15. Wilson #3
“Because he’s my husband. Because he screwed up for years and I’m still so fucking angry I can barely think straight, but he’s mine.
” My voice cracks a little and I let it.
“He’s been mine since we had nothing, since before any of this, and I’m not letting that woman be the last word on who he is. I’m just not.”
Isaac doesn’t say anything for a long moment.
“Okay.” His voice has gone soft in a way I’ve never heard from him. “Okay, Iz. I’ll text you the number.”
“Thank you.”
“And Izzy? For what it’s worth?” He clears his throat. “He knows he doesn’t deserve you. That’s the one thing he’s never once been confused about.”
I call the reporter before I can lose my nerve. She picks up on the third ring.
“This is Isadora Carter,” I say. “Wilson’s wife. I want to make a statement.”
“Mrs. Carter.” I hear a chair scrape, a pen clicking. “Go ahead.”
“Look, my husband made mistakes. A lot of them.” I press my free hand flat against the counter and watch my knuckles go white. “He worked too much. He missed stuff that mattered. I spent a lot of years feeling like I came second to his job, you know?”
I take a breath.
“But he never cheated on me. He never touched Sabrina Burnham. Not once. Everything she said was a lie because he wouldn’t give her what she wanted, and she couldn’t handle that.”
I hear her pen scratching on the other end of the line.
“You can quote me on all of that. I mean it.”
“Is there anything else?”
“Yeah. Tell them I’m still his wife.” I take a breath. “And tell them if anyone else wants to come for him, they can go through me first.”
I hang up before she can ask anything else.
Then I just stand there in Gran’s kitchen with my phone in my hand and my heart beating so hard I can feel it everywhere.
I just defended the man who broke my heart to the entire goddamn world. I don’t know if that makes me stupid or brave or just someone who still loves her husband even when she wants to strangle him.
I open a text to Wilson. My fingers hover over the keyboard for a long time before I finally type.
Me: I read everything. You gave them all of it just to clear my name. I don’t know what to say except thank you. And I’m still here.
I hit send and put the phone face-down on the counter.
I have no idea what happens now. I don’t know if we’re fixable or if too much has broken or if any of this even matters after everything we did to each other.
But I meant what I said. He’s mine. He’s always been mine. Even when I hated him. Even when I wanted to walk away and never look back.
Maybe that’s not nothing. Maybe that’s where we start.
I pick up the letter from the mailbox, the one I’ve read three times since breakfast, and I read it again.
I’m not leaving the island, and I’m not leaving you.
The walls I rebuilt on that bluff are still standing. But I can hear the tide against them now, patient, and I no longer entirely want them to hold.
***
Wilson
The call comes at sunset.
I’m on the inn’s porch with my coat on and my feet on the rail, watching the harbor go copper, when the phone lights up with Isaac’s name. I answer it, because I owe him that much.
“He pulled out.” Isaac doesn’t bother with hello, and his voice sounds like it’s about to crack. “Burnham. The whole thing. It’s done, Wilson.”
He takes a breath that sounds ragged through the phone.
“I’ve been holding this together for months while you were off chasing Izzy around an island. Months of me making promises I couldn’t keep and buying you time you didn’t even ask for, and now it’s gone because you decided to blow everything up instead of just waiting for the story to die down.”
“I know.” The water moves. A gull rides the wind without flapping.
“You KNOW?” His breath rasps down the line.
“Wilson, I’ve been up since four in the morning trying to put out fires and you’re just sitting there saying you know.
I need more than that. I need you to tell me why you torched everything we built so I can stop feeling like I wasted the last year of my life. ”
I watch the sun lower itself into the water, unhurried about it, the way it has done every evening of my life while I was in rooms with the blinds drawn.
“It’s just money, Isaac.”
Silence. A long one. Somewhere in it, faintly, I hear a man recalculating everything he knows about me.
“…Who is this,” Isaac says flatly, “and what have you done with Wilson Carter.”
“He retired.” The horizon takes the last of the sun. “You’ve got this, Isaac. You’ve been running things without me for months anyway. I’ll check in tomorrow.”
I hang up before he can answer, and I set the phone face-down on the rail.
The evening comes on cold off the water, and the inn’s porch boards creak under my boots, and out past the harbor, somewhere up a dirt road behind the scrub pines, my wife is in her grandmother’s kitchen with my letter, and the whole ruined empire between us just got smaller by its biggest piece.
I feel light.
I feel lighter than I’ve felt in years. It’s weird, losing everything I worked for and feeling like I can finally breathe.
But that’s the thing, isn’t it.
The company was never what weighed me down. It was all the stuff I stopped doing so I could keep running after it.