14. Hunt
— ? —
Hunt
I’d rehearsed this conversation a hundred times.
None of that mattered now.
The clinic smelled like her, hay and the soap she’d used for years, and my hands had been sweating since the parking lot and hadn’t stopped.
Two months of therapy in a beige office with a dying succulent on the windowsill, and the one thing that had stuck was what the therapist told me the first week.
Confession isn’t for the person confessing.
If I walked in here to feel better, I’d do it wrong.
I’d make it about my own absolution, the way I’d made everything about myself since the day I took the title.
So I wasn’t here to feel better. I was here to put the truth in her hands and let her do whatever she needed with it.
Nora was sitting in a chair at her desk, her hand resting on her stomach, waiting for an explanation I should’ve given her months ago.
The yellow wildflower I’d left on her doorstep was in a cup of water beside her, and I didn’t know what that meant, couldn’t let myself hope it meant anything at all.
“About a month before the accident,” I started, and my voice cracked immediately. “A month before the bear, I noticed you were sick.”
She didn’t interrupt. Just watched me with those green eyes that had always seen straight through me.
“It was a Tuesday morning. You were making coffee, and I was watching you because I was always watching you, and you went pale at the smell. Turned green for just a second before you caught yourself. I thought maybe you were just tired, but then you were sick the next morning too, and you tried to hide it, but I heard you in the bathroom.”
“I remember.” Her voice was flat. “I thought it was food poisoning.”
“I didn’t think it was food poisoning.” The words were thorns in my throat. “I thought maybe you were pregnant.”
Her expression changed. A flicker of understanding that made me want to stop talking, to take it all back, to pretend I’d never started this confession.
“You suspected.” Her voice was very quiet. “A month before that bear, you suspected I was carrying your child, and you never said a word.”
“I wanted a baby with you so badly I’d never once said it out loud.
” The truth poured out of me, ugly and raw and years overdue.
“I wanted it so much that I was afraid to say it, because our marriage was already strained, and I could feel you pulling away, and I knew if I added that weight it might break us completely. So I just hoped. Watched you for signs. Told myself I’d speak up when I was sure. ”
“But you never said anything.”
“I couldn’t.” I was pacing now, unable to stay still.
“Because if I was wrong, if you weren’t pregnant, if it was just wishful thinking, then I’d have to face the fact that I’d built up this hope for nothing.
And if I was right, I couldn’t risk you.
If you were pregnant, I couldn’t put you in front of a bear.
Couldn’t send you into fires or floods or any of the hundred dangerous situations we faced every month. ”
“So you decided for me.” Her voice was ice.
“I decided for you.” The admission was poison on my tongue. “I rewrote every roster to keep you out of danger. I told myself it was temporary, that I’d speak up as soon as I was sure, but I kept not being sure enough, and the days kept passing, and then we got the call about the bear.”
“And you chose Sasha.”
“She was certified. Available. She meant nothing to me. I needed someone who could do the job without putting you at risk, and she was the obvious choice.”
“She told everyone she was your wife.” Nora’s voice cracked for the first time. “She stood in our locker room and called herself your wife where I could hear it, and the way things had gotten, nobody in that building would’ve corrected her, least of all you.”
“I know.” The word was useless and I said it anyway, because it was the only true thing I had left to give her.
“She whispered poison in my ear for weeks. Told me you were pulling away. Told me I was replaceable. And the whole time, you had a reason for everything you were doing, and you couldn’t tell me.”
I made myself hold still and take all of it. “Every word of that’s true.”
“I begged you for the truth in a hospital room, Hunt. I sat beside your bed and begged you to explain why you’d replaced me, and you chose your secret over me.”
“I know.” I stopped pacing. Made myself face her. “I was going to say it. That last week, I’d finally decided I’d ask you straight out, tell you what I suspected and what I hoped. But the bear woke up before I got the chance.”
“That’s your excuse?” Her voice rose, the ice cracking into heat. “The bear woke up?”
“It’s not an excuse. There is no excuse.”
