4. Wilson #2
“We had nothing back then and I had everything I needed. Now we have everything and I’ve never felt more alone.”
“Then teach me.” I’m still on my knees and I don’t care how pathetic I look. “Stay and teach me. I know I got it wrong. I know I messed up. But I can be better, Izzy. I swear I can.”
“I tried!” Her hands fly up to her hair. “For seven years I tried. I planned trips for us that you canceled. I left notes in your suitcase that you never mentioned. I asked if we could see someone together and you always said after this next thing.”
She’s pacing again, unable to stand still.
“There was always someone more important than me. Always. The company came first. The clients came first. The deals came first. And I just kept sliding further and further down the list until I wasn’t even on it anymore.”
Her voice breaks.
“Do you know what that feels like? To be married to someone and still feel like you’re alone?”
“I thought I was doing it for us.” It sounds pathetic even to me. “I thought I was building a future for…”
“You were building it for you.” She grabs the divorce papers and clutches them to her chest. “And I was just the thing you’d get around to when you had time. Except you never had time. There was always a deal more urgent than your wife.”
She looks at me and she just looks so tired.
“I can’t do it anymore. I can’t keep being the afterthought. I can’t keep waiting for a day that’s never going to come.”
“Izzy.” Her name is all I have left. “I love you. You know I love you.”
“I know you do.” She wipes her eyes with the back of her hand. “But love isn’t enough when I never see you. When you’re never here. When I spend every night alone wondering if this is just what my life is going to be.”
She breathes in, and it shakes on the way down.
“I’m so tired, Wilson. I’m tired of missing you while I’m still married to you. I’m tired of being lonely in my own house. I’m tired of looking at everything we have and wishing we could go back to when we had nothing.”
She walks to the front door. Pulls it open. Holds it.
“I’ll have my lawyer send the papers to Robert. Please don’t come here again.”
I get up off my knees. My legs barely do it. I step out onto the stoop because there’s nothing left to do, and I turn, and she’s framed in her mother’s doorway with her arms full of the end of us.
“Then why weren’t you?” I don’t even know I’m going to say it until it’s out. “You asked me that. In there. I’ve been asking myself the same thing since I landed, Izzy, and I don’t have an answer, and it’s eating me alive…”
“Goodbye, Wilson.”
The door closes in my face.
I stand there staring at the black paint and the brass knocker and the little wreath of dried flowers someone hung for decoration.
My hand lifts toward the doorbell. Then drops.
I end up just pressing my forehead against the cool wood like an idiot, trying to remember how to make my legs work.
The folder is still inside. All my proof, scattered across her mother’s floor. I spent a whole flight putting together an argument like I could just present the evidence and fix everything, and she’d already made up her mind before I even rang the bell.
She believed me about Sabrina. I could see it in her face. She knows I didn’t cheat.
And she still wants out.
Because the video wasn’t the point.
I get that now.
The point was everything else.
All the times I wasn’t there, all the things I forgot, all the moments I chose the job over her. Years of that. And I somehow didn’t notice until she was handing me papers.
I press my palms flat against the door and just let go. Really let go, the way I haven’t since I was a kid. Ugly crying, the kind where your whole body shakes and you can’t catch your breath and you don’t even care anymore.
Somewhere inside, Izzy can probably hear me losing it on her mother’s doorstep.
I don’t try to stop.
She asked me to choose her. That’s it. That’s all she ever wanted. And every time, every single time, I picked the other thing. Some meeting that could have waited. Some deal that wasn’t going anywhere. Some flight to some city that wasn’t the city where she was.
I kept telling myself it was temporary. Just until things settled down. Just until this next thing was done.
The work I did was for us. For the life I wanted to give her.
But she already told me what kind of life she wanted. Years ago, sitting on the floor of my crappy little office, eating sandwiches on a carpet that had seen better days.
She wanted me to drop everything sometimes. She wanted me to just show up.
That was it. That was the whole list.
And I couldn’t even manage that.
When did I stop being the man on that carpet?
There’s no single day I can point to. That’s the worst part. A thousand small choices, and I made every one of them without noticing.
I push off the door and wipe my face with the back of my hand. I probably look terrible. Actually, I definitely look terrible.
A woman walks past with a little dog and does that thing where she pretends she doesn’t see me. Fair enough. I wouldn’t want to make eye contact with some guy crying on a stoop either.
I put the rings back in my pocket.
There’s a cut on my palm from the diamond, this thin red line from holding them too tight.
I press my thumb into it and weirdly, the sting helps.
At least that pain makes sense.
She was right about everything. I don’t know how to stop. I don’t know how to put anything above work.
But I’m going to learn.
However long it takes. Whatever I have to tear down to do it.
My phone buzzes against my chest and I grab for it so fast I nearly drop it, because it might be her, please, God, let it be her, SAbrINA BURNHAM.
I stare at the name until the screen gives up and goes dark. Then I look at the closed black door, and back down at the phone, and a laugh comes out of me with no joy anywhere in it.
The wrong woman is calling me.
The right one just locked me out.