15. Liliana
— ? —
Liliana
We drive until the city lets go of us.
The lights thin out, then vanish, and the highway narrows to a two-lane road before narrowing to a gravel track winding up into the dark shoulders of the mountains, and the whole time neither of us really talks. We don’t need to.
His hand finds mine over the console somewhere around the edge of the city and it stays there, warm and certain, his thumb moving slow across my knuckles, and I watch the pines go by in the headlights and feel the whole horrible glittering night peel away behind us mile by mile.
By the time we turn up the last steep drive, the sky has gone the soft gray of almost-dawn, and there it is at the top of the rise, dark against the paling sky. The Everett cabin.
I’d forgotten how much I loved this place.
“Nobody knows we’re here,” Tristan says quietly, cutting the engine.
The silence that rushes in is enormous, the deep total quiet of the mountains, nothing but wind in the pines and some far-off bird testing the morning.
“No press. No phones that work worth a damn. Nobody. Just us.” He turns to look at me in the gray light, uncertain, hopeful. “Is this okay? I didn’t really think it through, I just… I wanted to get you somewhere they couldn’t reach you. We can go back whenever you want.”
“No.” The word comes out fast, certain. I look at the cabin, at the dark trees, at the enormous quiet, and my whole chest unclenches. “No, this is… this is exactly what I wanted. I don’t want to go back. Not yet.”
The tension in his face eases.
“Okay,” he says softly. “Then we don’t.”
Inside, it smells of woodsmoke, cedar, and years of good memories, exactly like it always did.
I’m still in my ruined gala dress, wine-stained and wilted, so Tristan digs through an old dresser in the back room and comes out with an armful of his own clothes, ancient soft things he’s left up here over the years, and I change into a faded flannel and a pair of drawstring sweats that pool around my ankles and smell of him.
Of this place, of a simpler version of both of us. He pulls on an old henley worn nearly transparent at the collar and a pair of jeans with a hole in the knee, and he looks about nineteen, and my heart does a slow, stupid thing at the sight of him.
We don’t talk about any of it.
We don’t sit down and hash out the marriage, or the divorce, or the year that broke us, or the woman who threw wine at me twelve hours ago. We just… exist.
He makes coffee on the old stove and we drink it on the porch wrapped in blankets watching the sun climb over the ridge. I find a deck of cards and beat him at gin four times and accuse him of letting me win and he swears he isn’t and I know he is.
Tristan splits wood while I read on the porch and pretend not to watch him do it. We make a mess of a lunch neither of us can really cook and eat it anyway, laughing.
It’s easy. Too easy. It’s surprising how naturally we fold back into each other’s rhythm after everything, like a song your hands remember even when your mind’s forgotten the words.
For one whole day I let myself have it. I let myself pretend the world isn’t waiting at the bottom of the mountain. I let myself just be here, with him, in the quiet.
And by the time the fire’s lit and the windows have gone black with dark, I’ve stopped bracing for the moment it all falls apart.
The fire crackles low and gold, and we’re sprawled on the floor in front of it, blankets and cushions dragged down off the couch, his old guitar leaning against the stone hearth and I look at it. Without thinking, I just ask.
“Play me a song.”
He glances over at me, brows lifting. “Yeah?”
“I miss it.” It comes out more honest than I mean it to, softer, stripped of all my careful armor. “Your voice. I didn’t let myself miss it for a long time, but I did. I do. Play me a song. Please.”
Tristan doesn’t tease me for it. He just reaches over and lifts the guitar into his lap, and settles it against him, and tunes it for a second with his head bent, and then he starts to play.
And I know it from the first three notes.
It’s the song from the rain. The one from the street outside Danica’s, the one he started on our bed a lifetime ago, the one that got hijacked out of his hands at the concert.
Lilies in the Dark.
He plays it slow and unhurried, just for me. His voice fills the small warm room and I sit there in his old flannel with the firelight on my face and let it wash all the way through me.
Tristan is watching me while he sings.
I feel it, that steady dark gaze over the neck of the guitar, and I make myself hold it, and the song moves through its verses, and somewhere in the second one his voice cracks.
