Chapter 26 Abbie
ABBIE
"Well," Gray says from somewhere to my left, his voice dry. "That's dramatic."
"Please tell me you have candles somewhere in this house."
"I have candles everywhere in this house. Marguerite keeps them stocked like she's preparing for the apocalypse." I hear him set down the knife, then the shuffle of his feet on hardwood. "Don't move. The floor's wet near the sink."
"I'm pregnant, not incompetent."
"You're also standing three feet from a very sharp knife in complete darkness."
Twenty-two weeks. The baby’s been moving more, but Gray hasn’t felt a clear kick yet. We know from the scan we’re having a daughter.
A drawer opens. Closes. Opens again.
"Gray."
"I know where they are."
"You clearly don't."
"I clearly do, I just—" A thud, followed by a muffled curse. "The drawer's stuck."
I pull out my phone and turn on the flashlight, sweeping the beam across the kitchen until it lands on him. He's crouched in front of a bottom cabinet, hair falling into his eyes, looking deeply offended by the concept of emergency preparedness.
"The mighty Grayson Valentine," I say. "Defeated by a junk drawer."
"It's not a junk drawer. It's a utility drawer."
"It has rubber bands and dead batteries in it. That's junk."
He yanks the drawer free with more force than necessary and produces a box of long white tapers, holding them up triumphantly. "Candles."
"My hero."
He smiles, then lights four candles and sets them around the kitchen.
"Power might be out for a while," he says, checking his phone. "Whole canyon's down. Tree hit a transformer on Topanga Canyon Boulevard."
"So we're stuck here."
"We're stuck here." He leans against the counter across from me, arms crossed, candlelight dancing in those pale blue eyes. "With no television, no internet, and approximately six hours of cell phone battery between us."
"How did people survive before electricity?"
"They talked to each other, apparently. Read books. Died of tuberculosis."
"Sounds romantic."
"The tuberculosis?"
"The talking." I boost myself onto the counter, legs dangling, and he doesn't tell me to be careful. Progress. "We could play cards. Do you own cards?"
"Somewhere."
"That's a no."
"That's a 'Marguerite probably knows where they are, and Marguerite isn't here.'"
After the elevator on my first day at VTG, I watched Gray command a meeting and thought: There’s someone who never wonders whether he belongs. I was wrong, it turns out. I was spectacularly wrong.
"What are you thinking about?" Gray asks.
"The day we met."
His expression shifts. "Your first day at VTG."
"You were wearing a gray suit. Which I thought was very on-brand and slightly pretentious."
"It was Tom Ford. It was supposed to be pretentious."
"You shook my hand and said 'Welcome to the madhouse.' And I thought you were just being cute, but then I spent the next six months learning that you literally meant it was chaos."
"Creative chaos," he corrects. "There's a difference."
"Is there?"
"Creative chaos builds empires. Regular chaos just burns things down."
The candle nearest to me flickers. The baby shifts, a roll, a stretch, and I press my palm flat against the spot, willing her to do it again.
"I was intimidated by you at work," I admit. "At first."
"I know."
"You knew?"
"Abbie." He says my name like it contains entire sentences. "You went very still every time I walked into a room. You edited your emails to me four times before sending them. I could see it on your face when you hit send, like you were launching a missile."
"You never said anything."
"What was I supposed to say? 'Please stop being scared of me, I promise I'm not as intimidating as I look'? That would've made it worse."
"So what did you do?"
"I started leaving you notes." He says it simply, like it's nothing. "On your ideas. Little comments in the margins, things I liked. Figured if you could see me as a person with opinions instead of just a threat, you might relax."
I remember those notes. Scrawled handwriting, usually one word, smart or yes or occasionally push further. I'd kept them in a folder, accumulated evidence that I wasn't failing.
"I thought you left those for everyone."
"I didn't leave those for anyone. Just you."
The admission lands somewhere tender, somewhere I'm not prepared for it. I look down at my hands, at the bare finger where my ring should be, still should be, even after all these months without it.
"Gray."
"Yeah."
"Why didn't you ever tell me how ashamed the claustrophobia made you feel?"
The question drops between us like a stone into still water. He lets the storm fill the silence for a while, and when he speaks his voice is different. Rougher.