“You’re right.” She stood up, her hands clenched at her sides. “There is no excuse for any of this. You suspected I was carrying your child, and you couldn’t say it to my face. You didn’t protect me, Hunt. You decided for me. You treated me as if I was fragile instead of someone you married.”
“I did all of it.”
“I told you I was tired.” Tears were running down her face now, and each one felt like a knife in my chest. “I told you I was hurting, that our marriage was falling apart, and you dismissed me to my face, and the whole time you had a reason. And the reason was that you still couldn’t talk to your own wife. ”
I took it. All of it. Every word she hurled at me, every accusation I deserved.
“You’re right.” My voice was barely a whisper. “Every word. I was wrong, and I’m sorry. I knew you were upset. You told me you were upset. And I convinced myself I was protecting you when the truth is I was protecting myself.”
“Protecting yourself from what?”
“From losing you.” The admission ripped out of me, bloody and raw.
“Saying it out loud made it possible to lose it. The baby, the hope, you. As long as I kept it inside, as long as I didn’t speak the words, then maybe it’d all be okay.
Maybe I could control it. Maybe I wouldn’t have to face the fact that I was failing at the most important thing I’d ever done. ”
“And you lost it anyway.”
“I lost you anyway.” I felt the tears on my own face now, couldn’t stop them, didn’t try. “I lost everything anyway. Every choice I made to protect you pushed you further away, and by the time I realized what I’d done, you were already gone.”
Silence fell between us.
Nora stood with her arms crossed over her stomach, over the baby I hadn’t known about, over the secret she’d been carrying alone for months. Her face was wet and her jaw was set and she looked at me, and her face gave me nothing.
“I don’t know if I can trust you again.” Her voice was steady, which was somehow worse than if she’d been screaming. “You made me feel awful. Invisible. Replaceable. For a long time.”
“Longer than I let myself count.”
“I don’t know if you do.” She shook her head slowly.
“You think you understand because you’ve said the words, because you’ve sat in therapy and processed your feelings, but you weren’t there, Hunt.
You weren’t the one standing in that locker room hearing another woman claim your husband, or lying in bed alone wondering why your partner couldn’t look at you, or driving away from everything you’d built because staying would’ve destroyed you. ”
“No.” I forced myself to hold her gaze. “I wasn’t. And I can’t undo any of it. I can’t take back the choices I made or the pain I caused. All I can do is try to be different going forward.”
“Trying is where you should’ve started.”
“Then tell me where to go from here.”
She was quiet a while. I watched her hand move over her stomach, an unconscious gesture of protection, and I felt my heart crack in my chest. That was my baby in there. Our baby. And she’d been carrying it alone because I’d driven her away.
“The appointments.” Her voice was barely above a whisper. “You can come to the doctor’s appointments. That’s it. That’s the inch.”
I took a breath that felt like drowning.
“Okay. The appointments.”
“I mean it, Hunt. Just the appointments. You don’t get to show up at my house, or make more speeches in the rain, or leave flowers and notes and try to romance your way back into my life.”
“Okay.” I didn’t argue a single line of it. I took each condition like she was handing me a gift I hadn’t earned.
“I’m not forgiving you. I’m not saying this changes anything. I’m saying you can be present for the medical parts of this pregnancy because you’re the father and that counts, even if I’m not sure for what yet.”
“I understand.”
She searched my face for lies or manipulation or any of the things I’d given her reason to expect. I held still and let her look, hoping she could see the truth I was too broken to articulate.
“The next one’s Thursday at ten.” She turned away, dismissing me. “Don’t be late.”
I walked to the door. Stopped with my hand on the frame.
“Nora.”
She didn’t turn around. “What?”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet. You haven’t seen me during hormonal mood swings.”
The ghost of a joke. Barely there, probably not meant to give me hope.
I took it anyway.
“I’ll see you Thursday.”
I walked out of the clinic into the afternoon sun, and for the first time in months, the world didn’t feel like it was ending.
She’d given me an inch. One inch, out of all the miles I needed to travel.
I was going to make it count.