CHAPTER 20
Fault Lines
°°°
She hadn't expected the fight to still be waiting for them the next morning, but it was, sitting quiet and unresolved at the kitchen table like a third presence neither of them had properly acknowledged the night before.
She'd lain awake longer than she wanted to admit, replaying the phone call, the specific edge in his voice that had cut underneath the fear, trying to decide whether she was overreacting to something understandable or correctly identifying something that mattered.
By the time morning light came through the kitchen window, she'd landed on the second answer, and she'd promised herself, brushing her teeth with unusual determination, that she wasn't going to let the day's plans crowd out this conversation the way convenient urgency so often did.
"We need to talk about yesterday," Emery said, setting her coffee down with more force than necessary. "Not the plan. Not Sasha's information. The part where you said you weren't okay, and I heard something underneath that I don't think either of us actually addressed."
Rhys looked up from his own mug, wary. "What do you mean?"
"I mean the anger, Rhys. Under the fear.
When you called me, you weren't just scared.
There was something sharper than that, something that sounded a lot like the same instinct that told Preacher to almost buy me out of The Wrenhouse for my own good.
" She held his gaze steadily, unwilling to let the moment soften before it had actually been examined.
"I need you to sit with that instead of just apologizing your way past it. "
He was quiet for a long moment, something working behind his face, and when he spoke his voice had gone careful, deliberate.
"You're right. I was angry. Not at you — or not only at you.
Angry that you'd put yourself somewhere I couldn't protect you, even though I'd agreed to let you go there.
Angry that agreeing to trust you didn't make the fear go away, the way I think some stupid part of me expected it to. "
"That's the problem, though. Isn't it." Emery kept her voice level, though something in her chest had gone tight.
"You expected trusting me to feel comfortable.
It doesn't. It's not supposed to. Trusting someone with their own choices means sometimes sitting with fear you don't get to resolve by controlling the outcome.
If every time that fear shows up, it comes out as anger dressed up as concern, that's not actually different from where we started. It's just slower."
"So what am I supposed to do with it? The fear doesn't go away just because I've decided not to act on it the old way."
He pushed back from the table slightly, some restless energy needing somewhere to go, and paced a few steps toward the window before turning back to face her.
"I keep thinking I've made real progress, and then something like yesterday happens and I find out the progress is thinner than I thought.
Like I've just gotten better at hiding the old instinct instead of actually replacing it with something different. "
"I don't know." She said it honestly, unwilling to pretend she had a clean answer ready to hand him.
"But I think you have to actually feel it, instead of converting it into anger the second it gets uncomfortable.
I think that's the actual work, Rhys. Not just restraining the old behavior.
Learning to sit inside the fear without needing it to turn into something else. "
He absorbed that, something raw crossing his face. "That sounds a lot harder than just not deciding things for you."
"It probably is." She reached across the table, not quite touching him yet, just closing the distance enough to make the gesture available if he wanted it.
"I'm not trying to make this impossible.
I'm trying to tell you the truth, because I think you'd rather have that than a version of me that pretends yesterday didn't reveal something real. "
"I would." He took her hand, his grip tighter than usual, some old anxiety still visibly working through his system. "I don't want the easy version of this, Em. I had the easy version for nine years, and it turned out to be built on things I never let either of us actually look at directly."
They sat with that for a while, the coffee going cold between them, and Emery found herself turning over her own contribution to the moment — the specific temptation, even now, to soften the confrontation before it had finished doing its work, some old peacekeeping instinct still whispering that conflict this direct was dangerous, was something to manage rather than something to simply survive.
"There's something else," she said finally, pushing past the instinct.
"I think I need to name my own part in this too.
When you called yesterday, and I heard the anger under the fear — my first reaction wasn't to push back the way I did just now.
My first reaction was to want to apologize.
To smooth it over immediately, make you feel better, even though nothing about what I'd done actually deserved an apology.
" She met his eyes, something vulnerable in her own admission now.
"I caught myself doing it. I stopped myself.
But the impulse was right there, exactly like it always used to be, and I think that's worth naming too, not just your side of it. "
She'd noticed the pattern more clearly than usual this time, some new, hard-won awareness letting her watch her own mind work in real time — the flinch toward smoothing things over, the automatic calculation of what would make the discomfort end fastest, all of it so familiar it had taken real effort to recognize as a pattern rather than simply who she was.
She wondered how many other moments across nine years of marriage had followed that same quiet arithmetic without her ever once noticing it happening.
"Thank you," Rhys said quietly, "for telling me that. It would have been easier to just let me be the only one with something to work on."
"Easier isn't really what we're going for anymore. Is it."
"No." A ghost of a smile crossed his face, tired but real. "I guess it's not."
The silence that followed wasn't quite peace, but it wasn't the tense unresolved thing from a few minutes ago either — something more honest, more sustainable, two people sitting inside a genuine disagreement without either of them rushing to paper over it.
"I don't think we've actually resolved this," Emery said eventually. "I don't think it resolves in one conversation. But I wanted you to know I saw it, and I wanted you to know I'm not going to pretend I didn't just because acknowledging it is uncomfortable."
"I saw it too. In myself, I mean. I don't love what I saw." Rhys turned her hand over in his, tracing an absent line across her palm. "But I'd rather see it than keep pretending the good version of me is the only one that exists."
He looked at her for a long moment, something searching in his expression. "Can I ask you something? Does it scare you? Knowing the anger's still in there, even if I'm getting better at not letting it drive?"
She considered the question honestly before answering.
"A little. I won't lie to you about that.
But I think what scares me more is a version of you that pretends it isn't in there at all — because that's the version I can't actually trust to catch it next time.
This version, the one who can name it out loud at a kitchen table the morning after — that's the version I think I can actually build something with. "
Her phone buzzed against the table, and she glanced at it — a text from Ghost, addressed to both of them, asking if they could meet at the clubhouse that afternoon to start actually planning a response to what Sasha had given them.
Emery looked up at Rhys, something steadier settling between them despite the conversation's unfinished edges.
"We should go," she said. "Whatever's still unresolved between us, Ruiz isn't waiting for us to finish figuring it out."
"No." Rhys stood, offering her his hand to pull her up from the chair, an old habit neither of them had ever fully lost. "But I'd rather walk into that meeting having actually said this much to each other than walk in pretending yesterday didn't happen."
"Me too."
They left the fight where it was — not resolved, not buried, just honestly acknowledged and set down for the moment, a strange, hard-won kind of progress that felt, to Emery, more real than a clean resolution would have.
She thought about it on the drive to the clubhouse, watching the familiar road unspool ahead of them, Rhys quiet beside her with his own thoughts clearly still working through the morning's conversation.
There was something almost freeing, she realized, in letting a disagreement simply exist without forcing it toward tidy resolution — an acknowledgment that some things took longer than a single honest conversation to fully repair, and that pretending otherwise would only have been another version of the old pattern, dressed up as growth instead of named plainly as what it still was.