Just splinters, right in the middle of a line, the emotion breaking clean through the melody, and he keeps playing but his eyes have gone bright and fixed on mine and the air between us has gone taut and charged in a way I can’t breathe around.
The last chord rings out and fades into the crackle of the fire.
Neither of us moves.
“I’ll never stop loving you.” He says it quietly, the guitar still in his lap, his eyes never leaving my face. “I need you to know that. Whatever you decide, however this goes. That part isn’t going to change. I’ll never stop.”
Deep down, I believe him. That’s what wrecks me. I’ve never once doubted that he loves me, not even at the worst of it, not even the night I put my ring in his hand.
“You know that was never our problem.” My voice comes out thin.
“Tristan, I always knew you loved me. That was never the thing that broke us. You can love someone and still leave them alone in a house for a year. You can love someone and still make them feel like a footnote in their own marriage. Loving me was never the part you got wrong.”
He sets the guitar aside. And then he moves, shifting off the cushion and onto his knees on the rug in front of me, closing the space between us until I have to tip my head back to hold his eyes.
“You’re right,” he says. “It took me losing you to finally understand it. The problem was that I loved you and didn’t take care of you. I thought they were the same thing and they’re not. They’re not even close.”
His voice roughens, urgent, every word landing as if he’s been holding it for weeks.
“I loved you and I still let you eat dinner alone. I loved you and I missed the things that mattered and sent a text instead of showing up. I loved you so much and I made you feel completely alone, and those two things lived side by side in me for two years and I never once stopped to see how that was possible.”
My eyes are burning but I don’t look away.
“I see it now.”
He reaches out, slow, and takes one of my hands in both of his, and holds it as if it’s the only thing keeping him upright.
“And I am never going to make you feel that way again. I finally understand what I did and I’ll work for it.
Every day. I’ll do the work of actually being there, and I’ll keep doing it, and I don’t need the tours or the fame or any of it, I let all of that go and I’d let it go a hundred more times, because none of it was ever worth one single night of you feeling alone. ”
His thumb moves over my knuckles, and his voice drops, raw and low.
“I choose you. Over everything, Lily. There is no version of my life I want that doesn’t have you at the center of it. I just want you.”
The fire pops while the mountains are silent all around us. I sit there with my husband on his knees holding my hand and telling me the one thing I spent two years dying to hear, and I feel the knot I’ve been holding clenched tight in my chest for weeks finally start to come loose.
I kiss him first.
There’s no moment where I weigh it, no careful accounting of everything that could go wrong.
There’s just his face in the firelight and the last of my anger dissolving into an ache that hurts worse than anger ever did, and then I’m surging forward off the cushion and my hands are fisting in the worn collar of his henley.
My mouth is on his, hard, desperate, months of held breath breaking loose all at once.
He makes a low sound against my lips, startled, and for one second he goes still with surprise, and then his hands come up to frame my face and he kisses me back as if he’s a man who’s been starving.
It’s not gentle. Neither of us is gentle. It’s all the fury and the grief and the wanting I’ve been drowning in for weeks, poured into the crush of his mouth on mine, and I bite at his lower lip and he groans and pulls me closer and it still isn’t close enough.
Then he tears his mouth from mine, breathing hard, his forehead dropping against mine, his hands trembling where they hold my face.
“Lily…” It comes out wrecked. “Wait. Wait, we should… I don’t want you to do this and regret it. I don’t want to be another thing that happened to you, if you need to stop we stop, right now, I mean it, just tell me…”
“Just tonight.” I don’t let him finish. I fist my hands harder in his shirt and drag him back to me, my mouth an inch from his, my whole body one live wire. “Just tonight, Tristan. That’s all. Just give me tonight.”
His eyes search mine, dark and blown and desperate. “Just once,” he breathes.
And we both hear it for the lie it is, hanging there in the firelit dark between us.
At this point, neither of us cares.
Tristan’s mouth is back on mine and there’s no more talking.
He pulls me into his lap and I go, straddling his thighs on the rug, my knees sinking into the blankets on either side of him, and his hands slide down from my face to my waist and grip me there, hauling me flush against him, and I can feel every hard line of him through the thin worn fabric between us.
The fire throws heat across one side of me and he throws heat across the other and I am burning alive in the middle of it.