28. What It Cost
Chapter twenty-eight
What It Cost
He had suggested the diner because he was not entirely sure what Julie Anderson was going to do when he told her the truth, and he was not ashamed of that calculation.
He knew her well enough by now to know that she was not a woman who made scenes.
She was composed and professional and had spent twenty years being the steadiest person in whatever room she was in.
But he also knew, from the preparation room and from Halloween and from the booth outside the Grange Hall on the night of the wedding, that underneath all of that composure was a woman who felt things completely and without reservation when she finally let herself, and he had decided that if he was going to tell her everything, he wanted walls around it.
He wanted the particular containment of a public place, the noise of Pine Hollow around them, the practical necessity of behaving like two people having dinner rather than two people having the conversation they had been circling for eighteen years.
He called on Wednesday and said Rachel's and she said all right and he heard in her voice that she understood something was coming, and he was glad she understood because it meant he did not have to find a way to warn her.
He did not sleep well either, though he did not know that about her until later.
He arrived at exactly seven and found her in the back booth the way he always found her, without having to look.
She was already there with her coffee and her hands wrapped around the cup and her face doing the composed thing it did.
He sat down across from her and took off his jacket and looked at her and thought that he had been working up to this moment since August and possibly since long before that and there was no version of the next hour that was going to be comfortable. The only thing to do was begin.
He had thought about how to say it on the walk over.
He had rehearsed it in the apartment above the Herald that morning with his coffee going cold at the table by the window, and the rehearsed version had sounded reasonable and ordered and had made a certain logical sense.
He sat down across from Julie and looked at her face and understood immediately that the rehearsed version was not what was going to come out of his mouth.
What came out instead was the truth, which was messier and less ordered and cost considerably more.
He told her about being afraid.
He watched her face while he said it and he did not look away because she deserved to have him look at her while he said it, even when what he was saying was not easy to look at.
She was listening with the full focused attention she brought to everything, her hands around the cup and her eyes on him and her face doing what her face did when she was receiving something difficult, composed on the surface and something else entirely underneath.
He kept talking because stopping was not an option and the truth was the only thing he had to offer her that was worth anything.
He told her that he had been seventeen years old and so completely certain of her that the certainty itself had terrified him.
That he could see from where he was standing the whole shape of the life ahead of them and it was a good life, it was a life he wanted, and the wanting of it had scared him more than anything else in his seventeen years because wanting something that completely meant it could be taken away and he had not known how to live with that exposure.
He had not known how to say I love you and I am terrified by how much in the same breath and he had done the only thing that felt manageable at nineteen, which was to leave and tell himself he would figure out the rest later.
He told her that later had turned into eighteen years.
He told her about the silence. This was the part that cost the most, the part he had been carrying the longest and the part he understood now, sitting across from her in Rachel's diner with the November dark outside, was the true wound.
Not the leaving. The silence after. Eighteen years of not reaching out, not a letter, not a phone call, not a single word to say "I am sorry" or "I was wrong" or "you were the most important person in my life and I handled that badly.
" He had told himself he was protecting her.
He said that out loud and heard how hollow it sounded and kept going anyway because she deserved the hollow version too, the version where he admitted that what he had called protecting her was actually protecting himself, that there was a difference between those two things and he had spent eighteen years collapsing that difference because it was easier than looking at it clearly.
She was very still across the table.
He watched her receive it, the full weight of it, and he did not try to soften it or qualify it or give her an easier version because Jake Peterson had told him that the careful version was its own kind of avoidance and he was done being careful at the expense of being honest.
Then she said she had not loved Mark.
He had not expected that. He had braced himself for anger and he had braced himself for silence and he had braced himself for the particular composed withdrawal she did when something cost her more than she was willing to show, but he had not braced himself for that, and it hit him like something physical.
He sat very still and let the words she spoke into his heart not just into his ears.
She told him Mark had been a good man, patient and kind and steady, and that she had grown to appreciate him and care for him and that she supposed that was a form of love and she was not going to call it less than it was.
And then she said it was not what she had at seventeen and eighteen and nineteen and it was not what she would have had if he had stayed or come back or picked up a phone, and that she thought sometimes that Mark deserved better than what she had been able to give him.
He said her name.
She shook her head and told him she was not finished, and he closed his mouth because she was right and because he owed her this, owed her the space to say all of it without interruption. He sat with his hands on the table and listened.
She told him Mark might have actually died of a broken heart that just had the name "cancer" attached to it.
She said it plainly, without drama, the way she said things that cost her, and he felt the full weight of that settle into him and did not look away from it because looking away would have been exactly the wrong thing to do.
She told him she had been scared too. That he was not the only one who had been terrified at seventeen by the size of what they had, and that she would have been scared alongside him if he had let her, that she would have sat in the terror of it with him and they would have figured it out together or they wouldn't have but they would have done it together, and that was what he had taken from her, not just himself but the chance to be scared with someone instead of alone.
He sat with that.
He sat with all of it, the Mark part of it and the silence of it and the chance to be scared together that he had taken from her without understanding what he was taking. He did not try to defend himself or explain himself further because there was nothing left to explain and she was not finished.
She told him she was not angry about the past.
And then she told him she was angry about right now.
He looked at her across the booth and felt the particular truth of what she was saying arrive in him before she finished saying it, because he had known this was coming, had known it was the real question underneath everything, the one that Jake's words at the bakery had been pointing him toward without saying it directly.
She said she had let him back in. She listed the specific ways she had let him back in, the office and the coffee and the walk hand in hand in the snow and the Halloween kitchen, and she said she had let herself believe this time was different, and then she asked the question he had been asking himself since he drove into Pine Hollow in August.
"How do I know it won't happen again?"
The diner went on around them. He could hear Eli Carter somewhere near the front of the restaurant, that particular seven year old energy that did not know how to be quiet, and Rachel's warm firm response, and the ceiling fans and the other conversations and all of it, Pine Hollow on a Thursday evening entirely unaware of what was happening in the back booth.
He looked at Julie Anderson across the table, this woman who had just told him the most honest things anyone had said to him in eighteen years, who had sat in this booth and given him the full weight of what his leaving had cost without flinching from a single word of it, and he thought about what he wanted to say.
Rachel appeared with their food and set it down with the quiet efficiency of someone who understood what was needed and disappeared without a word, and he was grateful for that.
Julie looked at her plate and did not pick up her fork.
She looked at him.
He looked back at her and thought about being seventeen.
And eighteen. And nineteen. He thought about all the years after and about driving into Pine Hollow in August and feeling something loosen in his chest that had been tight for so long he had forgotten what it felt like not to carry it.
He thought about the preparation room and the graveside and the snow on Main Street and the Halloween kitchen and the farm table and every morning he had woken up in the apartment above the Herald and known exactly where he was and what he felt, for the first time in eighteen years, that he was in the right place.
He thought about what he wanted to say to her.
He thought about what it needed to be.
Not the careful version. Not the managed version.
The true one. Jake had told him the simple true thing was enough, and he believed that, and he was going to prove it right now in the back booth of Rachel Carter's diner with Pine Hollow all around them and Julie Anderson's eyes on him waiting for the answer that was either going to save this or end it.
He was going to give her the answer.
He was going to give her all of it.
He opened his mouth.