Chapter 3
CADE
Her taillights swing out past the gate and then there’s nothing. Just the dark and the cold coming in around my feet.
I close the door. The lamp she left on throws yellow across the floorboards and I stand there a moment too long, like the room’s going to explain something to me if I wait.
It doesn’t.
She sat here waiting for me in the dark while I waited for Ashley to fall asleep.
I go pour a whiskey I don’t want and carry it into the living room and set it down by the lamp, and my hand’s not steady doing it. The glass clicks twice against the wood before it settles.
I sit in her chair. There’s something of hers still in the air over it, that perfume she wears, faint, already fading.
That gets me worse than anything so far. I’m up out of it and standing in the middle of my own living room with nowhere to put myself, whiskey forgotten.
Pierce’s question. My answer. I go back to it because it’s the only piece I can hold still.
Do you still love her?
I don’t know.
True when I said it. True now. I never lied to my wife in that study, never lied to her at all, not once in two years. I keep trying to find some defense in that. She asked me a question and I answered honestly. What else was I supposed to do?
I can still see her face when I said it. And now she’s gone.
Ashley went down against my shoulder halfway through Sienna’s tribute and I had her up before I thought about what I was doing. I keep remembering that, and it doesn’t get any easier to look at.
I carried her out through hundreds of people. Didn’t look back. I didn’t think about my wife.
My stomach does something ugly when I let myself actually think about that, and I have to put a hand flat on the wall, and I stand there breathing through my mouth until it passes.
I check my phone. The message is still there, sent from Ashley’s house, my own words looking back at me.
At Ashley’s. Don’t wait up.
Considerate. I remember thinking that word while I typed it. Considerate.
There’s nothing in it asking how my wife was getting home.
I set the phone down like it’s hot.
Pierce texts at twenty to three. You want to tell me what I watched tonight. I start an answer, get a few words into it, read them back, and they sound like a man building his own defense in real time. I delete them and send tomorrow instead. His answer comes back one word.
Fine.
I don’t have anything left for that fight tonight so I put the phone face down and leave it.
She needs space. That’s what I tell myself, pacing the kitchen tile in my socks. People need space after a night like that. She’ll sleep. I’ll call at noon. We’ll fix this like adults, over coffee, at some restaurant with good lighting where neither of us raises a voice.
Then her voice comes back to me from beside the car, clear as if she’s still standing there.
I’ll send for the rest of my things.
My legs go. Not dramatically. I just find myself sitting down on a kitchen chair without remembering choosing to sit, my heart going too hard, too fast, like I’ve run somewhere.
Nobody sends for their things. People who are furious go to a hotel and come back Sunday humiliated and neither of you mentions it again for a decade.
Sending for your things means it’s over.
It means the decision was made before she ever walked down those stairs, and this house is already an empty stop on her way to a life without me.
I get up because sitting is worse.
It doesn’t make sense. I gave her the truth. She asked me straight out, sitting in the dark like an ambush, and I gave her the decency of an honest answer. Since when did honesty mean packing a suitcase at two in the morning?
I go down to the garage and hit the light. Her bay is empty. I stand in the doorway staring at the bare concrete, trying to remember whether I heard her tell me where she was going.
She didn’t. I asked, and she kept packing.
I go upstairs to our bedroom. I need to see the things she left. I can’t bear the empty space where she should be. There has to be somewhere in this house where it still feels like she’s here.
Two drawers stand open on her side of the dresser. Both empty. She didn’t bother to close them.
Her jewelry box sits shut on top of the dresser. Her ring is still where she left it, beside the box, not in it.
I pick it up.
It’s lighter than I remember. I sit on the edge of the bed with her ring in my palm.
“Sienna.”
I want to hear her answer from the bathroom. I want her to come out wearing that old sweatshirt and ask why I’m sitting here with her ring.
I close my eyes. She asked me if I loved her, and I could have lied. Now I’m sitting in our bedroom wishing she’d come back so I can.
I laugh. One ugly sound, no humor in it anywhere, and then I put a hand over my mouth like I can stuff the rest of it back in, and I finally let myself think the sentence I’ve been outrunning since her taillights disappeared down the drive.
She’s not coming back.
It catches me square in the chest. I sit with it. I make myself choke on it instead of trying to argue it down.
Then I get up, because I can’t stay still, and I put the ring down exactly where she left it, like moving it might make the sentence true faster.
Her closet’s still full. Dresses, coats, the soft things she wears around the house on Sundays. For one stupid moment that almost comforts me, until I see the gala dress hanging by itself.
She came up here between the podium and leaving and hung that dress up properly before she packed to leave me.
I touch the sleeve. Cold under my fingers.
I was six feet from this dress and I can’t put her in it. I can see the fabric right here in my hand. I can’t see her wearing it.
What I remember instead is a morning in the kitchen, her telling me something about a caterer.
Light brown hair already coming down at the back the way it does no matter what she has done to it.
Eyes so dark they read black across a room, and then she turned toward the window and the light got into them and they went brown, warm, lit all the way through.
It gets me every time. Gray sweater, the one with the stretched cuff, and I wanted her, the way I have wanted her since the first time I saw her.
I don’t remember one word about the caterer.
I let go of the sleeve like it burned me.
My side of the room is untouched. Her side looks like a break-in. Standing between the two, I finally understand that this isn’t a fight. This is the whole thing ending. It started long before tonight, and I’m the only one in the house who didn’t see it coming.
I go back downstairs, dump the untouched whiskey down the drain, and hold the glass under the tap until the water runs scalding hot over my knuckles. It stings like hell. Good. Anything is better than naming what’s sitting in my throat.
I walk back into the living room and I reach for the lamp switch out of habit, it’s four in the morning, lamps go off at the end of a night, and my thumb sits there on the switch and doesn’t move.
She left her ring on the dresser. I keep trying to find a reason for that which doesn’t mean she’s finished with me.
I take my hand back and leave the light burning.
I call her before I let myself think about whether I should.
It rings. Once, twice, and I’m pacing with the phone pressed hard enough to my ear that it hurts, five, six, seven, willing her to pick up through sheer force of wanting it, and then it just stops.
There’s no voicemail to pick up, she’s never set one up, just the ringing, and then the line goes dead in my ear.
I call again.