10. Nora
— ? —
Nora
I was going to call him today.
That was the plan. Wake up, eat breakfast, throw up breakfast because apparently that was just my life now, and then sit down at the kitchen table with my phone in hand and call my husband.
Lay it all out. Tell him exactly what I needed from him if this marriage was going to survive.
No more waiting, no more hoping, no more sitting in the passenger seat of my own life.
Bree’s advice had kept me up half the night, getting louder every time I closed my eyes.
So here I was. Eight in the morning, the breakfast nausea mostly passed, my phone on the table in front of me with Hunt’s contact pulled up.
His picture smiled at me from the screen, a photo I’d taken three years ago on our honeymoon.
He was laughing at a joke I’d made, his eyes crinkled at the corners, looking at me like I was the only person in the world who mattered.
I used to believe that look.
My thumb hovered over the call button. I’d rehearsed what I was going to say a dozen times.
Hunt, I’m not coming back until I see real change.
Hunt, I need you to show up different, not just say you will.
Hunt, this is your one chance to prove that our marriage matters more than whatever excuses you’ve been making.
One breath. Then another. My finger moved toward the screen.
And then I heard tires on gravel.
I knew the sound of that truck.
I’d helped him pick it out four years ago, stood in the dealership while he hemmed and hawed about engine specs and towing capacity, finally pointed at the dark blue F-150 and said “that one, you like blue, just buy it already.” I knew the particular rumble of its engine, the way the suspension handled dirt roads, the exact pitch of the gravel under its tires.
He was here.
I stood up so fast the chair scraped against the floor. Through the kitchen window I could see the truck coming up the drive, raising a cloud of dust behind it, and my whole body went cold.
He wasn’t supposed to be here. I was supposed to call him. I was supposed to be in control of this conversation, to set the terms, to decide when and how we’d talk.
But Hunt Anderson had never been good at waiting.
By the time I made it to the front porch, he was out of the truck and walking toward the gate. The morning sun caught the angles of his face, and I could see that he looked different. Thinner. Tired. The lines around his eyes deeper than I remembered.
Good.
I wanted him to look like he hadn’t been sleeping. I wanted him to wear his guilt on his face where I could see it.
I stopped at the top of the porch steps and crossed my arms. The gate was thirty feet away, and I wasn’t going any closer.
“I’ve been looking for you.” His voice carried across the distance between us, rough and desperate. “For a month. Nobody would tell me anything, and then I heard about the license transfer, and I drove all night to get here.”
“Congratulations.” I kept my voice flat. “You found me. Now leave.”
“Nora, please. Just let me explain.”
“You’ve had months to explain, Hunt. Years. You don’t get to show up at my grandmother’s house unannounced and demand a conversation.”
“I’m not demanding anything.” He took a step closer to the gate but didn’t touch it. “I’m asking. I’m begging, if that’s what it takes.”
“It’s not.”
He flinched like I’d hit him, and some small vicious part of me was glad.
“I resigned from the unit.” The words tumbled out of him, fast and unsteady.
“I’m not the director anymore. I handed everything off, the board seats, the family business stuff, all of it.
And I’ve been in therapy twice a week, working through everything, trying to understand why I made the choices I made. ”
“Good for you.”
“Nora, I know I hurt you. I know I was wrong. I know the benching was a mistake, and the way I handled Sasha was a mistake, and I should’ve told you the truth from the beginning instead of trying to protect you from a truth I never even gave you a chance to understand.”
“Then tell me now.” I heard the challenge in my own voice. “Tell me why. You’re here, I’m here, tell me the truth you couldn’t manage to say in all that time.”
His mouth opened. Closed. The same wall I’d watched him hit a hundred times.
“That’s what I thought.”
“It’s not that simple. There are things I need to say, things I need to explain, but not like this. Not shouting across thirty feet of dirt with you looking at me like you wish I’d never been born.”
“How am I supposed to look at you, Hunt? You want me to smile? Roll out a welcome mat? Forgive you before you’ve even apologized properly?”
“I want you to let me try.” He was at the gate now, his hands gripping the wooden slats, his knuckles white.
“I know I don’t deserve it. I know I’ve given you every reason to hate me.
