9. Andy #2
He starts the engine and pulls away from the curb carefully, windshield wipers beating a steady rhythm. Twenty minutes to my parents' house. Twenty minutes of rain and silence and the weight of everything we're not saying pressing against the windows like the weather outside.
I count streetlights. Focus on the sound of tires on wet asphalt. Try not to notice how his hands look on the steering wheel — the same hands that used to fix everything in our old apartment, that knew how to make pancakes on Sunday mornings and braid my hair when I was too tired after rehearsals.
Halfway through the drive, I can't stand the quiet anymore.
"Why are you still here, Jameson?" The question comes out sharp, but not cruel. I genuinely want to know. "Don't you have better things to do?"
He's quiet for so long I think he won't answer. Then: "I meant what I said, Andy. Nothing means anything if you're not with me."
I turn to look at him. His eyes are on the road, focused on the rain-slicked asphalt ahead.
His jaw is tight with something that might be concentration or might be the effort of keeping words inside.
He doesn't look at me when he says it, which somehow makes it feel more real than if he'd delivered it like a line.
"What does Selena think about all of this?"
The words are out before I can stop them. I hate that I asked, hate that her name is in my mouth, hate that I needed to know badly enough to break my own rule about not caring.
He shrugs, flat and dismissive. "I don't know, and I don't care."
That's it. No explanation. No defense. No carefully crafted response that acknowledges her importance while reassuring me of mine. Just words that dismiss Selena May more completely than any speech could.
I don't know. I don't care.
We turn onto my parents' street and I can see the porch light glowing through the rain.
Home. Except I don't know what that word means anymore.
Is it this house where I grew up, where Mom still makes my bed with the sheets I picked out in eighth grade?
Is it the studio where kids call me Miss Andy and trust me to help them find their balance?
Is it wherever Jameson is?
I push that thought away before it can take root.
He pulls into the driveway and kills the engine. The rain drums against the roof, steady and relentless. He grabs the umbrella from the back seat and gets out, walking around to my side.
When I open the door, he's already there with the umbrella held high. He shields me from the rain as I walk to the porch, the umbrella angled over my head while water soaks through his sweatshirt. By the time we reach the front steps, his hair is dripping and his shoulders are dark with moisture.
He doesn't wait. Doesn't linger on the porch or try to say anything else. He makes sure I'm under the overhang, nods once, and runs back to his car through the rain.
I watch him go — six feet five inches of him jogging through puddles, not looking back, not waiting for a thank-you or invitation inside.
The Jeep's taillights disappear around the corner and I'm left standing on the porch, dry and confused and hating how much I noticed the way his wet sweatshirt clung to his shoulders.
The door opens before I can knock.
"Was that him?" Mom asks, stepping aside to let me in.
I nod, shaking rain from my jacket. Mom hands me a towel and watches as I dry my hair, her expression thoughtful in the way that means she's been observing from the window.
"I heard he's been fixing things at old Pete's motel," she says, casual in the way that's never actually casual when it comes from Mom. "Broken pipes, door replacements. Doesn't charge him anything, either."
My hands still on the towel. "What?"
"He was a handyman before, right?"
I nod. My throat feels tight. Jameson with tools in his hands, fixing Pete's ancient plumbing and broken hinges. The skills that kept us afloat before Hollywood, before fame, when his income came from hanging drywall and repairing leaky faucets in apartments we couldn't afford to live in ourselves.
Mom doesn't push. She delivers the information and lets me do the math, the way she's always done — trusting me to reach my own conclusions instead of telling me what to think.
I sit at the kitchen table where I used to do homework, where I ate cereal before school, where I called Jameson the night I got accepted to the ballet company and again the night I turned it down.
The wood grain patterns are the same. The scratch from when I was nine and tried to carve my initials is still there.
Why is he doing this? Fixing pipes and replacing doors and sending snacks to the studio? To win me back? To prove something? And then what? We go back to LA, back to the house that echoes, back to the life that was slowly suffocating me?
I don't want that life. I want this one — the studio and the kids and waking up with somewhere to be that matters. I want to be Miss Andy, not Jameson Rivers's wife, not someone whose worth gets measured by how well she performs the role of supportive spouse.
Here, I'm happy. For the first time in three years, I go to bed tired from doing work that fills me up instead of drains me.
I laugh at Lily's questions and Marcus's determination and the way Gigi always asks if she can demonstrate the combination one more time.
I have coffee with the twins and dinner with Ellie and conversations with Maeve about which kids are ready to move up and which ones just need more time.
But I haven't stopped loving him.
I hate myself for that. I hate the way my body responded to him in the car — the awareness, the pull, the stupid flutter in my chest when he said my name like something fragile.
I hate these little reminders of who he was.
The umbrella held over my head while he got soaked.
The door opened without thinking. The handyman work Mom mentioned, the return of the man who used to fix everything broken in our world.
I hate that I still notice his forearms and the stubble along his jaw and the way his hands look on a steering wheel. I hate that twenty minutes in a car with him left me more confused than four days of his absence.
Most of all, I hate that when he said nothing means anything without me, some traitorous part of my heart whispered, then stay. Stay and fix pipes and send coffee and don't ask me for anything except the chance to exist in the same town as me.
But I'm putting myself first this time.
Not to punish him. Not to teach him a lesson or make him prove his devotion through grand gestures. I'm putting myself first because I spent three years putting myself last, and I can't do it anymore.
Not even for the man I still love.
Not even for Jameson.
The rain continues outside, steady against the windows, and I sit in my childhood kitchen listening to Mom move around in the next room, Dad's quiet footsteps upstairs, the familiar sounds of a house where people actually live instead of just exist.
Tomorrow I'll go back to the studio. I'll teach kids how to balance and turn and reach for something beautiful. I'll stack the snacks he sends on the counter and try not to think about what they mean. I'll build this life I'm choosing, piece by piece, day by day.
And if Jameson wants to be part of it — really part of it, not just visiting from his other world — then he'll have to figure out how to fit into the life I'm building instead of asking me to abandon it for the one that nearly killed me.
I'm putting myself first. For the first time in years, Andy comes first.
And that's not negotiable. Not for anyone.