Chapter 16
Rose
Evening settles into the apartment like a visitor who plans to stay.
Blue light through the unwashed window. The street below has shifted into its nighttime rhythm—fewer delivery trucks, more people walking dogs, the restaurant on the corner turning on its string lights, which cast a warm, uneven glow across the building opposite mine.
I sit on the floor surrounded by fabric.
Pieces of the collection I’m building, though collection feels too formal for what is essentially an experiment conducted on my living room floor.
A sleeve here. A bodice there. Swatches pinned to a dress form I found on Craigslist from a woman in Bernal Heights who was moving to Portland and selling everything that wouldn’t fit in her Subaru.
Wednesday has claimed a square of black wool as her personal territory.
She’s curled on it with the proprietary air of a creature who believes all textiles were created specifically for her comfort.
Her body is a perfect comma, tail tucked around her paws, one ear twitching occasionally at sounds I cannot hear.
I miss Jack.
The missing arrives not as a thought but as a physical sensation.
A specific, localized ache beneath my sternum, as though something behind my ribs has been bruised and is tender to the touch.
It comes in waves. Sometimes I can work through it, lose myself in the problem of a seam or the weight of a fabric, and for hours the missing recedes to background noise.
Then something—a song, a certain quality of light, the way Wednesday stretches in a manner that reminds me inexplicably of Jack reaching for his coffee in the morning—and the ache returns, fresh and precise, a pain with borders I could trace on a map of my own body.
I miss the weight of him in bed. The particular topography of his sleeping body, the way he gravitated toward the center no matter how large the mattress.
I miss his hands. The scar on his right thumb from a childhood accident with a pocketknife.
The way those hands could be so gentle on my skin and so decisive on a keyboard, moving through code with the confidence of someone reading a language written specifically for him.
I miss his voice when he wasn’t performing.
The private Jack, the one who existed before boardrooms and investors and the particular alertness that entered his body whenever Melissa called.
I miss the man who laughed at terrible movies and made worse pancakes and once, early in our relationship, stood in a downpour on Valencia Street because I’d mentioned wanting to see a band play and he refused to let the weather stop us, even though we arrived soaked and the band was terrible and we spent the entire set dripping onto the floor of a venue that smelled like mold and cheap beer.
I miss him. The missing does not diminish with time.
If anything, it sharpens. Becomes more specific.
The general ache of absence refining itself into particular griefs: his key in the door, his shampoo in the shower, the sound of him arguing with his mother on the phone in the other room while I pretended not to listen.
I could lie to myself. I could construct a narrative where leaving Jack has magically dissolved my love for him, where independence has cauterized the wound of our marriage and left me clean and whole and free of longing.
It would be easier. Cleaner. The kind of story people want to hear about women who walk away—that they stopped loving, that the leaving was a function of love’s extinction rather than its painful persistence.
But I have spent too many years lying to myself about smaller things to start now with the largest one.
I love him. I have loved him for nine years.
I love him standing in this apartment surrounded by fabric scraps and a cat who regards me with polite indifference.
I love him with the same stubborn, inconvenient intensity that made me marry him in the first place, that made me stand beside him through the company’s early catastrophes, that made me learn to cook his mother’s recipes and wear the clothes that made the Ashford family look cohesive and smile through speeches where another woman’s name received the warmth that should have been mine.
I love him, and the love does not make me want to go back.
That is the discovery. Not that I’ve stopped loving—I haven’t—but that love and return are no longer the same thing in my body.
I can love Jack Ashford with every cell I possess and still choose to remain in this apartment with its cracked mirror and its too-small desk and its absence of his particular gravity.
I can love him and love her. The woman I was becoming before I met him. The woman who got buried beneath nine years of making herself fit. The woman who is, piece by clumsy piece, reassembling herself on a hardwood floor in Hayes Valley with a black cat for a witness.
Wednesday opens one eye. Looks at me. Blinks slowly, as though she’s just reached a conclusion about my character that she finds neither impressive nor disappointing, merely factual.
“I know,” I tell her. “It doesn’t make sense to me either.”
She closes her eye. Resettles herself on the black wool. The fabric is going to be covered in cat hair. I’ll have to brush it before I can use it. I don’t mind. The imperfections are becoming part of the process, evidence of a life being lived rather than performed.
Outside, the string lights sway in a breeze I can’t feel through the glass. Someone laughs on the sidewalk. A car passes, its headlights sweeping the ceiling in a brief, traveling arc.
I pick up my shears. Cut into a piece of emerald silk. The sound is clean. Deliberate.
I miss him. I love him. I am not going back.
All three things can be true at once. The realization doesn’t make the missing easier, but it makes the staying possible.
One breath at a time. One cut of fabric at a time.
One evening in a room of my own choosing, with a cat who did not choose me but stays anyway, watching the world through eyes the color of things that grow in the dark.