6. Liliana #2
“I wrote it when I was nineteen, I needed a subject to write about and I didn’t have anything real yet, so I wrote about not having it.
That’s what the song is, Lily. It was never a love song about her.
If you actually listen to the words, it’s about looking for what’s real.
It’s about the empty space before you. I made one dumb reference in one throwaway verse a lifetime ago and I never, in a million years, thought it would crawl back out and land on you like this. ”
The awful thing is that I can hear the truth in it, threaded through all that desperation, and a week ago it might have mattered.
But it’s too late for it to matter.
“No.” I shake my head, slow, and the tears keep falling and I keep letting them. “You don’t understand. You think if you can just explain it well enough, if you can make me see the real story, then it fixes this. But it doesn’t, Tristan. It can’t. Because this was never about the song.”
My voice frays down to almost nothing. “Whether you’re telling me the truth right now or not, it doesn’t change anything, and do you want to know why?”
He doesn’t answer. He just watches me, terrified.
“Because I am so tired.” The words come out cracked open.
“I am so tired of having to understand you. Of standing in the dark holding my own hand, waiting for you to finally have time to explain your reasons, so that maybe, if I’m patient enough, we can end up on the same page.
I have spent this entire marriage understanding you. And I am done.”
His eyes have gone glassy, brimming, a wetness gathering along his lower lashes that catches the light every time he blinks. He doesn’t let it fall. He just stands there and lets me watch it happen. This man who never cries, coming undone in front of me.
And my own vision has blurred to almost nothing, the room smearing into shapes and light, because the tears haven’t stopped since the arena and I’ve given up expecting them to. I blink and he swims back into focus for a second, ruined and pleading.
“You keep trying to explain it to me now.” I wipe my face with the back of my hand and force myself to look right at him.
“Now, when it’s already blown up, when I’ve already been humiliated by the entire world.
But you had weeks, Tristan. From the second that song leaked.
You could have come home, any night, and sat me down.
You could have prepared me. And maybe it would have been fine. ”
His face crumples.
“We already survived my knowing about Hallie.” I’m crying so hard now the words come out in pieces, but I get them out, because he needs to hear every one of them.
“I knew you two dated. You both looked me in the eye years ago and told me it was nothing, and I believed you, and it never once came between us. So it was never the truth that would have broken me. Getting ahead of it would have cost you one honest conversation. That’s all. One night.”
“Lily, I…”
“But you couldn’t even give me that, could you?”
I don’t let him take it. Not this time.
“If you’d really believed this could hurt me, then it wouldn’t have mattered what else was pulling at you. The album, the label, all of it. You would have dropped everything and made the time instead of tossing me a rushed reassurance on your way out the door and calling it handled.”
My voice breaks with every word.
“But you didn’t. You’re never fully around.
You couldn’t clear one evening, you couldn’t finish one conversation, you couldn’t get ahead of one thing before it exploded in my face.
And now I am a public laughingstock, on top of already feeling lonely and pathetic and invisible in my own home for months. ”
I gasp in a breath. “The song didn’t do that. You did.”
The room goes quiet except for the sound of me trying to breathe.
Tristan looks as if I’ve hollowed him out.
“Tell me what to do,” he whispers. “Whatever it is. Tell me and I’ll do it.”
And there it is. The proof that he still doesn’t understand, even now, even after everything I just said. He heard every word about how tired I am, how done I am, how I’ve spent this whole marriage understanding him, and his answer is to ask me to do it one more time.
But at this moment, honestly, there’s nothing left in the tank. I gave it all to a man who was always somewhere else.
“You’re not the man I married anymore,” I say quietly.
He goes white.
“And I’m done.” My voice is shaking but it doesn’t break, not on this.
“You cannot stand there and tell me I didn’t give this a chance.
Because I stayed. I stayed through all of it, and tonight I walked into that arena giving you one last shot to show me the person you used to be.
