19. I Would Survive This , Too -Libby
Nineteen
I Would Survive This , Too -Libby
Imade it down the stairs, through the hallway, past the bathroom, and past the closed door where I could hear Lily and Fiona’s low voices, the sounds of their packing.
Reaching my bedroom door, the lock turned under my fingers.
My back hit the door, my legs gave out, and I slid to the floor.
The first sob was silent. The second wasn’t, and I pressed both hands over my face. Lily’s room shared a wall; she didn’t need to hear this.
I’d seen it on his face the second he stepped onto that roof, before he opened his mouth, before he sat down, before he stumbled through that careful, measured apology with his eyes directed anywhere but me. I’d known—with a terrible, piercing clarity—that I needed to prepare.
So I had.
And I’d smiled.
And I’d made it easy for him. I always did. I didn’t know anymore whether that was kindness or compulsion—whether I was generous or just terrified of what happened when I didn’t smooth things over, didn’t hand them the exit, didn’t hold the door.
It’s laughable, really.
My own words came back to me, and a fresh wave of tears burned down my cheeks. I tasted salt, the hint of cigarette still on my lips.
What had I expected? Honestly—what, exactly, had I been hoping for?
A declaration? Some breathless confession of undying love from a thirty-year-old soldier who looked like that and had a way of listening—really listening—like whatever you said was the only thing in the room, like he was already deciding what to do about it?
I was almost forty, with a daughter and a decade of bad decisions written into me.
A man like Finn wouldn’t choose a woman like me.
That wasn’t bitterness. That was just a fact.
I pressed my forehead against my knees and let the tears flow.
The humiliation burned worse than the rejection—and the worst part, the part that made the whole thing unbearable, was that he hadn’t even rejected me.
Not cruelly. Not carelessly. He’d been gentle about it, soft-voiced and careful, and somehow that made it so much worse than cruelty would have.
I knew what to do with cruelty. I’d built an entire life around surviving people who couldn’t be bothered with gentleness. Cruelty I could navigate.
But kindness? Kindness delivered with quiet eyes and, hey, it’s not anything against you, really—that undid something in me I hadn’t known was still even in me.
Because for one night—a few reckless, unguarded hours in the dark—I’d allowed myself to believe something different.
His hands on my skin had rewritten a decade-old story: the one that said I’d aged out of being wanted in a way that truly mattered; that my body now existed for function rather than desire; that the stretch marks, the exhaustion, and the years of doing everything alone had made me the kind of woman a man like that could want in the dark and discard without a second thought in the morning.
And I’d handed him that opportunity, walked right into it, because some part of me had apparently decided that half of something was better than nothing, as if I hadn’t known exactly what I was doing, as if I hadn’t known exactly how it would end.
Last night, in the dark, with his hands and mouth on my body, stopping himself had seemed to cost him something real.
Turns out, it came considerably easier in the morning light.
I dug my nails into my palms, hard. Hard enough to leave marks, enough to redirect the ache from somewhere unmanageable to somewhere I could control.
Stupid.
Stupid, stupid woman.
I’d let myself act like a girl. Like the twenty-two-year-old I’d been before Lily, before the marriage that had spent years teaching me, with patient and grinding thoroughness, exactly how little my own needs were permitted to matter.
Before I’d learned—through repetition, through exhaustion, through the slow accumulation of every small and large disappointment, ground down until they were just sediment, just the floor I stood on—that wanting things for myself led, without exception, to this.
To a bedroom floor and the taste of something too good dissolving into ash.
I breathed.
Just that. Just the one small thing.
I counted them the way I’d taught myself years ago, during a period when counting breaths had been the only reliable distance between me and a darkness I couldn’t afford to fall into—when Lily had been small enough to need me every hour of every day, and that need had been the single thread tethering me to this world.
In. Hold. Out.
In. Hold. Out.
Slowly, deliberately, I gathered every broken piece of the last hour and pressed them down.
I folded them into the place where everything else lived that I couldn’t hold and still keep walking—a skill I’d developed young, younger than anyone should have to, back when the only place that remained fully mine existed entirely behind my own eyes.
