14. Cameron
— ? —
Cameron
We’ve been working late for two weeks straight, the software launch bearing down on us like a freight train, and tonight is no different.
Hannah’s at her desk, her ADHD in hyperfocus mode, jumping between code reviews and investor emails and a marketing presentation that’s been rewritten so many times I’ve lost count.
I’m in my corner with the laptop, handling the administrative tasks she hates, staying out of her way while making myself useful.
When she’s in the zone like this she forgets to eat, forgets to blink, forgets there’s a world outside the screen, and I’ve learned to slide water onto her desk at intervals like leaving offerings at a shrine.
She drinks it without noticing. I count that as conversation.
Yesterday she pushed the empty glass back across the desk without looking up, and I refilled it, and neither of us said anything, and it was the best hour of my month.
This is our rhythm now. I order lunch that appears at her elbow without comment.
I field the calls she doesn’t have time for, taking messages in a notebook I bought specifically for the purpose.
Her developers have stopped flinching when I answer the phone with “Hannah Jasper’s office” like I’m her secretary instead of her estranged husband.
Maybe I am her secretary now. I don’t care. I’d be her janitor if it meant I got to see her every day.
The storm has been building all evening, rain lashing the windows, thunder rolling across the city like a warning. When the lights flicker and die, plunging us into darkness, Hannah swears and slams her laptop shut.
“The backup generator should kick in,” she says. “Give it a minute.”
We wait. The minute passes. The darkness holds.
“Shit.” She fumbles blind across her desk in the dark, knocking things over. “The building manager gave me a flashlight when I moved in. Said the power’s unreliable in storms.”
“Here.” I pull out my own phone and turn on its light. “I’ve got three percent battery.”
“I’m dead.” She holds up her dark screen. “Been meaning to charge it all day.”
We find the flashlight wedged behind a filing cabinet, the beam weak but steady. Outside, the storm rages on, rain hammering the glass like it’s trying to break through.
“The break room,” I say. “There’s a couch. We can wait it out.”
The walk down the hall takes longer in the dark.
She leads with the flashlight, and I follow her voice more than the beam, one hand trailing the wall past the whiteboards and the boxes she still hasn’t unpacked.
At the corner her hand finds my sleeve, just for a second, steering me around a chair I would have walked into, and then it’s gone again like it was never there.
She hesitates, and the hesitation has weight, has history. A dark room. A couch. Me.
I can see her calculating: the risk of being alone with me in the dark versus the alternative of sitting at her desk for hours with no power and no way to work. Practicality wins.
Her silhouette wavers ahead of me against the glow of the emergency exit signs. The building feels different in the dark, unfamiliar, full of shadows and strange sounds. Water drips somewhere. The wind howls through gaps in the window frames. Our footsteps echo off walls we can barely see.
“Left here,” she says, and I follow her voice around a corner, past the kitchen, into the small room with the couch and the mini-fridge that’s already warming.
I sit at one end. She sits at the other, as far from me as the small space allows.
For a long time, neither of us speaks. The flashlight sits on the coffee table between us, casting its weak beam at the ceiling. Lightning flashes outside, illuminating her profile for a split second before plunging us back into darkness.
“Was any of it real?”
Her voice comes out of the darkness, quiet and raw.
“What?”
“Us. The marriage. Those first years when you came home for dinner and danced with me in the kitchen and looked at me like I was the only thing in the world that mattered.” I hear her shift on the couch, pulling her knees up to her chest. “Was that real? Or was I just convenient? The girl who didn’t mind waiting while you built your empire? ”
The question cuts me open.
“Hannah.” I turn toward her, even though I can barely see her in the darkness. “It was real. The realest thing in my life. I just lost sight of it.”
“When?”
“I don’t know exactly. It happened so slowly I didn’t notice.
The company kept demanding more of me, and my parents kept pushing, and there was always another meeting, another crisis, another reason to stay late.
” My voice breaks. “And you were so understanding, so patient, so willing to give me space to figure things out. I took advantage of that. I took advantage of everything you gave me, and I didn’t even realize I was doing it until you stopped giving. ”
“I waited years for you to come back to me.” Her voice is barely above a whisper. “Years of hoping tonight would be different, this week would be different, next month would be different. And it never was.”
“I know.”
“Then why did it feel like I was alone even when you were in the room? Why did I have to beg my own husband to look up from his phone and actually see me?”
“Because I’m an idiot.” The words come out harsh, angry at myself. “Because I thought you’d always be there, no matter how badly I treated you. Because I took the most precious thing in my life and acted like it would wait forever while I chased things that don’t matter.”
