16. Not Jealousy
Sixteen
Not Jealousy
Idrove to Renata’s that evening without calling first, which I understood, halfway there, was probably a mistake.
Renata answered the door with an expression that made clear exactly how welcome I wasn’t.
“She’s not obligated to see you,” she said.
“I know. Please just ask her.”
Olivia came to the door a few minutes later, arms crossed, wearing a sweater I recognized from years ago. She looked well. That was the thing that undid me most, standing on Renata’s porch — she looked like a woman who was doing fine without me.
“I found the emails,” I said, before she could tell me to leave. “The reporter, before the ceremony. Vanessa steered the photo, Liv. Not by lying. By saying exactly enough true things to make sure the story wrote itself the way it did.”
Something moved across Olivia’s face — recognition. She’d known this shape existed, even without the proof.
“I want to say something, and I need you to actually hear it,” I said. “You weren’t jealous. I’ve been telling myself for weeks that this was about your insecurity, that you needed reassurance you’d never needed before. That was never true, was it. You weren’t afraid of losing me to her.”
“No,” Olivia said, quiet, careful. “I was watching you give her my place. Those are different things, Sebastian. One is about fear. The other is about a fact.”
“I know that now.”
“You know it now.” Her voice didn’t rise, but something underneath it did. “I said almost that exact sentence to you in our kitchen, weeks ago, and you looked at me like I was speaking a language you’d never studied. What changed? An email? You needed a paper trail to believe your own wife?”
I didn’t have a good answer for that, because she was right. “I should have believed you the first time you said it,” I said. “I chose comfort over you, over and over, in small enough pieces that I could tell myself I hadn’t chosen anything at all.”
Olivia was quiet for a long moment, arms still crossed.
“What do you want from me tonight, Sebastian?” she finally said. “It’s been a few weeks. An apology doesn’t undo that on its own. I need you to understand that before you say whatever you drove over here to say.”
“I don’t expect it to undo anything,” I said. “I came to tell you that you were right, about all of it. And to tell you I removed Vanessa from the Hudson Valley pitch team this morning, and I’m restructuring her role entirely by the end of the week.”
“That’s a start,” Olivia said. “It’s not the same as an ending, though. I need you to understand that too.”
“I do.”
“Then go home, Sebastian. I’m not ready for the next conversation yet, and I don’t think you’re ready to have it either.”
I went home. I understood, driving away, that I had finally answered her old question honestly, if weeks too late.
And what am I?
She was the person who’d seen the truth before I could bear to look at it. I was the one who was going to have to earn, slowly, the right to stand beside her again.