9. Izzy #2
“Izzy.” His voice is a rasp. “I’m sorry. I know you asked me not to come here.”
“And yet.” My voice shakes and I can’t make it stop.
He stands slowly, one hand braced on the step rail. He turns the frame around and holds it out.
Our wedding photo.
The glass has been replaced. The crack is gone. But underneath, where the photo tore when the frame hit the marble, thin lines of glue hold the pieces together. He took our broken wedding photo apart and put it back together, piece by piece.
“I found it on the floor of your office, after you left.” He takes one step toward the gate. “Someone else picked it up first, but I got it back. I fixed it.”
“Wilson, I can’t…”
“I know a glued photo doesn’t fix anything real.” His voice cracks down the middle. “I know it doesn’t touch seven years. But I couldn’t stand the thought of us in a trash can somewhere.”
My feet won’t move off the sidewalk. The man I married is standing on my mother’s steps holding the mended pieces of our life in both hands.
“I thought you might want it back.” He holds the frame out further. “Even if you don’t want me.”
***
Wilson
She hasn’t taken the frame.
It hangs between us over the gate, my arms out straight, and the longer she stares at it the heavier it gets. My shoulders burn. I don’t lower it.
I’ve been on those steps since one o’clock.
The sun was high when I sat down and now the shadows run the whole length of the street and the air has gone sharp.
Helena looked out the front window once, saw me, and let the curtain fall without coming to the door.
I don’t blame her. I wouldn’t let me in either.
Izzy’s eyes stay on the photo under the new glass. Her arms are wrapped around her own body, and her face has been crying for hours somewhere I wasn’t.
She doesn’t take the frame.
“Why are you here, Wilson?” Her voice is low and rubbed thin.
“I watched our wedding video.” It spills before I can order it. “Last night. I found the DVD in a box in the closet. You asked me once to watch it with you, and I said yes, and a meeting happened, and you never asked again.”
Her chin dips. She remembers.
“I saw myself make you a promise.” My grip tightens on the frame. “In front of everyone, with a plastic cup in my hand.”
“You made me swear it.” Her voice shakes. “Later. In the kitchen. You held my face and made me swear.”
“I don’t remember making it.” The crack in my voice runs all the way down and I let it.
“That’s how far gone I am, Izzy. You said it to me on the phone from that island, and I still didn’t remember.
The most important vow I ever spoke, and I had to watch myself say it on a screen before it was real. ”
Her breath leaves her in one long shudder.
“And you kept it.” I keep my eyes on her, and I don’t cry, because she’s seen me do enough of that this month to last her a lifetime.
“You kept a promise I forgot I made. You left exactly the way I begged you to, and I stood in that kitchen with your note in my hand and didn’t even understand what I was reading. ”
“Why are you really here?” She wipes her cheek with the heel of her hand. “What do you want from me?”
“I want you to know I finally understand.” I lower the frame at last and hold it against my chest. “You didn’t leave because of Sabrina. You didn’t leave because of the video, or the tabloids, or anything the internet thinks it knows.”
“Then say it.” She grips the top of the gate from her side. “Tell me why I left. I want to hear it from your mouth.”
“You left because I broke that vow every day for years.” Each word costs me and I pay it. “I made you feel like you didn’t matter in your own home, and you stayed anyway, hoping I’d figure it out, until hoping started hurting worse than just being done.”
I make myself hold her eyes.
“I finally get it. I’m awake now.”
Her grip flattens white against the iron. She shakes her head, slow, then faster.
“It’s too late.”
“It’s not.”
“It IS.” It bursts out of her, loud enough that a light flicks on across the street. “You don’t get to show up with a glued-together frame and a revelation and undo seven years of feeling invisible!”
“I know I don’t get to.” I come through the gate because I can’t do this with bars between us. “I’m not asking you to forgive me. I’m asking you to let me try.”
“Try.” She backs up a step onto the walkway. “For how long, Wilson? A month? Two? Until the next emergency that only you can fix, and I’m back at a set table watching candles burn down?”
“I cleared everything.” My heart hammers, and it gets into my voice. “The deal. The board. All of it. Isaac is running the company, and I told them I don’t know when I’m coming back.”
She goes very still. Her eyes move over my face, hunting for the lie.
“You did what?”
“I sent it in writing so I couldn’t take it back.” The frame is heavy against my chest. “The deal can die. Let all of it fall down. None of it matters if you’re not there when I come home.”
