11. Kenneth #2
“I know it doesn’t fix anything.” He takes a shaky breath. “I know a retraction and a billboard and cutting off my mother don’t undo what I did to you. But I wanted you to know that I see it now. All of it. How alone I left you. How much I let her poison everything. How badly I failed you.”
“Kenneth-”
“I’m not asking you to forgive me.” His eyes are wet, gleaming in the low light. “I’m not asking for another chance. I just-” His voice breaks. “I needed you to know. I chose wrong. And I’m never making that choice again.”
I pull the blanket tighter around myself. My hand drifts to my stomach without thinking.
“Why now?”
“What do you mean?”
“Why does it take losing someone to see what you had?” The question comes out sharper than I intended.
“Why couldn’t you see it when I was standing right in front of you, begging you to come home?
When I was making dinner every night and eating alone?
When I was waiting for phone calls that never came? ”
He doesn’t have an answer. I watch him search for one, watch him come up empty.
“I used to wait for you.” My voice is quiet now, the anger fading into something sadder.
“Every night. I’d set two places at the table and watch the food get cold.
And you’d call five minutes before or five minutes after, and you’d say you were stuck in meetings, and I’d tell myself it was fine.
Temporary. That things would get better. ”
“I’m sorry-”
“Things never got better.” I’m not crying.
I don’t have tears left. “They just got lonelier. And then your mother showed up with her keys and her criticism and her little comments about how I wasn’t good enough for this family, and you still weren’t there.
And I started to wonder if you even noticed I existed. ”
“I noticed.” Tears are streaming down his face now, and he makes no move to wipe them away.
“I noticed every time I came home to an empty bed because you’d taken another night shift.
I noticed every time you smiled at me like you were performing instead of feeling.
I noticed how quiet you’d gotten, how careful. ”
“Then why didn’t you do anything?”
“I didn’t know how to fix it.” The words are a confession, raw and terrible. “I knew something was wrong, but I didn’t know how to ask what. I didn’t know how to be what you needed. And the longer I waited, the worse it got, until I couldn’t-”
He stops. Covers his face with his hands.
“You could have asked,” I say softly. “You could have just asked me what was wrong.”
“I know.” His voice is muffled, broken. “God, I know.”
I look at this man I married.
The man who held me the night my grandmother died. The man who learned my mother’s soup recipe from memory because I mentioned missing it. The man who flew across the country once just to bring me my favorite flowers from a shop in California because I mentioned missing them.
That man is still in there somewhere. Underneath the fear and the paranoia and the damage his parents did.
But so is the man who believed his mother over his wife. The man who accused me of infidelity in front of everyone I love. The man who had my things packed before I could even defend myself.
“I’m glad you cut her off,” I say finally. “I’m glad the retraction ran. I’m glad you put up a billboard that half of Newport is probably photographing for Instagram right now.”
A ghost of something crosses his face. Almost a smile, but not quite.
“But?”
“But I’m not ready to forgive you.” The words taste like ash in my mouth. “I don’t know if I ever will be.”
He nods. Accepts it.
I turn away. “You can go now.”
I hear him move toward the door. Hear it open.
“Beatrice.”
I don’t turn around.
“Whatever you decide,” he says, “whatever happens - I meant what that billboard said. You fixed me once. You’re the only person who ever has.”
The door clicks shut behind him.
I stand there for a long moment, staring at the empty space where he was.
Celia emerges from the kitchen, frying pan clutched in one hand.
“Didn’t need it?”
“Not this time.”
I don’t move. My hand drifts to my stomach, to the small swell that’s becoming harder to hide.
“Celia?”
“Yeah?”
“Am I being too cruel?”
She sets the frying pan down on the side table. Crosses her arms. Studies me with the same expression she used to wear when I’d come to her with boy problems in high school - half sympathy, half steel.
“He let his mother call you a whore in front of the whole town,” she says slowly. “He chose her over you for two years. He let you beg and plead and cry, and he still didn’t come home. He accused you of cheating at a dinner table with your parents right there.”
She pauses.
“You’re not cruel, Bea. You’re surviving.”
I nod. Swallow the knot in my throat.
“Then why do I feel like this?”
Celia doesn’t answer. Just crosses the room and pulls me into a hug, blanket and all, holding me tight enough that I can pretend the pressure in my chest is just the embrace and not something breaking.
“Come on,” she murmurs into my hair. “Let’s get you back to bed.”
I let her lead me down the hall.
I lie down in the guest room that’s become my home.
I close my eyes.
I don’t sleep.