15. Rhett
Rhett
I find out she tried to quit me on a Wednesday, and that’s the thing that finally breaks my hand off the wheel.
Not quit the team. Quit me. The assistant in the comms office mentions it without knowing she’s mentioning anything, just chatter while I’m waiting on a stat sheet, did you hear Maren tried to get reassigned off the coaching account, asked Caden to put Camila on you instead, Caden said no.
She says it like office gossip. I say something that passes for a reply and I go stand in the tunnel for a while where it’s dark.
She tried to hand me to Camila. The woman who saved my name four times in one night, who sat in a hospital and held my hand and told me she was on my side no matter what, she went to my son and asked to be taken off me.
To leave. To disappear, the way I’m starting to understand she’s spent her whole life disappearing, doing the noble useful vanishing thing where she removes herself before anyone has to choose her, so she never has to find out they wouldn’t.
And Caden said no, which is its own knife I’ll get to later, the way my son keeps her chained to me without knowing what he’s chaining either of us to.
I think about it for a day. A real day, not a figure of speech.
I drive out to the lake house I barely use, the one I bought after the divorce because a man’s supposed to land somewhere, and I never did land, I just kept the keys.
It’s too big and too quiet and it’s got a view of the water I’ve watched maybe four times.
I sit on the deck with a coffee going cold and I think about every reason, and the reasons are all still true.
She’s twenty-eight. She works for my son.
I’m a headline waiting to happen and she’s the woman paid to prevent the headline.
I broke a family once being the man who wanted what he wanted.
Every reason I gave her in the film room is still standing.
I think about Caden, too, the way I always circle back to Caden out here, because this house is the closest I came to building a place he might visit and he never has.
I think about the version of this where I do the right thing, the careful thing, the thing the man I was would do, and I let her reassign herself and I coach my hockey team and I retire a legend and I die in this big quiet house with a clean conscience and nothing in my hands.
I’ve got a whole life of evidence for where the careful thing lands you.
It’s got a lake view. Nobody’s ever in it.
And underneath all of the reasons, immovable, is the new thing: she tried to leave so she wouldn’t have to be chosen, and I have spent my whole life letting people leave because it was easier than choosing them out loud.
Not this time. I’m fifty-three. I’ve run out of next times.
***
I go to her apartment that night. Off the clock, off the property, off every line we drew.
A walk-up on a street I’ve never been on, because I’ve never been anywhere in her life, only the rooms where she manages mine.
I park two blocks down and walk with my collar up, not because I’m ashamed, because she’d want me to, and that’s a distinction I’d have missed a year ago.
She opens the door in sweats with her hair wet and her face bare and surprise all over it, and behind her the apartment is small and warm and full of her, books two rows deep on shelves, a couch with a blanket that’s well-loved, a mug on the windowsill, and a stuffed team mascot on a shelf that I recognize, that she took from a hospital, and the sight of it does something to my chest I don’t have a word for.
“You can’t be here,” she says.
“I know.”
“Rhett, if anyone sees you on my street —”
“Nobody saw me. I’m good at not being seen when it matters. It’s the one thing the fame taught me.” I don’t move from the doorway. I’m not going to come in unless she lets me; I’m done taking things people didn’t offer. “You tried to get reassigned.”
That stops her. The surprise drains out and something more careful comes in. “Who told you?”
“Doesn’t matter. You went to Caden and asked him to put Camila on me. You tried to quit me.” I keep my voice flat because if I don’t it’ll do something I can’t take back. “Why?”
“You know why. It’s the only smart thing left. If I’m not your comms lead, then there’s no conflict, no fireable thing, no —”
“You’d have handed yourself to a worse job and a worse year and called it smart, so you didn’t have to stand in a room and want something.
” I take one step in. One. “That’s the part I can’t let go.
You didn’t try to leave because of the risk.
You tried to leave so nobody’d ever have to choose you.
So you could go be useful somewhere safe and never find out. ”
Her eyes are bright. “Find out what.”
“Whether you’d be chosen.” It’s the truest thing I’ve ever said to anyone, and I know it’s true because I’ve spent thirty years doing the same cowardly thing from the other chair, letting them go so I’d never have to risk staying.
“I’m not going to be one more person who lets you disappear because it’s easier.
Caden said no to reassigning you. I’m here to say no to the rest of it. ”
“You don’t get to —”
“I’m too old to pretend I don’t want you.
” I say it plainly, no charm, no heat, just the fact of it laid on her kitchen table.
“I’m too old to do the noble thing and lose it the way I’ve lost everything else by being careful and absent and right.
I came back to win one more thing before I’m done, and I told the whole city it was the Cup.
It isn’t. It’s you. It’s been you since you threw me out of a press room.
I want you, and I want the bad coffee and the two a.m. nothing and the version of my life where you’re in the room, and I know exactly what it could cost you, and I’m standing in your doorway anyway letting you decide, because for once in my life I’m going to choose the person out loud and let her choose back. ”
The apartment is very quiet. Somewhere a radiator ticks. A car goes by on the wet street below and the light slides across her ceiling and is gone.
She’s crying and not bothering to hide it, and there’s something else on her face, something I keep catching and can’t read, a held thing, a door she’s keeping shut, and for half a second I think she’s going to tell me whatever it is, the thing that’s been sitting behind her eyes since the foxhole.
Her mouth opens. Rhett, before we, there’s something —
And then she closes it. Decides against it, the way I’ve watched her decide against it three times now. Swallows it back behind her teeth and chooses, instead, to cross the kitchen.
I should make her tell me. Some animal part of me knows she’s holding something with my name on it, the same wrong half-inch as Brunner’s voice on the phone, the same note I keep almost placing.
But she’s coming toward me with her wet hair and her bare face and her whole self finally not managing anything, and I am not a strong enough man to stop a woman who’s decided to choose me, not after waiting my whole life to be chosen.
“This is going to ruin us,” she says, an inch away, hands fisting in my shirt the way they did at the bar.
“Probably.”
“I’m choosing it anyway. Eyes open. I need you to know I’m choosing it with my eyes all the way open.” There’s a weight in it I don’t understand, a confession folded inside a sentence that sounds like surrender. “Whatever happens. I chose this knowing.”
“Knowing what?”
She doesn’t answer. She kisses me instead, and this time there’s no bar, no bartender, no Tobin, no kid in a stairwell, no son on a phone, no rule, nothing in the whole world but her hands and her mouth and the small warm apartment that smells like her and a stolen mascot watching from a shelf, and the line we spent two months and four cities defending goes down without a sound.
I get a hand in her wet hair and the other at the small of her back and I lift her against me and she makes that sound, the one from the bar, the one I’ve been hearing in the dark for weeks, and she pulls me toward the short hallway and the door at the end of it, and I go, God help us both, I go.
The last thing I think, before thinking stops being something I’m interested in: she’s holding something back, and I let her, and I’m going to learn what that costs.
But not tonight. Tonight she chose me, eyes open, and I’m going to spend the whole night being chosen, and worry about the price the way I’ve always worried about everything, too late, and out loud, and with my whole stubborn heart.