The silence stretches between us, filled only by the sound of rain and distant thunder.
Then I feel her shift on the couch. Moving closer. The warmth of her body reaching mine through the darkness.
“Do you remember what you said?” she whispers. “That first anniversary? In the kitchen?”
“Nothing on this earth outranks you.”
“You burned the pasta.”
“Set off the smoke alarm.”
“You were such an idiot.” But she’s laughing, soft and sad, and the sound of it makes my chest ache.
“Still am. But I’m trying to be better.”
Her head drops onto my shoulder. The weight of it is nothing, a few pounds of tired woman, and it lands on me like absolution.
Just rests there, like it used to in the early days, when we’d fall asleep on the couch watching movies neither of us finished, waking up tangled together with the credits rolling.
I hold perfectly still, afraid to breathe, afraid any movement will break whatever spell has allowed this moment to happen.
The flashlight flickers on the table. Neither of us moves to fix it.
Some things you don’t interrupt, even for light.
“Do you remember what we were watching the first time that happened?” she asks, her voice muffled against my shoulder.
“That documentary about penguins. You cried when the baby one got lost.”
“You pretended you weren’t crying too.”
“I had something in my eye.”
She laughs again, and this time it sounds less sad. “You’re a terrible liar.”
“I know.”
Her hand finds mine in the darkness. Our fingers intertwine, muscle memory from a thousand nights of holding hands across pillows, across dinner tables, across all the small distances that used to be nothing and became everything.
“Cam…”
“Yeah?”
“I miss who we used to be.”
“Me too.” I turn my head slightly, my lips brushing against her hair. She smells like citrus and coffee and something underneath that’s just her, that’s always been her, that I’ve been missing for years without letting myself admit it. “I miss you. Every day. Every hour.”
“We never finished a single movie,” she says into the dark. “Five years. Not one.”
“You always fell asleep.”
“You always let me.”
“It was my favorite part of the week.” The words come out before I can weigh them, and they’re true, and the truth of them sits in my chest like a bruise. “Your head right there. Whatever we were watching, I never cared how it ended.”
She lets the silence stretch. The storm fills it, counting it out for us.
“This is a bad idea,” she says.
“The worst.”
“We’re still getting divorced.”
“I know.”
“Cam…”
Thunder rolls somewhere over the city, close enough to feel in the floor. I count the silence after it the way you count the distance of a storm, and every number brings her closer.
I lean in. I can feel her breath against my lips, can feel her pulse racing where my thumb rests against her wrist. The darkness wraps around us like a cocoon, and for a moment it feels like we’re the only two people in the world, suspended outside of time, outside of all the hurt and anger and broken promises.
She pulls back before our lips touch.
“Stop.” Her voice shakes. “Stop making this hard.”
“I’m not trying to-”
“I know.” She stands up, putting distance between us. I hear her footsteps, then the rustle of her grabbing her bag from somewhere in the darkness. “But this doesn’t change anything. You hurt me. One almost-kiss in a blackout doesn’t fix the years I spent begging you to look up.”
“I know it doesn’t.”
“I need space. Real space. Can you give me that?”
Every cell in my body screams no. I want to pull her back, kiss her properly, make her feel how much I love her until she can’t doubt it anymore. I want to fix this with my hands and my mouth and my body because words have never come easy to me and actions always have.
But she asked. And for once in my life, I’m going to listen.
“Okay. Space.”
The word costs more than the car did. More than the flowers. More than anything I’ve bought her, because it’s the first thing I’ve actually given up.
She nods, a movement I feel more than see.
“Goodnight, Cameron.” My full name, careful and deliberate, the way she’s said it for weeks. But her voice catches in the middle of it, right where the nickname used to live.
She walks out into the storm.
The office is very quiet after the door closes. Her chair is still turned toward the couch. The flashlight beam has gone yellow and weak, dying on the coffee table, and I don’t move to save it. I sit in the dark of the company she built without me and listen to the rain hit the glass.
I sit there for a long time after she leaves. The storm keeps at the windows, rain and wind and thunder, and somewhere in that chaos my wife is driving home alone because I agreed to give her space.
I make my way to the window by memory, hands outstretched, bumping into the coffee table before I find the glass. The city is dark below, whole blocks without power, but I can just make out the red blur of taillights disappearing into the rain.
She said this doesn’t change anything. She said we’re still getting divorced.
But she also held my hand. She also rested her head on my shoulder. She also leaned in, just for a second, before pulling away.
I stand there in the dark long after she’s gone, and I answer the question she didn’t stay to hear.
“Then I’ll make it impossible to say no.”
***