9. Liliana #3
He’s sitting on the curb now, knees up, hoodie pulled tight, his breath ghosting white in the cold, and even from up here I can see he’s shivering, and he has been out there for nine hours, and he is still, impossibly, waiting.
My heart clenches so hard it hurts.
You stubborn idiot, I think, pressing my hand flat against the cold glass. You beautiful, stubborn idiot, what are you doing?
Because this is new.
In two years of marriage he never once waited up for me, and now he’ll sit on a freezing curb till dawn for the chance to look at my face. The irony of it is almost too much to hold.
Where was this man when I was the one waiting? Where was all this stubborn devotion when I was plating dinners for a ghost?
And I know why he’s here. I’ve known since Danica said his name.
The papers reached him, my quiet little bomb slid across a desk somewhere, and now he’s on my cousin’s curb at four in the morning because a marriage that ended in slow motion for months has suddenly, finally, become real to him on paper.
I stand there for a long time, my forehead against the glass, watching him shiver.
Then I get my cardigan.
The cold hits me the second I step out the gate, and I pull the cardigan tighter and wrap my arms around myself, and Tristan is on his feet before I’ve taken three steps, up off that curb so fast he stumbles, and then just standing there staring at me like I’m a mirage that might dissolve if he moves wrong.
God, he looks terrible.
That’s my first thought, uncharitable and immediate.
He looks wrecked. He’s in that gray hoodie he’s had since before he was famous, the soft worn one, and there are dark hollows carved under his eyes, and stubble he hasn’t dealt with, and he looks so much like the boy who climbed a trellis for a cat that my chest does a slow, traitorous ache.
Right now, he’s not the polished superstar. Not the man on the magazine covers.
Just Tristan, tired and rumpled and human, looking at me like I’m the only thing left in the world.
“Lily.” My name comes out of him rough, disbelieving, like he didn’t actually think this would work. “You came down. I… thank you, I didn’t think you’d…”
“You’re going to freeze to death on my cousin’s street,” I say. “And then it’ll be a whole headline and I’ll have to deal with that too.”
“I’m sorry.” The words tumble out of him.
“I’m sorry, I know I said I’d give you space, I meant it, I’ve been trying so hard to give it to you and then the papers came and I just…
I couldn’t, Lily. I couldn’t just sign it and let you disappear without at least standing in front of you once and telling you… ”
“Then just agree to it.” I keep my voice level, my arms wrapped tight around myself.
“That’s why you’re here, so let’s not draw it out.
Sign the papers, Tristan. I’ll keep the whole thing quiet, I promise you that.
No press, no statements, no feeding the machine.
Nobody has to know the details, we just, we quietly end it, and we both get to stop being the country’s favorite tragedy. ”
My throat tightens. “I don’t have another public spectacle in me. I just want it to be over, without an audience this time.”
“I don’t want it to be over.” He takes a step closer, and stops himself, hands coming up like he’s afraid to spook me. “Lily, please. I know how I sound. I know I have no right. But we can fix this. I know we can, if you’ll just…”
“It isn’t yours to fix.” The words come out quiet and final. “That’s the part you still don’t understand. It stopped being a thing you get to decide a long time ago.”
I look up at him, at those tired, pleading eyes, and I make myself say it.
“Go home, Tristan. It’s late. It’s freezing. Go home.”
A quiet devastation breaks across his face, but he doesn’t argue. That’s the part that undoes me, honestly, more than any argument could.
The old Tristan would have talked. Charmed. Reasoned. Filled the air with beautiful words until I forgot what I was mad about.
This one just nods, slow, and takes a step back, and lets me have the space I asked for, and it’s so unlike him that I almost don’t recognize it.
I turn to go.
“I’m going to show you.”
His voice stops me before I reach the gate.
Quiet. Steady. Not begging anymore.
“I know you don’t believe me. You have no reason to.
But I’m going to show you that I can change, Lily.
I’m going to become the man you deserve, the one you fell in love with, the one I should have been this whole time.
I’m not going to tell you. I’m done telling you things.
” A breath. “I’m going to prove it. However long it takes. ”
My heart slams against my ribs, hard and fast and traitorous, and for one dangerous second I want to turn around so badly it’s a physical pull.
But I don’t.
I keep my eyes on the gate and my arms wrapped around myself and I make myself walk, one foot in front of the other, back toward the door and the warmth and the small safe life I’m building without him.
Be strong, I tell myself, with every step. You have to be strong. You cannot survive learning to trust him again just to watch him leave you a hundred more times.
Then I close the door behind me.
And I don’t look back.