"Because I was embarrassed."
"Of what?"
"Of being weak." He pushes off the counter, moves to the window, stares out at the rain-lashed darkness.
"My father never had any weaknesses. At least none he showed.
He was this... this monolith of a man, utterly certain about everything, never afraid.
And I was supposed to be that. I thought I had to build something bigger and more impressive than anything he had done.
How could I do that if I couldn't even get in an elevator without wanting to throw up? "
"Gray—"
"I built things instead." He turns back to me, and his face in the candlelight is stripped bare, no masks left.
"That's what the work was, Abbie. All of it.
The deals, the expansion, the empire. I couldn't fix what was broken inside me, so I just...
built around it. Made something so big that no one would look closely enough to see the cracks. "
"But I wasn't supposed to be no one," I say quietly. "I was supposed to be your wife."
"I know." He crosses back to me, stops just close enough that I could touch him if I reached out.
"And every time I didn't tell you, every time I worked late instead of coming home, every time I chose the distraction over the honesty, I was telling you that you weren't enough.
That you didn't deserve the real me. And I know that's not what I meant, but it's what I did. "
My throat aches. "I thought you didn't trust me."
"I didn't trust myself. I was afraid that if you saw the scared version of me, the one who can't breathe in small spaces, who used to have panic attacks in his father's office, who still sometimes wakes up convinced he's trapped, you'd realize you married the wrong man."
"That's the stupidest thing I've ever heard."
He laughs, ragged. "Yeah, well. Fear isn't known for its logical consistency."
"I married you because you were the first person who ever made me feel like I could want things.
" I slide off the counter, stand in front of him, tilt my face up to meet his eyes.
"Big things. My mother spent my whole childhood telling me I was too much, too loud, too ambitious, too difficult to love.
And then you walked into my life and acted like all of that was exactly what you wanted. "
"It was exactly what I wanted. It still is."
"Then why did you stop acting like it? You never told me you loved me. Not once in the last three years before I left."
The question hangs there, sharp-edged, and Gray closes his eyes. When he opens them again, they're wet.
"Because I convinced myself that providing was the same as choosing.
That if I worked hard enough, built enough, gave you enough, money, security, the life you deserved, that would prove I loved you.
And I didn't have to actually show up. I didn't have to be present.
I could just... write checks and sign contracts and believe that was the same thing. "
"It wasn't."
"I know." His voice cracks. "I made you invisible, Abbie.
Not Europe, not Richard, not your mother.
Me. I did that. I saw you struggling for my attention, and instead of giving it to you, I just built more.
Worked more. Became more absent. And I told myself it was for you, but it wasn't. It was because being present meant being seen, and being seen meant showing you the parts of myself I was convinced would make you leave. "
The storm howls outside, but in here, in this candlelit kitchen, everything is terribly still.
"I thought you were going to leave first," I hear myself say.
"Every single day of our marriage, somewhere in the back of my mind, I was waiting for you to realize you could do better.
Find someone easier. Someone whose family didn't think she was a disappointment, who didn't need constant proof that she was worth staying for. "
"Abbie—"
"That's what my mother taught me." I'm crying now, can feel the tears tracking down my face.
"That love was temporary. That people left.
That the best you could hope for was to leave first, before they had the chance to hurt you.
And I brought that into our marriage, Gray.
I kept waiting for you to prove her right.
Even when I asked you for what I needed, I was afraid you would hear it as a reason to leave. "
"I should have stayed anyway."
"You should have. But I did tell you what was happening. I asked you to come home. To choose me."
He reaches for me then, slowly, giving me time to pull back. I don't. His hands cup my face, thumbs brushing away tears, and I can feel him trembling.
"I stopped listening," he says. "I hid behind work, and you were left waiting for the worst. I was so busy protecting myself that I forgot I was supposed to be protecting us."
"Six years," I whisper. "Six years of doing this."
"Seven, technically. Including the separation."
"You're counting the separation?"
"We were still married. Still are." His thumbs trace my cheekbones. "I never stopped being married to you, Abbie. I just stopped being good at it."
I laugh, wet and broken. "You stopped listening."
"I have something for you," I say finally.
"What?"
"Stay there."