“That’s insane.” Her hand comes up over her mouth. “Wilson, that’s your whole life.”
“No.” I step closer, close enough to see her breath fogging. “You’re my whole life. I just forgot, and I kept forgetting until I turned into everything I swore at that reception I’d never be. I deserve to lose you. I know that. I’m standing here anyway.”
She stares at me. Says nothing. Then she shakes her head, wipes her eyes with her sleeve, and moves past me toward the steps.
“My lawyer is waiting on my signature.” Her voice has gone flat with exhaustion. “We’re past the part where showing up fixes anything.”
I catch her wrist. Gently. Loose enough that one small pull would free her.
She doesn’t pull.
“Izzy.” I turn, and she lets herself be turned. “Tell me it’s too late. Tell me you don’t love me anymore.”
“Wilson, don’t…”
“Look me in the eyes and say it.” I’m close enough now to count the tears caught in her lashes. “Say the words, and I’ll sign the papers tonight. I’ll walk away and never bother you again.”
Her mouth opens.
Nothing comes out.
Her chin trembles. Her breath drags in and out in small broken pulls, fogging between us, and her wrist stays in my hand, and the silence stretches out until the silence is the answer.
She can’t say it. She can’t say it.
Her phone buzzes in her pocket.
She flinches. It buzzes again, then again, then keeps going, one long angry seam of vibration.
“Check it.” I loosen my hold, and my hand stays where it is anyway. “It might be your mother.”
She pulls the phone out one-handed. Looks down.
Her face empties out.
“Izzy?” I reach for her arm. “What is it? What’s wrong?”
She doesn’t answer. She turns the screen around, and her hand is shaking so badly I have to catch her fingers to steady it.
WILSON CARTER’S WIFE SEEN WITH MYSTERY MAN, IS SHE MOVING ON?
The photo underneath shows Izzy on this sidewalk, outside this brownstone, wrapped in a man’s arms. Her face is buried in his shoulder. His hand cradles the back of her head. The angle makes it look intimate. It makes it look answered.
The comments are already stacking under it, faster than the screen can hold them.
@gossipgirl_nyc: oh so THAT’S why she really left lmaooo get it girl ??
@carterwatch: wait this is from YESTERDAY?? outside her mom’s place?? she’s already got someone ??
@sideeyequeen: wilson out here doing damage control and she’s been booked and busy lmaooo
@blinditemqueen: plot twist she was the problem all along yall
Heat goes through my chest, fast and ugly, before any thinking gets a vote. Her arms around another man. Yesterday. On this sidewalk, while I sat home falling apart over a DVD.
Stop it. You know better than anyone how much a photo can lie.
I strangle it. I strangle it as fast as anything I’ve ever killed in a boardroom.
I’m not fast enough.
Izzy is watching my face when it happens. She watches the heat arrive, and she watches me fight it down, and her eyes close off like a shop grate coming down.
“Izzy, wait…”
“Don’t.” She takes her wrist back. She takes her phone back. She takes one step up toward the door, then another, moving carefully, the way you move when you’re carrying too much. “They’re never going to let me be the one who got hurt. Not even for one night.”
“I know it’s not what it looks like.” It arrives a beat too late and we both hear it. “Izzy, I know that, the photo means nothing, I…”
“You knew for a second.” She stops at the top step with her back to me. “I watched the second happen.”
The door opens under her hand. No slam. The latch clicks shut behind her, soft as anything, and a slam would have at least meant she had heat left over for me.
I stand on the walkway holding our mended wedding photo while a porch light two houses down turns off.
For one minute she couldn’t say she didn’t love me. One minute. Then the world took thirty seconds to remind her what loving me costs.
I don’t know who the man in the photo is.
That’s the truth I carry back down the steps.
Somewhere out there, the whole internet is deciding for both of us, the same way it decided about a Tokyo window, and the woman I love is on the other side of that door reading strangers call her a cheater because she let someone hold her while she cried.
While she cried. Over what, Wilson? Over who?
Over you. She was crying over you. That’s the only thing that photo actually proves.
I climb the steps one more time and set the frame against her door, angled so it can’t fall, our young laughing faces turned out toward the street.
One of us should get to keep it.
Then I walk to my car in the dark and I don’t look at my phone, because I already know what’s waiting there, and for once in my life the fire can burn without me.