23. Maren
— ? —
Maren
Letting someone believe a lie never feels the way you thought it would.
Rhodes has been weird all morning. Professional in a way that feels engineered to keep me out, speaking to me in complete sentences that contain zero warmth, treating me like a colleague he met last week instead of the woman he was married to for years.
He’s even stopped making eye contact when we’re discussing options, keeping his gaze fixed on the samples, the notes, the tablet screen, anywhere but my face.
It’s supposed to feel like the upper hand.
So why does it feel so terrible?
I watch him across the courtyard, conferring with Patricia about drainage concerns.
He’s nodding at whatever she’s saying, arms crossed, expression carefully neutral.
In the morning light, I can see the shadows under his eyes too, he said he couldn’t sleep, and I believe him.
His jaw is tight in that way it gets when he’s holding something back.
He’s jealous.
He thinks I have someone waiting for me at home, someone sharing my bed and my mornings and my ordinary days, and it’s eating him alive. I can see it in every too-careful movement, every too-polite response.
Let him wonder, I keep telling myself. Let him sit in it the way I sat alone in that house for years.
But the thought has lost its teeth. Watching him go quiet and careful doesn’t feel like winning anything.
It feels like hurting a man I promised, once, to stop hurting.
A man I’m nowhere near as over as I need him to think I am.
Whatever grim satisfaction I felt yesterday has curdled into something closer to shame.
I didn’t technically lie. Someone is waiting for me at home.
Someone small and stubborn who has Rhodes’s eyes and Rhodes’s dimples and absolutely no idea that his father exists.
I just let Rhodes assume I meant something else.
I let him fill in the blanks with a partner, a boyfriend, a mysterious figure who occupies the space he vacated.
It felt like armor in the moment. Now it just feels small, and beneath the person I’ve fought so hard to become.
“The fountain drainage is fine,” Patricia says, heading back toward the main building. “I’ll get those reports to you both by end of day.”
“Thanks,” Rhodes says, not looking at me.
We stand in the courtyard, six feet apart. The silence is thick.
“So,” I say. “The specs.”
“Right.” He pulls up something on his tablet. “The contractor needs to know the exact measurements for the basin retrofit. I had them pull the original blueprints, but the dimensions don’t match what we’re looking at now.”
“Someone modified it at some point.”
“Apparently. Which means we need to remeasure everything manually.”
“Fun.”
“Thrilling.”
It’s almost banter. Almost. But there’s no warmth in it, no spark. Just two people making words happen in each other’s direction.
“I’ll get the measuring tape,” I say.
“I’ll get the-”
“Rhodes.”
He stops.
“Can we just-” I exhale, frustrated. “Can we acknowledge the weirdness so it’s less weird?”
His jaw tightens. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“You’ve barely looked at me all morning.”
“I’m focused on work.”
“You’re focused on avoiding me while technically being in the same room.”
He doesn’t deny it. He stands there, tablet clutched in both hands, staring at the fountain like it personally offends him.
“I’m trying to be professional,” he says finally.
“You were professional yesterday and you still made eye contact.”
“Yesterday was different.”
“Why? Because you didn’t know about-” I stop myself. About who?
About no one. About a lie by omission that’s somehow gotten too big to correct.
“Because I hadn’t spent all night thinking about it,” he says quietly.
The honesty lands low and winds me.
“Rhodes-”
“You were right.” He looks at me now, finally, and the rawness in his expression makes my chest ache.
“You were right that I don’t get to be jealous.
I don’t get to feel replaced when I’m the one who made you feel that way for years.
So I’m trying, I’m really trying, to just do the job and not make this harder than it has to be. ”
“By acting like I’m a stranger?”
“By acting like a colleague.” His voice is carefully even. “That’s what you want, right? Professional boundaries?”
I want to scream at him. I want to tell him that I spent three years building a life without him, that I learned how to be alone and then how to be a mother, that Rowan is the best thing that ever happened to me and Rhodes has no idea he even exists.
I want to tell him that the someone waiting at home has his eyes.
Instead I say, “Get the measuring tape.”
We measure the fountain.
It takes two hours, because nothing about this renovation is simple.
The basin has been modified at least twice, the original dimensions obscured by decades of repair work and aesthetic updates.
We end up on our hands and knees at one point, both of us holding opposite ends of the tape while arguing about whether the corner measurement includes the decorative lip.
