30. Maren #2
“I’m scared,” I admit. “Not of you specifically. Of what happens when we disagree. Of what happens when you want something I don’t want to give.”
“So we decide it together.” Rhodes’s voice softens. “We figure it out before we’re angry, not during. You stop being scared I’ll take him. I stop being scared you’ll vanish with him. Rowan gets two parents who actually talk.”
“What do you want? How much of him?”
“I want to be his father. Not a visitor.” He meets my eyes. “I want regular time. Weekends when I’m in Boston. Holidays. Eventually, when he’s older, when he’s ready, time in California.”
“And if I say no to California?”
“Then we figure out something else. But you don’t get to decide him all on your own anymore, Maren. Neither do I. That’s what doing this together actually means.”
I close my eyes. The reasonable part of me knows he’s right. The scared part of me is screaming that I’m about to lose everything.
“I need to know that when it’s scary, when he’s sick, when something’s wrong, I won’t be shut out just because you have more money and more power than me.”
“You won’t be. Not ever.”
“And when you can’t be here, I want to be the one he comes to. Not a nanny. Me.”
“Of course.”
“And I want-” My voice breaks. “I need you to promise you’ll never use everything you have to take him from me. Even if you’re angry. Even if we can’t stand each other someday.”
“Maren.” He crosses the room and stops just in front of me, close enough to touch, not touching. “I’m never going to use what I have against you. I swear it. On his life, I swear it.”
“Okay.”
“You mean that?”
“I mean it.” I exhale. “Then we do this together. From now on. Every decision, both of us.”
He nods slowly. Something in his shoulders loosens, like he’s been bracing for a different answer.
“Thank you.”
We stand there, a foot apart, the weight of everything we’ve said pressing down on the space between us. Then Rhodes asks the question I’ve been dreading.
“Was last night a mistake?”
I should say yes. It would be easier, cleaner, safer. We could draw a line and pretend it didn’t happen and focus on co-parenting like civilized adults.
But I’m so tired of easy. I’m so tired of safe.
“No,” I tell him. “It wasn’t a mistake.”
His breath catches. “What was it, then?”
“I don’t know yet.” The honesty hurts coming out. “Something I wanted, something I still want, something I’m terrified is going to destroy us all over again.”
“Me too.” He reaches out, finally, and his fingers brush my jaw. Featherlight. “I’m terrified too.”
“So where does that leave us?”
The pause stretches so long I think he won’t answer, and when he does, his voice is barely above a whisper.
“Figuring it out together.”
I lean into his touch, just for a second. Just long enough to feel the warmth of his palm against my skin.
He doesn’t pull away. But something shifts in him, a tension I feel through his hand before I understand it.
“There’s something I have to tell you,” he says. “And I have to tell you now, because we agreed we’d decide things together, and sitting on this would be the old me.”
I step back. The warmth of the moment curdles. “Tell me what.”
“Rachel.”
The name is a slap. I haven’t heard it in three years and it still knows exactly where to land. “What about her.”
“She filed a lawsuit against me yesterday. Wrongful termination.” He says it steadily, watching my face. “It has no legs, and that’s not why I’m telling you. Her lawyer spent yesterday afternoon shopping her story to tabloids. An inside account of our marriage.”
The floor tilts.
“She wants a payoff to disappear,” he continues. “And if she doesn’t get it, she sells the whole thing. The affair that never happened, the gala, the divorce. All of it. Especially you.”
And there it is. The thing I clawed three years and three thousand miles to escape, reaching back into my own kitchen to find me.
“So it’s starting again.” My voice comes out strange, far away. “The headlines. The cameras outside the shop. Strangers deciding who I am.”
“I’m not going to let that happen.”
“You’re not going to let it.” I laugh, and it’s an ugly sound. “Rhodes, you don’t control the press. You never did. You just controlled which one of us it was aimed at.”
He flinches. Good.
Then the worse thought arrives, the one that steals every scrap of air out of the room.
“Rowan.” I can barely get it out. “If they start digging into you, into where you’ve been for two weeks, they find him. They find out he exists. He’s a headline before he can read.”
“Maren-”
“This is the exact thing I was scared of.” I’m backing away from him now, arms wrapped around myself, my voice climbing toward the register that wakes my son and I can’t stop it.
“Your world. It doesn’t stay in California.
It reaches out and takes whatever it wants, and I let you back in, and now it’s going to swallow him. ”
“Our son.” His voice goes to quiet steel. “And I’d burn the company to the ground before I let anyone touch him. You have to know that about me by now.”
“I don’t know that! That’s what terrifies me. Every single time I let myself feel safe with you, something like this walks through the door.”
Down the hall, right on cue, Rowan wails. A nightmare. They come more often since his whole world rearranged itself, and the timing of it, the way I keep getting torn in half by the two people who need me most, breaks something loose in my chest.
“I have to go to him.” I’m already moving. “You should go.”
“Maren. Please. Let me help with this. That’s what I’m here for-”
“I can’t look at you right now.” It’s the truth and it’s cruel and I say it anyway. “Please. Go.”
He goes. I hear the front door close, careful and soft, the way he does everything now, and somehow the gentleness of it is worse than a slam.
Then I go down the hall and gather up my crying son and hold him until he stops. I keep shaking for a long time after he doesn’t.
I don’t hear from him for the rest of the day. Or the next morning. At noon, my phone buzzes with a text that makes my stomach drop.
I have to fly back to California tomorrow. The Boston project is finished.
The words blur while I stare at them. Then I type back the only thing I can think of:
How long?
His response takes eleven minutes.
I don’t know yet.