6. Juliette #2
I actually serve it - the chocolate torte I spent two hours perfecting, plated beautifully with raspberry coulis. I carry the plates to the table one by one and set them down in front of each frozen face.
Then I sit back down and eat mine.
The torte is perfect. Rich and dense, the bittersweet chocolate balanced by the tartness of the raspberries. My mother’s recipe.
“Don’t let it go to waste,” I say into the silence. “I made it from scratch. Like everything else at this table.”
The door closes behind them with a sound like a verdict.
Eleanor doesn’t say goodbye. She gathers Nicole and Edward with a look and sweeps out of my house without a word, her silence more damning than anything she could say.
Nicole murmurs something apologetic that I don’t catch.
Edward pauses in the doorway, looks at his son, and shakes his head once before following his wife into the night.
And now it’s just us.
Zachary stands in the foyer with his hands in his pockets, his face a mask I can’t read. I’m leaning against the wall by the dining room, arms crossed, waiting.
“That was cruel,” he says finally.
“Was it?”
“You humiliated me. In front of my entire family.”
“I read your words back to you. If they were humiliating, that’s not my fault.”
“It was years ago, Juliette.” He runs a hand through his hair, a gesture I used to find endearing and now just looks like deflection. “I was twenty-eight years old. I’d just gotten married. I was scared and overwhelmed and I vented to my mother. That’s all it was.”
“That’s all it was.”
“Yes.”
“You told your mother you didn’t love me.”
“I told my mother I was having doubts. Which is normal. Which is what people do when they make a major life decision.”
“Two months in, Zachary. Two months. We were still supposed to be in the honeymoon phase and you were writing emails about how you wished you’d married someone else.”
“I never said-”
“Nicole.” The name comes out hard. “The spark you had with Nicole. The ease. The understanding. You wrote that to your mother and then you came home and climbed into bed with me and I had no idea. I had no fucking idea.”
“Because it didn’t matter.” He takes a step toward me. “Because I worked through it. Because I chose you, Jules, every day for six years I chose you-”
“You chose to stay. That’s not the same thing.”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I want you to say you love me.” My voice cracks on the word. “I want you to say you’ve loved me every day of this marriage, not that you’ve chosen me like I’m a chore you decided to keep doing.”
“I do love you.”
“Totally?”
He hesitates.
It’s barely a beat. A fraction of a second. But I’m watching for it, and I see it, and it tells me everything.
“Jules-”
“That’s what I thought.”
“That’s not fair. You’re asking me to perform some kind of - I can’t just declare my feelings on command like-”
“Like you did when you wrote that email? That seemed pretty easy.”
“I was confused then!”
“And you’re not now?”
Another hesitation. Longer this time.
“I love you,” he says finally. “But I don’t know if that’s ever going to be enough for you. I don’t know if anything will ever be enough for you. You’re so-”
“Sensitive?”
“Demanding.” His jaw tightens. “You want more than I know how to give. You want some kind of all-consuming passion that doesn’t exist outside of movies, and when I can’t deliver it, you treat me like I’ve failed you.”
“You wrote an email saying you settled for me.”
“And I’ve spent six years trying to prove that wasn’t true!”
“Have you? Because from where I’m standing, you’ve spent six years letting your mother treat me like the help while you stood by and told me not to make a fuss.”
“That’s not-”
“‘Don’t be so sensitive, Jules.’ ‘Let it go, Jules.’ ‘She didn’t mean it like that, Jules.’” I push off from the wall, closing the distance between us. “Every time. Every single time she drew blood, you handed her the knife and told me to stop bleeding so loudly.”
“I was trying to keep the peace.”
“You were trying to keep her happy. At my expense. And tonight was the first time I ever put a price tag on it.”
We stand there, facing each other across three feet of foyer, and I wait for him to say something that will make this better. Something that will prove the email was a lie, that the last six years were real, that I didn’t waste my twenties loving someone who was never going to love me back.
“I can’t do this right now.” He turns toward the stairs. “I’m going to bed. We can talk in the morning when you’ve calmed down.”
“When I’ve calmed down?”
“When you’re being rational.”
“I’ve been rational for six years. I’ve been so rational I forgot what my own feelings looked like. And now that I’m finally having them, you want me to put them away so you can get some sleep?”
He stops at the bottom of the stairs. Doesn’t turn around.
“I’m sorry you found that email,” he says quietly. “I’m sorry it hurt you. But I can’t change the past, and I can’t make you believe something you’ve decided not to believe. So I don’t know what you want from me.”
“I want you to fight for us.”
“I’ve been fighting for six years.”
“No.” My voice is steady. Cold. “You’ve been avoiding conflict for six years. Those aren’t the same thing.”
He finally turns. His face is tired, older than I’ve ever seen it.
“Then maybe we should stop,” he says. “If this is what fighting looks like, maybe we should both just… stop.”
The words hang in the air between us.
“Is that what you want?” I ask.
He doesn’t answer.
He goes upstairs without another word, and I stand alone in the foyer of the house we’re supposed to share, surrounded by the wreckage of a dinner party and a marriage.
From upstairs, I hear him close the bedroom door.
Not slam. Close. Quietly. Carefully. The way he does everything.
The chocolate torte is still sitting on the dining room table, half-eaten. My mother’s recipe. The one she taught me when I was twelve, standing on a step stool in our tiny kitchen, promising me that someday I’d make it for someone who loved me.
I walk back to the table. I look at the torte, at the raspberry coulis pooling on the abandoned plates, at my grandmother’s china that I brought into this marriage because I thought it might make me worthy of it.
Then I pick up Eleanor’s plate and throw it against the wall.
The crash is enormously satisfying. So I do it again. And again. Nicole’s plate, Edward’s plate, the empty serving dishes, anything I can reach. The sound of shattering china fills the dining room, and somewhere upstairs a light turns on, but I don’t care.
I throw every piece of my grandmother’s china against the wall.
And when I’m done, when I’m standing in a room full of broken things, I sit down on the floor and I don’t cry.
I’m done crying over Zachary Dean.