“It doesn’t,” Rhodes says.
“It has to. Look at the blueprint.”
“The blueprint is from 1894. I don’t think they were accounting for the lip someone added in the sixties.”
“Then why did Patricia say-”
“Patricia said to measure the basin. She didn’t say anything about including the later additions.”
“She implied it.”
“She didn’t.”
“She absolutely-” I stop, sitting back on my heels. “This is ridiculous.”
Rhodes is still holding his end of the tape, kneeling across from me in his expensive suit pants like he doesn’t care about the dirt. His hair is falling across his forehead in a way that makes me want to push it back.
I don’t.
“We’ll measure both,” he says. “The original basin and the modified version. Let Patricia decide which one she needs.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
We keep measuring.
At some point, our hands brush reaching for the same corner. Rhodes pulls back like he’s been burned.
“Sorry,” he mutters.
“It’s fine.”
“I didn’t mean to-”
“Rhodes.” I sit up, dropping my end of the tape. “Seriously. It’s fine.”
He’s not looking at me again. His jaw is doing that tight thing. I watch him swallow hard, and something in my chest twists.
“Imagining you with someone else makes me sick,” he says.
The words come out low, rough. Like he didn’t mean to say them at all.
I freeze.
“I know I don’t have the right.” He’s staring at the fountain, at his hands, at anything but me. “I know I threw away whatever claim I had to your happiness, that whoever you’re going home to, they get the life I was too stupid to appreciate.”
“Rhodes-”
“You don’t have to say anything. I’m not asking you to make me feel better about it.
” He exhales hard through his nose. “I just, I need you to know that when I’m being weird, it’s not because I’m angry at you.
It’s because I’m sitting here trying not to think about some guy getting your ordinary days, and I’m failing spectacularly, and I have no idea how to deal with it except to not look at you. ”
My heart is pounding.
“You have no right to be jealous,” I say. My voice sounds strange.
“I know.”
“You don’t get to feel replaced.”
“I know.”
“You left, let your mother and your work and Rachel take up so much space that there was nothing left for me. You-”
“I know, Maren.” He looks at me now, finally, and his eyes are wet. “I know. You think I don’t know? You think I haven’t spent three years cataloging every single way I failed you?”
I don’t have an answer for that.
“I know I have no right,” he says again. “But knowing I have no right doesn’t make me stop loving you.”
The confession fills the quiet.
Three years. Three years of silence, of separate lives, of me building something new while he, what? Pined? Regretted? I assumed he moved on. I assumed someone like Rhodes, with his money and his power and his ability to have anything he wanted, would find someone else to fill the space I left.
“You still love me,” I say. It comes out flat, disbelieving.
“I never stopped.”
“It’s been three years.”
“I’m aware.”
“You could have called, written - anything.”
“You made it clear you wanted space. I was trying to respect that.” He laughs, but there’s no humor in it. “Turns out I’m better at respecting boundaries after the fact than during the marriage.”
“That’s not funny.”
“I know.”
I’m shaking, I realize. Hands trembling, heart racing, the whole stupid physiological response to emotional overload. I spent years wishing he’d fight for me, and now he’s kneeling in the dirt of an old courtyard telling me he never stopped loving me, and I have no idea where to put it.
“I tried to move forward,” he says. “I sold the house, restructured the company, did therapy, for real this time, not just the kind where you show up and talk about surface-level stress.” He pauses. “Moving forward and moving on turned out to be different things.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I can be better without being over you.” He meets my eyes. “It means I can have a whole life and still feel like something’s missing every single day.”
I want to tell him the truth.
I want to say: The someone waiting at home is three and a half years old. He has your eyes. He asks me questions I don’t know how to answer. I never told you because I was scared and angry and I didn’t know how to be a mother and an ex-wife at the same time.
But the words won’t come.
“I’m not going to tell you who I was talking about on the phone,” I say instead. “It’s not your business.”
“I know.”
“I’m not going to make you feel better about this.”
“I’m not asking you to.”
“Then what are you asking for?”
He holds my gaze for a long moment. The sunlight catches the gray at his temples, the lines around his eyes that weren’t there three years ago.
“Nothing,” he says. “I’m not asking for anything. I’m just, telling you the truth. Because you deserve that much.”
He stands up, brushing dirt off his pants.
“I should go,” he says. “I’ll send Patricia both measurement sets. You can finish up here without me.”
“Rhodes-”