But I love you, Nora. I love you more than I know how to say, and I drove eight hours to tell you that in person because you deserve more than a phone call. ”
“You should’ve thought about what I deserved before you disappeared into that office.”
“I know. God, I know.” His voice cracked. “I’ve been living with that every single day since you left. Sitting in our house, in your spot on the couch, understanding for the first time what it feels like to wait for someone who doesn’t come.”
The words hit a bruise in my chest, one I didn’t want him to reach.
“That doesn’t fix anything.”
“It’s not supposed to fix anything. It’s supposed to show you that I understand now.
That I get it. That I know what I did and I know it was wrong and I’m here because I couldn’t stay away anymore.
” He took a shaky breath. “I’m not here to bring you back, Nora.
I’m not here to drag you home or convince you to forgive me before you’re ready.
I’m here because everywhere else is just places you aren’t. ”
I stared at him.
That was Hunt, though. Even when he was wrong, even when he was desperate, he could find the words that cut straight through my defenses. Everywhere else is just places you aren’t. Lines like that were the reason I’d fallen for him.
But I wasn’t going to fall for it again.
“Nice speech.”
“It’s not a speech. It’s the truth.”
“You don’t know what truth is. You’ve been lying to me for so long you’ve forgotten the difference.”
Before he could respond, a brown-and-white blur shot off the porch.
Waffles moved faster than I’d ever seen him move, a small furious missile of hooves and horns aimed directly at the man by the gate.
The scream he let out was pure goat rage, a sound that belonged in a nightmare, and Hunt barely had time to register what was happening before forty pounds of territorial livestock slammed into the gate hard enough to rattle it.
“What the hell?” Hunt stumbled backward, his eyes wide.
Waffles was on his hind legs now, front hooves on the gate, screaming at Hunt like he was personally responsible for everything wrong in the world. Which, to be fair, he kind of was.
“That’s Waffles.” I felt the first real laugh I’d had in a month trying to get out. “He doesn’t like strangers.”
“I’m not a stranger, I’m your husband.”
“You’re a stranger to him. And apparently his judgment is better than mine was.”
Waffles chose that moment to throw himself against the gate again, and Hunt retreated another few steps, backing toward his truck. The goat followed his movement with laser focus, still screaming, his whole body vibrating with the desire to commit violence.
I laughed.
I didn’t mean to. It came out of me, surprised loose by the sight of my husband being terrorized by a goat, and I hated that he saw it. Hated the way his face changed when he heard the sound, the desperate hope that flickered in his eyes.
“He’s very protective.” I got the laughter under control. “Showed up a few weeks ago and decided I was his person.”
“I can see that.” Hunt was pressed against the door of his truck now, Waffles still screaming at him through the gate. “Nora, please. Just give me five minutes. I’ll stay on this side of the gate, I won’t come any closer, just let me say what I came here to say.”
I should’ve said no. Should’ve told him to get in his truck and drive away and not come back until I was ready to hear him out. That was the plan. That was what taking my life by the horns was supposed to look like.
But the sky had other ideas.
The clouds that had been building all morning chose that exact moment to open up.
One second it was dry, and the next the rain was coming down so hard I could barely see the gate.
A true Texas gullywasher, the kind that turned dirt roads into rivers and filled up ditches in minutes.
Hunt was soaked within seconds, his shirt plastered to his skin, his hair streaming into his eyes.
He didn’t move.
He dropped to his knees in the mud of my driveway, the rain hammering off his healing shoulder, and looked up at me through the downpour.
“I did this.” His voice was barely audible over the rain. “Not the job or Sasha or the accident. Me. I did this to us, to you, and there’s no excuse that makes it okay.”
I stood on the porch, dry, my arms crossed over the secret he couldn’t see.
“You benched me because you were scared, and you couldn’t trust me enough to tell me what. You replaced me with someone else and you let her whisper poison in my ear for weeks. You made me feel invisible in my own marriage, Hunt. You made me feel like I wasn’t worth the truth.”
“I know.” He didn’t flinch from it. He stood there in the rain with mud to his knees and let every word land exactly where I aimed it.
“You held her in your arms in front of the entire unit while I stood in the doorway like I didn’t matter.”
His throat worked. “I know that, too.”
“You told me you loved me in the past tense and then wondered why I drove away.”