8. Hunt
— ? —
Hunt
The first night, I told myself she needed space.
The first week, I called. Again and again, the same voicemail, messages that started calm and ended desperate.
I’m sorry. Please call me. I love you. Present tense now, always present tense, too late.
By the third day her phone went straight to voicemail and I understood she’d blocked me.
I tried her email, the landline we’d never used, Rodriguez, anyone who might know where she’d gone.
Nobody knew, or nobody would tell me, and the whole unit had started going quiet when I walked into rooms, careful never to say her name.
I carried her wedding ring in my breast pocket, over my heart, because I couldn’t stand the thought of it in a drawer in the dark.
My thumb found it in meetings, in surgery consults I couldn’t focus on, in the long gray evenings in a house gone suddenly too big and too clean and too quiet, the cushion by the window still holding the dent where she used to sit and watch the road for headlights that came too late, if they came at all.
Then, on a Tuesday, my mother let herself in.
Vivian Anderson didn’t knock. She had a key, had always had a key, and she used it now without apology, walking into my house like she owned it. Which, technically, she did.
“Sit down.” Her voice was ice.
I sat.
She held my eyes, her face set in lines I’d seen when I was a boy who’d disappointed her. But this was worse. This was fury held on a leash.
“I spoke to Nora,” she said.
My heart lurched. “When? Where is she? Is she okay?”
“I’m not telling you that.”
“Mom, please. I need to know she’s safe, I need to talk to her, I need to explain…”
“You need to be quiet and listen to me.” She sat across from me, her back perfectly straight, her eyes boring into mine.
“I’ve known that girl for seven years. I’ve watched her love you with everything she has.
I’ve watched her build a life around a man who was never home, never present, never paying attention. And I’ve watched you throw it away.”
“I didn’t throw it away. I was trying to protect her.”
“From what?”
The truth stuck in my throat. The thing I’d been too scared to name.
“I had reasons.”
“Reasons.” My mother laughed, and it wasn’t a kind sound. “That’s what you told Nora, isn’t it, while she begged you to explain. I’ve got reasons, trust me, I can’t tell you yet. And she was supposed to wait patiently while you scheduled your life around another woman?”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“What was it like, then? Explain it to me the way you couldn’t explain it to her.”
I couldn’t. The shame of it crumbled under her gaze.
“That’s what I thought.” She stood. “You know the worst part? I could’ve helped you.
If you’d come to me, told me what you were thinking, I could’ve talked sense into you.
But you always have to do everything alone, always have to be the one in control, and now you’ve lost the best thing that ever happened to you.
That girl drove away with her wedding ring in your hand and you’ve got no idea where she is. ”
I took the ring out of my breast pocket.
I hadn’t decided to; my hand just went there, the way it had a hundred times a day since the parking lot.
And the watch came with it, because I kept them together now, the plain gold band and the watch I’d found wrapped in blue paper on the top shelf of her closet with my name on the tag in her handwriting.
A gift for the anniversary I’d missed. Every second, I’m yours, engraved on the back of a thing she’d bought and wrapped and waited to give me while I signed a card on my way into surgery.
I held them both out on my palm like evidence.
My mother’s face broke. For one second the fury drained out of her and left grief underneath, grief for both of us.
“Oh, Hunt.” Then she made herself hard again, because one of us had to be. “That’s not enough. You know it isn’t.”
“It’s all I’ve got left of her.”
“Then hear me. You can’t cry your way back to that girl.
Don’t you dare show up with words. Show up different, or don’t show up at all.
And there won’t be a third chance.” She walked to the door, and there she turned, and her eyes were wet, which shocked me, because my mother never cried.
“I love you. So I’m not going to be your spy.
I’m going to be her mother, even if you’ve forgotten how to be her husband. ”
The door closed behind her.
Show up different, or don’t show up at all.
The next morning, I went to Sasha’s office.
“Hunt.” She looked up from her desk with a smile that felt different now that I was paying attention. Sharper. “How are you feeling? Shoulder healing okay?”
“I’m taking you off my schedule.”
Her smile froze. “Excuse me?”
“Effective immediately. You’ll be reassigned to other team members.”
“I don’t understand.” She stood, came around the desk, positioned herself closer than necessary. “We work so well together. Everyone says so. The bear call proved it. I saved your life, remember?”
“I remember. And I’m grateful. But this isn’t working for me anymore.”
“Because of Nora?” Her voice went hard. “Because your wife threw a tantrum and ran away, you’re going to punish me?”
Her tone made me look at her more carefully. The set of her jaw. The anger under the concern.
“What did you say to her?”
“Nothing she didn’t need to hear.”
“What did you say to her, Sasha?”
“The truth.” She crossed her arms. “That you chose me. That a man doesn’t bench his own wife unless he’s already replaced her. That she should go quietly instead of making a scene.”
I stared at her. All the times I’d told Nora she was imagining things, that Sasha was just a colleague, that there was nothing to it. And the whole time, Sasha had been whispering poison in my wife’s ear, and I’d left the door open for her to do it.
“You’re done here.”
“You can’t fire me for telling the truth.”
“I’m not firing you. I’m removing you from my supervision. HR can put you wherever they want.”
“You’ll regret this.” The sweet mask was fully gone now. “Everyone knows you couldn’t save your marriage. Everyone knows your wife left you. And everyone is going to wonder what you did to make her go.”
I walked out.
That afternoon I resigned as director. It took ten minutes to hand my father’s people the board seats and charity galas and investor meetings that had eaten years of my evenings; he said “about time” and hung up, and I felt nothing but lighter.
I started seeing a therapist twice a week, Dr. Wendy Park, who wouldn’t let me perform contrition in place of feeling it.
“You didn’t lose her in a month,” she told me in the third session.
“You lost her over eighteen months. You just only noticed the month.” She was right, the way she was right about most things I didn’t want to hear.
A month after Nora left, Rodriguez mentioned it over break-room coffee, offhand, like it was nothing. A vet license transferring to a town in Texas called Primrose. The name on the application was L. Smith. Leigh was her middle name. Smith was the one she’d had before me.
I was packing a bag before he finished the sentence. I still didn’t have the words, after a month of journaling and Dr. Park’s silences, for the thing that had started all of it. But I knew where I had to say it now, and I had eight hours of highway to figure out how.
Show up different, or don’t show up at all.
I was going to show up different.