Chapter 14
SIENNA
The knock startles me badly enough that I lose my place on the page.
I look at the clock on the mantel. A little after nine. None of the women would come this late without calling. For a moment I sit with the book open across my knees and listen, wondering if I mistook something outside for knuckles against wood.
The knock comes again.
I leave the book facedown on the sofa and cross the room. Rain has been coming down since late afternoon, hard enough that I checked the radar twice and moved the chair away from the west window when water started pushing beneath the old frame. Whoever is outside chose a miserable night for it.
I look through the peephole.
Cade stands on my porch.
For a moment I don’t open the door. I don’t even move.
He is soaked. His shirt is dark against his shoulders, his hair is plastered back from his forehead, and water runs from his jaw onto his collar. I cannot see his car. The low part of the turnaround flooded before dinner. He must have parked on the road and walked down.
He looks terrible. Not the polished version of terrible I saw after too much travel or a bad week before a closing.
He looks thinner. Tired in a way I have never seen him allow anyone to witness.
There are shadows under his eyes, and something about the set of his mouth makes my stomach tighten before I remember I am no longer responsible for it.
Has he eaten?
The thought comes so fast I hate myself for it.
I unlock the door. Wind drives rain in under the porch roof the moment I open it, and Cade looks at me through the screen. For once, he doesn’t seem to know what expression to put on his face.
“Why are you here, Cade?”
“Because I owe you an answer.”
My fingers tighten on the edge of the door. “You don’t owe me anything.”
He looks as if he might argue, then doesn’t. It would be easier if he argued.
Rain runs off his sleeves and falls steadily from his fingertips.
He shivers once, a small involuntary movement he would deny if I mentioned it, and my anger collides with a lifetime of being the woman who gets up when someone else is uncomfortable.
I do not want him in this house. I do not want him standing in rooms he never knew existed, looking at the life I had before I learned to arrange myself around his.
But I cannot stand here and watch him shake on my porch either.
I push the screen open. “Come in before you drown on my porch.”
He stops on the mat just inside the door. I get a towel from the linen closet and hand it to him at arm’s length, and he takes it the same way, careful not to touch me, and rubs it over his hair and down the back of his neck.
Then he looks around. He can’t help it. Anyone would.
The old reflex rises before I can stop it.
I start assembling explanations for things he hasn’t criticized.
The sofa came with the house. The lamp has a scorch mark because the wiring was bad when I bought the place.
Two of the seascapes are objectively ugly and I know it.
The kitchen is small, but I never needed?—
I draw a breath to speak, then let it out without saying anything.
Cade glances at me. “What?”
“Nothing.”
His gaze moves over the room once more. If he thinks it is beneath him, he can think it in silence.
He folds the towel over once and keeps it in his hands. “You asked me something the night you left.”
I know immediately what he means. The hurt is right there again.
“Don’t.”
“Sienna.”
“You came all the way up here for this? In this? You couldn’t leave it alone?”
“I didn’t come here to hurt you.”
“Then why are you standing in my house talking about her?”
“I’m trying to answer you.”
“I don’t want your answer anymore.” I fold my arms because otherwise my hands are going to shake. “It doesn’t matter whether you love her. It never mattered.”
The lie tastes bitter immediately. I don’t think he believes me, and I resent him for catching this one truth when he missed so many others.
“The marriage wasn’t real,” I say. “It was an arrangement. It solved my grandfather’s problem and gave your family the stake it wanted, and now it’s over. The papers just put it in writing.” My arms are folded so hard my hands hurt. “Did you bring them?”
“Don’t say that.” The words come out hard enough to stop me. He takes one step toward me and catches himself. “God, Sienna, don’t say that. It isn’t over.”
“It is.”
“Give me a chance.”
I stare at him. “A chance.”
“A chance to?—”
“A chance for what, Cade?”
He opens his mouth and nothing comes, and that hurts more than it should.
My eyes are burning. I blink hard, because I will not stand here and cry for him again — not while he looks at me as though the right answer is somewhere in this room and he only needs another minute to locate it.
“You already broke my heart.” My voice breaks anyway, and now I am furious about that too.
“Haven’t I suffered enough? You had me. I was there.
Every morning, every dinner, every event I stood beside you at while you looked through me to see who had come into the room.
I kept telling myself you were a good man because you weren’t cruel to me, and I made that enough, because I loved you and I didn’t know what else to do. ”
“Sienna—”
“No. You don’t get to come here after I finally left and ask me for another chance to survive you.” I wipe under one eye, angry at my own hand for needing to. “What is left of me that you would like a chance at?”