When everything else had been managed by hands that weren’t mine: what I wore, where I went, whether I’d been enough, smiled enough, tried hard enough.
The only control I possessed lived in that quiet internal space where I could pack everything down tight, presenting a perfect exterior no one could ever see past.
I had perfected that skill over the years, molding it into something I could readily employ.
And I needed it now, on this very floor.
The world outside my door had fractured, and Lily needed a functioning mother, not a woman wilting on a bedroom floor over a man’s morning-after speech.
I scrubbed my face with both hands, then pressed my palms flat against the floor and pushed myself up.
My legs trembled, but I stood anyway.
I walked to the small mirror above the dresser and confronted my reflection: red eyes, blotchy skin—the face of a woman who had been through too much.
Almost forty.
I’d uttered that number on the rooftop as evidence for the prosecution. But standing here now, I forced myself to see what it truly represented—Lily’s entire childhood. Every double shift. Every time I hadn’t quit when quitting would have been easier.
Every line on my face had been earned. Every single one.
I moved to the small antique sink in the corner and turned on the faucet.
Cold water. I splashed it once, twice, three times, until the redness began to recede.
My wet hands gripped the basin’s edge, the porcelain cool and solid under my palms, and I stayed like that until my breathing slowed to something manageable.
I straightened, lifting my chin.
Finn had his mission, his walls, his simple, controlled method for navigating the world without letting any of it permanently attach itself to him.
Fine.
I had mine too.
I’d survived worse than this.
I would survive this, too.
Because Lily needed me. Needed me sharp, present, and three steps ahead. The world now held new monsters. But I had lived with monsters before, and I understood something fundamental about them.
They counted on you to stay lost in fear.
I dried my face, checking the mirror one final time.
I unlocked the door and stepped into the hallway.
My eyes were clear, my back straight. Perhaps if Finn looked closely, he’d see the faint impressions my nails had left in my palms. But no one would know that sixty seconds ago I’d been on the floor.
The ache was still there, a low thrum beneath my ribs, but it was back where it belonged: on the inside.
* * *
When I walked into the kitchen, Finn stood at the counter with a map spread out in front of him—an actual paper map, the kind gas stations used to sell before GPS became ubiquitous, creased and soft at the folds from what looked like years of use.
The kitchen was his space now; the map spread across the counter like a declaration of territory.
I skirted its edge, grabbing a glass from the cupboard with a little too much force.
The clink of it on the granite was the only sound.
He didn’t look up, but I saw the muscle in his jaw tighten for a half-second.
Good. That’s exactly how this needed to be.
“We need a plan to get to my place,” he said.
I set my glass down.
“Can you elaborate on where exactly your place is?”
My voice was sharper than intended; his finger paused on the map for a fraction of a second.
I let the sharpness stand.
He straightened, crossed his arms, and met my eyes for the first time since I’d come downstairs. I held his gaze long enough to establish my resolve before shifting my attention.
“I have a—for lack of a better word—an island, just off the coast of Maine.”
I blinked. “An island?”
“Yeah.”
“You have an island?”
“I have an island.”
He looked back at me, the corner of his mouth shifting—not quite a smile, but the expression of a man who had watched this particular penny drop before and had never tired of it.
“How does a thirty-year-old have an island?”
“Twenty-three, actually, when I bought it.” He leaned against the counter, his posture loosening, settling, like a man handed a subject he knew how to hold.
“The county seized it for back taxes. The previous owner died without heirs, and the property sat in administrative limbo for about six years. Two hundred acres of rocky shore and pine trees that nobody wanted. It was listed for next to nothing at a tax auction.”
“Define ‘next to nothing.’”
“Forty thousand dollars.”
I opened my mouth, then closed it again.
“SEAL deployment pay accumulates when you have zero expenses and nowhere to spend it,” he said.
“No rent, no car payment, no—” He gestured vaguely at the general concept of civilian life.
“Just tours. Consecutive tours. So the money added up, and when I came across that listing, I figured it beat spending it on a truck I’d never be home to drive. ”
“So you bought an island instead.”
“I bought an island instead.”
Footsteps in the hallway. Lily and Fiona appeared in the kitchen doorway.