Chapter 11 #3
“You know that? Two months. Every single night. And it was never about me. It was never going to be about me. He just wanted someone to tell him he was a good man. That’s all he ever wanted.
Someone to say, you’re not a bad man, Ryan, you’re a tired one.
” Her mouth twisted. “He’s so small, Scarlett.
You have no idea how small he is. I could have had anyone.
And I wasted two months holding that man’s hand while he cried about his wife. ”
Kerr said, “That’s enough,” and the agents walked her out through the tall glass doors into the white sun.
* * *
Scarlett stood in the ballroom doorway.
She had thought she would feel triumph. She had imagined this moment on the island, and on Jess’s couch, and in her locked bedroom. She’d thought it would feel like touching the wall at the end of a race.
It didn’t. It felt like something much stranger.
It was never about me.
It wasn’t a love story. It had never been a love story.
Her husband had not fallen in love with a brilliant, beautiful doctor who understood him better than his wife.
He had not found some great passion. He had just been small.
Tired and small and scared and lonely, and he had wanted somebody at one in the morning to tell him he was a good man, and Alexis had been awake, and willing, and Scarlett had been asleep upstairs.
That was so much worse.
And it was so much better.
It was the difference between being replaced and being neglected. She had spent weeks thinking she had been replaced. She hadn’t been. There was no better woman. There had only ever been a man who had stopped showing up, and a woman who had used it.
Scarlett found that she could breathe.
* * *
Ryan found out from the news, like everyone else.
He was at the house when she got home. He was standing in the living room in front of the television with the remote hanging from his hand, watching Alexis being walked out of the Bayfront Club in handcuffs. He turned when he heard the side door.
“You were there,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You did that.”
“Kerr did that. And Troy.” She put her keys down. “Troy saw her come up from the stern with my phone. He told the Bahamian police. And then Luke made him sign a different statement.”
She watched Ryan hear it. She watched her husband understand what his brother had done. He sat down very slowly on the arm of the couch, like his legs had stopped working.
“Luke,” he said.
“Luke.”
He put his hand over his mouth.
* * *
She told him that night.
It was late. They were in the kitchen, because they were always in the kitchen. Alexis’s arrest was still on every channel. Kerr had called twice. Jess had called six times.
“I’m moving out,” Scarlett said.
He was at the sink. He went very still.
“Not because of the texts,” she said. “Not because of Luke. Not because of anything you did this week.” She took a breath.
“You were—this week, you were—” She couldn’t finish it.
“I just need to know what I want. When nobody’s trying to kill me.
When nobody’s watching. When there’s no FBI and no press and no locked doors and no house full of people who think I’m crazy.
I need to know what I want when I’m just a person again.
And I can’t find that out in this house. Not with you in it.”
He dried his hands on a dish towel. He folded the towel. He put it down.
“Okay,” he said.
She waited for the rest. For the please. For stay. For give me another chance, give me a week, give me ten minutes.
It didn’t come.
“When?” he asked.
“Tomorrow. I’ll go to Jess’s until I find a place.”
“Okay,” Ryan said again. His voice was barely steady. “Then I’ll help you pack.”
* * *
He carried every box.
They packed in the morning, early, with the sun just coming up over the bay. She didn’t take much. Clothes. Her old swim parka. Her goggles. The gray sweater, which she didn’t let herself think about. A box of SwimSafe files from her desk. Jess’s car was in the drive with the trunk open.
Ryan carried the boxes down the stairs one by one, and out the front door, and down the drive, and fitted them into Jess’s trunk and back seat like a puzzle. He didn’t talk. He didn’t make it slow. He didn’t ask her even once to stay.
When the last box was in, he shut the trunk.
Jess got in the driver’s seat and stared very hard at her phone.
Scarlett stood in the drive. Ryan stood a few feet away. There were no cameras at the gate this morning. Just the birds, and the sprinklers going on next door, and the two of them.
“You didn’t ask me to stay,” she said.
“No.”
“Why not?”
He looked at her for a long time.
“Because you asked me for something,” he said. “You asked to find out what you want. And for nine years, every time you asked me for something, I was in the middle of something else. So I’m not in the middle of anything. Go find out.”
She got in the car.
He stood in the drive with his hands in his pockets and watched them go, all the way down to the gate, and she watched him in the side mirror until the gate closed and she couldn’t see him anymore.