10. Nora #2
That one got past whatever he had left. His face crumpled, and he was crying now, or maybe it was just the rain, I couldn’t tell anymore.
“I know all of it, every single thing I did wrong, and I could list them for hours if you wanted me to. But it wouldn’t change anything.
It wouldn’t make you forgive me. The only thing that could do that’s if I actually became someone worth forgiving, and I’m trying, Nora. I’m trying so hard to be different.”
“Trying isn’t enough.”
“Then tell me what is.” He spread his hands in the mud, pleading. “Tell me what you need. Tell me what I have to do to prove that I mean it. I’ll do anything, Nora. Anything.”
The rain was slowing now, settling into a steady drizzle. Hunt was kneeling in a puddle, his clothes ruined, his whole body shaking from the cold. He looked pathetic and broken, a man who had finally understood what he’d lost.
I should’ve felt satisfied. I’d wanted him to grovel, hadn’t I? Wanted him to feel a fraction of the pain he’d caused me?
But watching him kneel in the mud wasn’t making me feel better. It was just making me tired.
“Go home, Hunt.”
“What did you just say?”
“Go home. Get dry. Stop kneeling in the mud like an idiot.”
“Not until you tell me there’s a chance.” His voice was desperate. “Not until you tell me this isn’t over.”
“I’m not telling you anything. I’m telling you to leave.”
“Nora, please.”
“Go. Home.”
I watched him process it. The refusal, the dismissal, the fact that showing up and making speeches wasn’t going to fix anything. I watched him look for loopholes, for ways to stay, for arguments that might change my mind.
Then his face changed.
“Okay, Nora.”
He stood up. Slowly, painfully, his knees stiff from the cold and the mud. He wiped the rain from his eyes and looked at me across the distance between us, and I saw the moment he decided to actually listen.
“Okay.” He walked to his truck, opened the door, paused with one hand on the frame. “I’m not giving up. But I’ll go, because you asked me to.”
He got in, started the engine, and drove away.
I watched his taillights disappear down the road, my heart pounding in my chest, furious that he’d done exactly what I’d asked. He was supposed to fight harder. Supposed to refuse to leave. Supposed to give me a reason to keep being angry, to keep pushing him away.
Instead he’d just gone.
Exactly like I’d told him to.
The rage hit me out of nowhere, irrational and overwhelming. He couldn’t even stay wrong. Couldn’t even give me the satisfaction of having to throw him out bodily. He’d just nodded and left, like my words actually mattered to him, like he was finally learning to listen.
I hated it.
Waffles appeared at my side, his fury apparently satisfied now that the intruder was gone. He pressed against my leg and bleated softly, and I reached down to scratch behind his ears.
“At least you’re consistent,” I muttered.
Inside, I called June.
She answered on the second ring. “Nora, honey. What’s wrong?”
“He found me.”
A long pause. “Hunt?”
“He showed up an hour ago. Knelt in the mud in the rain and gave me a whole speech about how he’s changed and he understands now and everywhere else is just places I’m not.” I heard my voice shake. “And then I told him to leave, and he left. First try. No argument.”
“And you’re upset about that.”
“I don’t know what I am.” I sank into the chair by the window, staring at the empty driveway. “I was going to call him today. I had a whole plan. I was going to tell him exactly what I needed and watch what he did. And then he showed up and ruined it.”
“Did he ruin it? Or did he just do the thing you were going to ask him to do anyway?”
“I didn’t ask him to show up here. I didn’t ask him to make speeches in the rain.”
“No. But you told him to go, and he went.” June’s voice was gentle. “That’s not nothing, Nora. That’s a man who’s learning to listen.”
“Or a man who’s learned that the right words and the right gestures can make people forgive him without actually having to change.”
“Could be.” June didn’t argue with me. “Do you want him gone? Because if you do, I know some people who could make that happen. Not in a violent way, just in a ‘every time he tries to come to town his tires go mysteriously flat’ way.”
I almost laughed. “No. I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Well, that’s honest.” The warmth in her voice was like a blanket. “You don’t have to know yet. You don’t have to decide anything right now. Just take it one day at a time and see what he does next.”
“What if he doesn’t do anything?”
“Then you’ve got your answer. And what if he does?”
I put my hand on my stomach, on the secret no one knew except June and Bree and the doctor in the next town over. The baby that was growing while everything else fell apart.
“I don’t know yet.”
“That’s okay.” June’s voice was firm. “Not knowing is allowed. Just don’t wait too long to figure it out.”
After I hung up, I stood at the window and watched the rain drip off the porch roof.
He was gone. He’d actually gone, just like I’d asked, and I had no idea what to do with that information.
But somewhere underneath the anger and the confusion, underneath the fear of trusting him again, there was a tiny flicker that might’ve been hope.
He’d listened.
Maybe, for the first time since he took the director’s chair, he’d actually listened.