I gave this everything I had left. And I can’t do it anymore, Tristan. ”
“Lily, no…” He’s already moving toward me, panic breaking across his face. “No, please, don’t… Don’t say that…”
I step back, out of his reach.
“We’re over.”
For one second he just stops, as if the words don’t compute, as if his brain refuses to process them.
Then he comes apart.
“No… No, no, no, baby, please.” He crosses the room fast and his arms come around me from behind as I turn, wrapping me up, pulling my back against his chest, his face dropping into my neck.
“Please don’t. Please… I’ll fix it, I’ll fix all of it, I swear to God, just don’t say that, don’t leave. Please, please don’t leave me…”
“Tristan, let go.”
“I can’t.” His voice shatters against my shoulder, and he’s crying now, I can feel it, hot and wet against my skin, his whole body shaking around mine.
“I can’t let go, Lily, please… Don’t make me.
I’ll change. I mean it this time, I’ll walk away from all of it, the album, the tour, the whole thing, I’ll burn it to the ground tomorrow if you stay.
None of it matters, none of it ever mattered without you… ”
I pull at his arms but he only holds tighter.
“Let go. Let go of me,” I say three times before his grip finally starts to give.
And then he’s sliding down.
Tristan goes to his knees behind me, his arms sliding down to lock around my hips, his forehead pressed into the small of my back, and he holds on as if he’s a drowning man holding on to anything that floats.
“Please don’t go.” The words are muffled against me, broken almost past understanding. “Please, baby, I’m begging you, please don’t leave me. I’ll be better. I’ll be who you married, just like before. Just give me one more… One more chance, I can’t lose you, Lily. I don’t want to…”
I’m crying so hard I can barely see, and it takes everything I have, every last thing, to reach down and pry his arms off of me.
“I don’t think we can fix this anymore.”
Then I turn to face him, and he’s still on his knees on the hotel carpet, looking up at me with his face ruined. Wet and desperate, and God, it would be so easy. It would be so easy to fold but I have to choose myself from now on.
“I think it’s better if we just part ways.”
“Don’t say that.” He shakes his head, over and over. “Please don’t say that.”
I twist my wedding ring off my finger.
It doesn’t want to come, two years is a long time to wear a thing, but I work it over my knuckle and then it’s in my palm, small and cold, heavier than it has any right to be. He sees what I’m doing and the last of the fight drains out of his face.
“Lily, no. No, don’t, please, keep it. It’s yours…” He reaches for my hands, and I step back as I press the ring into his open palm instead, folding his fingers over it.
“I can’t lose myself over this too.” My voice is barely there. “I’ve already lost so much tonight. I’ve already broken my own heart standing in that arena watching you. I won’t lose the rest of me trying to save a marriage that only ever asked me to understand and wait and shrink.”
After that, I close his hand around the ring and slip away.
“Let me go, Tristan. Get the divorce started. Just let me go.”
“Lily. Liliana, please.” He’s still on his knees. He’s still reaching. “I love you. I love you, do you hear me? I love you…”
“I know.”
That’s the worst part. I do know.
I know he loves me, in his own broken, absent, backward way, and it isn’t enough. It was never going to be enough, and knowing it doesn’t change a single thing.
With that, I turn and I walk to the door.
Tristan’s voice follows me across the room, cracking on my name.
“Lily! Lily, please!” and every syllable of it hooks into me and pulls but I don’t stop.
I don’t turn around, because I know if I look back at him on his knees, on that floor, I will never make it out this door.
So I don’t look back.
I open the door and I step into the empty hallway, and I keep walking. Blind with tears, my chest heaving around a sob I won’t let out until the elevator doors close, because staying would have killed me, and at least this way I get to choose how I break.
Tomorrow I will call a lawyer, and I will start unmaking the best decision I ever made.
Tonight I just put one foot in front of the other, and let the doors slide shut on two years and the boy I once fell in love with, leaving everything I thought we were.