4. Luisa
— ? —
Luisa
I was sitting at the island with the dress spread out in front of me like evidence at a crime scene.
Burgundy silk catching the under-cabinet lights.
Size two. Not mine. I’d been sitting there for an hour, waiting, running my fingers over the fabric and thinking about all the ways a marriage could die without anyone signing papers.
Wade’s footsteps stopped in the doorway.
“Lu?” His voice was careful. He’d seen the dress. “What are you doing up?”
“Funny thing.” I didn’t look at him. “I couldn’t sleep. So I went to the closet to smell your shirts like a pathetic housewife, and I found this.”
Silence.
I finally raised my eyes. He was still in his work clothes, wrinkled button-down, tie loosened, that exhausted look he’d been wearing for months. His gaze moved from the dress to my face and I watched him calculate, watched him run through possible explanations like he was solving for x.
“It’s for a charity event,” he said. “The Vandermeer Foundation gala. The family committed to-”
“You’re buying dresses for her now?”
“It’s not like that. Dad asked me to pick it up from the boutique because he was in meetings all day, and I just-”
“When will this end?”
The question came out sharper than I intended. Loud in the midnight quiet. Wade flinched like I’d thrown a glass at him.
“Lu-”
“No, I’m asking you a real question.” I stood up, and the stool scraped against the floor, and I didn’t care. “When does this end? When do I stop finding other women’s dresses in my closet? When do I stop eating dinner alone? When do I get my husband back?”
“You have me. I’m right here.”
“You’re not, though.” My voice cracked and I hated it. “You haven’t been here in a year. You’ve been at her apartment fixing her sink. You’ve been at her mother’s grave. You’ve been at charity events and family dinners and everywhere, everywhere except with me.”
“Her mother died, Luisa. She doesn’t have anyone else.”
“She has your entire family! She has Alton and the whole Buckley machine. She has friends and money and an army of people who would drop everything for her.” I pressed my palms flat on the counter because my hands were shaking.
“What she doesn’t have is my husband. That’s mine. That’s supposed to be mine.”
Wade dragged a hand down his face. He looked wrecked, dark circles under his eyes, and part of me wanted to cross the kitchen and hold him and part of me wanted to throw the dress in his face.
“You don’t understand,” he said quietly. “She’s fragile right now. She’s-”
“I’m fragile too!” The words exploded out of me.
“Do you get that? Do you have any idea what this past year has been like for me? I’ve been mourning this marriage while you’re still standing in it.
I’ve been watching you pour everything you have into another woman while I sit here wondering what I did wrong, what I could have done differently, why I’m not enough-”
“You’re enough. God, Lu, you’re more than enough.”
“Then act like it!” I was crying now. Great. Fantastic. “I can’t remember the last time I came before her. The last time you chose me. The last time you looked at me the way you used to, like I was the most important thing in your world-”
“You are.”
“I’m not. I’m clearly not, because every time that phone rings, you go. Every single time.”
He moved toward me. I held up my hand and he stopped.
“I’ve been swallowing this for a year,” I said. “Every canceled dinner. Every missed Saturday. Every time you came home smelling like her perfume and told me it was nothing. I’ve been swallowing it and swallowing it and I’m full, Wade. I can’t take any more.”
“It’ll be over soon.” His voice was desperate. “The estate stuff is almost settled. Once that’s done-”
“When?”
“What?”
“When will it be done? Give me a date.”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. That furrow between his brows deepened, and I watched him search for an answer he didn’t have.
“I don’t know exactly,” he finally said. “There are legal complications, and the foundation transition, and-”
“So you can’t tell me when this ends.”
“Not precisely, but-”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Lu, that’s not fair.”
“None of this is fair!” I grabbed the dress and held it up between us like a shield. “This is a size two. I’m a size six. You’ve been married to me for three years and you don’t even know what size I wear, but you know her size, you know what color looks good on her, you know-”
“My father asked me to pick up a dress. That’s all. I didn’t choose it.”
“You chose to do it. You chose her, again, over me.”
“I didn’t-” He stopped. Took a breath. When he spoke again, his voice was very controlled. “I’m trying to do the right thing. For everyone.”
“The right thing for everyone except your wife.”
“That’s not true.”
“Isn’t it?”
We stared at each other across the kitchen island. The clock ticked. The refrigerator hummed. I could hear my own heartbeat in my ears, too fast, too loud.
“Do you love me?”
The question fell into the silence like a stone into still water.
Wade’s face went blank. The checked-out kind of blank, like I’d asked the question in a language he didn’t speak. His mouth opened.
Nothing came out.
Three full seconds of silence.
I watched my husband stand in our kitchen and fail to answer the simplest question in the world.
“Oh, wow.” I heard my own voice from somewhere far away. Flat and sarcastic, gutted underneath. “Thank you. That’s really, that’s great, Wade. Thank you for that.”
“Yes.” It came out too loud, almost a shout. “I do. I do love you.”
But he’d hesitated. He’d stood there with his mouth open and nothing inside it, and we both knew what that meant.
“Luisa.” He was moving toward me now, crossing the kitchen in three long strides, and his hands were on my arms and his eyes were wild with panic.
“I love you. I’ve loved you since the cobblestones.
I’ve loved you every day of our marriage.
I just. I froze, I don’t know why I froze, but it doesn’t mean-”
“Stop.”
“Please. Please believe me.”
I looked up at him. His face was inches from mine. I could see the fear in his eyes, real and raw, and I wanted so badly to believe that fear was for us. That underneath all the distance and the silence and the other woman’s dress in our closet, my husband was still in there somewhere.
“Hold me,” I said.
He pulled me against his chest so hard I couldn’t breathe. His arms wrapped around me like he was trying to keep me from disappearing. His heart was pounding. I could feel it through his shirt, fast and uneven.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered into my hair. “I’m so sorry. I know I’ve been… I know things have been-”
I didn’t say anything. I just stood there in his arms and felt the shape of him, familiar and strange at the same time, and tried to make myself feel safe.
I couldn’t.
A distance had opened up in those three seconds of silence, and I didn’t know how to close it.
We stood there for a long time. The clock ticked past one, past one-thirty. Eventually he pulled back and looked down at me, his hands cupping my face, his thumbs wiping tears I hadn’t realized I was still crying.
“Tomorrow,” he said. “Our anniversary. Just us, Lu. I promise. I’ll clear my whole day. No phone, no work, no, no anything. Just us.”
I’d heard “just us” before.
I’d heard it three Saturdays in a row, and every time it had evaporated like morning fog the moment his phone buzzed with her name.
But he was looking at me with those eyes, the eyes from the boathouse, from the cobblestones, from every moment I’d fallen in love with him, and I was so tired of being angry. So tired of fighting, of feeling like I was losing a battle I hadn’t even known I was in.
“Okay,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“Tomorrow. Just us.”
He kissed my forehead. My cheeks. The corner of my mouth. Gentle, careful, like I was glass he was afraid of breaking.
“I love you,” he said again. “I know I hesitated. I know that was, I don’t know why I did that. But I love you. I need you to know that.”
“Okay.”
“Say it back?”
I looked at him for a long moment. My husband. The man I’d married, who couldn’t answer a simple question without three seconds of silence first.
“I love you,” I said, because it was true, even though it hurt to say it.
He held me again. Tighter this time. And I let him, because I was tired, and because I wanted to believe him, and because believing him was easier than admitting what those three seconds of silence really meant.
Just us.
I decided to believe it one more time.