Cade closes his eyes.
His breath catches halfway in and doesn’t come back out cleanly. When he opens his eyes, they are wet.
Rain, I tell myself. His hair is still dripping. His collar is soaked. Water is still sliding down the side of his neck. It is rain. I need it to be rain.
“I never meant to hurt you,” he says.
A laugh comes out of me with nothing funny in it.
“Never meaning to hurt me would require caring about me at all.” I hear the cruelty as I say it, and for once I don’t call it back. “Which you don’t.”
He flinches. Actually flinches, and I have to look away.
“Sienna, please.”
“You need to leave.”
Silence stretches. Cade looks at me for several seconds, and I can see that he still has something in him to say. For once he does not insist on saying it.
“All right.”
He sets the towel on the bench and opens the door. The rain is louder immediately. He steps onto the porch, and I am already reaching for the door when he stops with one hand on the screen, his back to me.
“The answer is I don’t.”
I think he means me.
Something inside me drops so hard I have to grip the doorframe. Of course he doesn’t care. Why would he? I am the one who kept turning his decency into love because I needed it to be there.
“You don’t care that you hurt me.” It barely makes it across the porch.
Cade turns. “No. God, no. Ashley.” His face is running with rain and he doesn’t wipe it. “I don’t love Ashley. You asked me that night and I said I didn’t know. I know now. I never loved her. I should have known it ten years ago.”
I stare at him through the screen. “You drove all the way here to tell me you don’t love her.”
“I drove here because you deserved the answer when you asked, and I didn’t have it.”
“That’s convenient.”
“I know.”
The lack of defense catches me flat. I stand there with my hand on the frame and nothing to swing at.
“I was wrong about her,” he says. “About all of it. I didn’t know what love was, Sienna. I thought I did. I thought I’d already had it and lost it, and everything after was just terms. I didn’t know what it was until?—“
His fist closes at his side.
He looks away, out at the black where the water is, and shakes his head once, and does not finish it.
Until what?
The question arrives before I can defend myself from it. Until when? Until who?
I hate the hope that moves in me. It is small and vicious and alive despite everything I have done to kill it.
Thunder rolls somewhere offshore. He is going to walk back through that — a cold car, wet clothes, ninety minutes of coast road with his eyes looking the way they look.
“You can take the couch.”
Cade stops moving altogether.
Then he turns and looks at me, and the control I have spent my whole marriage reading simply is not there. His face is nakedly, openly stricken. I have never seen this man before.
And I know where his mind has gone, because mine has gone there too.
“Cade.”
“Our wedding night.” His voice is barely there. “I’m sorry.”
He rubs a hand over his mouth, eyes fixed somewhere beyond my shoulder. “I thought I was doing the right thing. I thought if I didn’t touch you, if I didn’t assume anything, I was being decent.”
“You offered to take the couch.”
“I know.”
“I thought you didn’t want me.”
His eyes close briefly. “I know that now too.”
The old humiliation rises so fast it shocks me. That beautiful ridiculous hotel room. The cream silk. The care I had taken with my hair, and the way I stood in that doorway pretending it didn’t matter while my husband offered to sleep somewhere else.
Cade looks at me again.
“God, Sienna. You were the most beautiful woman I had ever seen.”
I can’t answer.
“I wanted you.” His voice is rough. “That’s the part I can’t forgive myself for. I wanted you, and I still managed to make you believe the opposite.”
The porch light catches the water running from his hair. I don’t know what to do with any of this. I don’t know what it changes, or whether it changes anything at all.
“The couch is dry,” I say finally.
Cade looks through the doorway. For a moment I think he will come back inside. A week ago he would have. He would have heard a practical offer, accepted a practical solution, and thanked me in the morning.
Instead he looks at my face.
“I should go.”
The relief that moves through me is tangled so tightly with disappointment that I cannot separate them.
“You don’t have to.”
“I know. That’s why I should.”
He steps off the porch.
“Cade.”
He stops in the rain.
I don’t know why I said his name. I have nothing ready to follow it. He waits anyway, getting wetter, and I think of the unfinished sentence, and my heart does one stupid painful thing against my ribs.
“Drive carefully.”
His expression shifts, almost breaking again. “I will.”
He walks into the rain. I stand in the doorway until he is past the reach of the porch light, and then I close the door and lock it, and for a long time I don’t move.
I didn’t know what it was until?—
Until what?
Until who?
I know which answer I want.