because nothing ever got fixed. It just got postponed.
“You’re right,” I admit, quieter than I mean to.
“I can’t keep letting him charm his way out of it and pretending that counts as solving it.
If I never say anything, nothing changes.
It just keeps happening.” I set my fork down.
“We have to actually talk. Like adults. Not just kiss and forget and wait for the next time it falls apart.”
I sigh, and the weight of finally saying it out loud sits heavy on me.
Danica watches me for a long moment, a thing unreadable moving behind her eyes, as if she wants to say more and is deciding against it. Then she squeezes my hand once and lets go.
“Good,” she says, too brightly, reaching for her burger. “Now. Enough about your gorgeous, exhausting husband. I have gossip about Aunt Aurelia’s garden committee that is going to make your entire week.”
A chuckle slips out of me, and my chest loosens by a fraction. Leave it to Danica to know exactly when to stop pushing.
“Please,” I say. “I’ve been dying for a distraction.”
She launches into scandalized whispers about stolen prize roses and a hydrangea feud, and I let her carry me off somewhere lighter for a while, the resolve to talk to him tucked quietly in my chest for later.
I just hope he’ll be home long enough to listen.
***
The afternoon empties out the way they tend to now.
I come home to a penthouse that echoes.
There was a time I filled these hours, the little pottery studio I set up in the spare room, the wheel Tristan bought me two birthdays ago, back when I still turned out lopsided bowls and laughed about it.
I haven’t touched the clay in months. Somewhere along the way I stopped making things and started waiting instead, and I’m self-aware enough to hate that about myself.
So I do what I’ve gotten good at. I keep busy. I water the plants, answer two emails for the youth foundation board I sit on, and tell myself that today is going to be different.
Then, in the early afternoon, he calls me, and I nearly drop my phone scrambling to answer it.
His face fills the screen, propped up somewhere in the studio, headphones around his neck, that guilty-boyish look already in place because he knows exactly how long it’s been. Behind him I can see the soundboard, a couple of guys moving around in the background.
“Hey, you.” His voice goes soft the second he sees me, softer than it’s been in days. “God, I miss your face. This is the first break I’ve had since six this morning.”
“You look exhausted.”
“Well, I’m running on coffee and spite.” He rubs a hand down his face and smiles at me anyway, and there he is, my Tristan, the one underneath all the noise. “How are you? Tell me something good. Tell me about your day.”
“I had lunch with Danica.” I curl into the couch, holding the phone close. “Come home for dinner tonight.”
“Yeah?” His expression shifts, and that slow grin starts to spread. “Is my wife asking me out on a date?”
“If it actually gets you home and in a chair across from me, then yes.” I don’t mean to say it so plainly. It just falls out of me as I pick at a loose thread on the couch cushion, not quite looking at the screen. “Consider it whatever you have to consider it.”
The grin fades and his face turns guilty.
“Lily. I know I’ve been…” He rakes a hand back through his hair. “I’m sorry. I know how bad it’s been lately. I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t say sorry.” I make myself look at him and barely whisper it out. “Just be here.”
Tristan nods slowly, and whatever he sees in my face lands somewhere real.
“Okay. Tonight. I’m there.” He leans closer to the camera, filling the screen, and for a moment it’s as if there’s no distance at all. “I’ll wrap up by seven and come straight home, I promise.”
“You mean it?” It comes out before I can stop it, my whole face lifting, hope written all over me in a way I’d be embarrassed by if it were anyone but him.
His expression softens as he watches it happen.
“I mean it. Dinner. You and me.” A genuine smile. “It’s a date, baby. I’m already counting down.”
It’s the first time in days that my chest lifts.
Behind him, a voice cuts in, someone calling his name, and his head turns.
“Yeah, one sec.” He turns back to me, quick and warm. “I gotta go, they need me for a take. But tonight. I love you. Seven o’clock, I swear.”
The call ends before I can even say it back.
I sit there grinning like an idiot at the dark screen.
Then it hits me all at once, the good kind of panic, and I’m up off the couch and moving. I haven’t felt this awake in weeks.
The kitchen becomes a battlefield first.
I pull out every cookbook I own and settle on his favorite, beef tenderloin with roasted vegetables, the meal I made for him the night he proposed.
It takes hours and more focus than I’ve been able to summon in a long time, searing and basting and hovering over the oven, but when I’m done, the table is a spread from a magazine.
Candles waiting to be lit. Wine breathing. Lilies in the center, white ones, the kind he always says remind him of me, because I stopped at the florist on the way home from lunch just for this.
Then I go make myself into someone worth coming home to.
I run a bath as hot as I can stand it and sink in up to my chin, scrubbing away the hours of cooking, the oil and the heat and the faint smell of garlic clinging to my skin. I use the good soap, the jasmine one he always leans in and breathes against my neck when I wear it.
By the time I climb out, I smell of flowers instead of dinner, and I feel almost human again.
The dress he gave me still fits.
I stand in front of the full-length mirror and try to see myself the way Tristan used to. Beautiful, desirable, worth coming home to.
He picked this one out himself, surprised me with it on some ordinary afternoon for no reason at all, and told me he loved the way it looked on me so much he almost didn’t want to share me with anyone who might see it. I haven’t had a reason to wear it in longer than I want to admit.
Until tonight.
I do my makeup carefully, taking my time with the eyeliner, the lipstick, the subtle contour that makes my cheekbones look more defined than they are. I curl my hair and let it fall in soft waves down my back.
Everything tonight is chosen for him.
Because this isn’t only about a nice dinner.
Tonight is the night I finally say the thing I’ve been swallowing for a long time.
I’m going to tell him I’m lonely. I’m going to tell him I can’t keep living on scraps of him and calling it a marriage. This is going to be different.
The clock reads 6:45. He said seven. I made it with time to spare.
I light the candles, pour myself a glass of wine, and settle onto the couch to wait.
Seven o’clock comes.
I don’t panic. Traffic, I tell myself. A take that ran long.
He’s coming.
At 7:30, I text him, light and easy: Dinner’s ready when you are. No rush.
The three dots appear immediately. My heart leaps, embarrassingly, pathetically, a dog whose owner just walked through the door. I watch them pulse, willing them into words, willing those words to be On my way or Pulling up now or I can see the building, put the wine on ice.
The dots disappear.
I stare at my phone, waiting for them to come back but they don’t.
Five minutes pass, then ten, then twenty. The candles burn lower and the tenderloin goes cold. I refresh the thread obsessively, convinced I missed something, convinced my phone glitched and his reply is floating somewhere waiting to find me.
At 8:47, my phone finally buzzes.