Chapter 8 #2
He didn't understand that the disease was the fact that I had to be scheduled in the first place.
He didn't comprehend that a marriage couldn't survive on the leftover scraps of time he managed to sweep off his boardroom table.
Treating the symptom of my absence without ever acknowledging the terminal rot of his own ambition wouldn't work.
He still believed that a single afternoon could compensate for years of systemic neglect.
"Gwen? Are you listening to me?" Reid demanded, a sharp note of frustration bleeding through the static when I failed to immediately validate his operational fix.
Wind off the water suddenly picked up, howling across the bluff and whipping my messy hair wildly around my face. The gust slammed into the phone's microphone, scattering his next sentence into disjointed, electronic fragments.
"...need you to just come home... overreacting to the situation... we can fix this..."
Literal static crackling through the small speaker perfectly mirrored the vast, unbridgeable emotional disconnect lying between us.
We were speaking entirely different languages.
He was speaking a language of efficiency, schedule boundaries, and strategic concessions.
I was speaking a language of intimacy, emotional safety, and actual partnership.
I was standing on a cliff on an isolated island, my hands bleeding from the thorns of a life I was trying to rip out by the roots, and he was sitting in a temperature-controlled executive suite, trying to manage my heartbreak like a hostile corporate takeover.
I suddenly realized I no longer had the energy or the desire to translate his words.
Listening to him try to manipulate my feelings from his office, listening to the absolute arrogance of a man who assumed he could just throw an afternoon of his time at a broken marriage and demand it heal, I felt the very last reserves of my fight drain completely away.
Anger I had been desperately trying to summon all morning vanished, sinking into the damp coastal dirt beneath my boots. Panic that had gripped my chest since I walked out of the penthouse evaporated into the thin coastal air.
I didn't feel angry. I didn't feel panicked.
I just felt tired.
"Reid," I said quietly, pitching my voice just loud enough to cut through the wind and the electronic hiss of the connection.
"...already told the legal team to push the my meetings until Monday..." he was saying, still operating on his own relentless momentum.
"Reid, stop," I said, putting a firm, immovable wall of finality into the single syllable.
That abrupt shift in my tone finally penetrated his armor. The rapid-fire excuses ceased. The line went silent, save for the crackling static of the weak signal.
"Your apologies don't mean anything," I told him, my voice completely devoid of anger, stripped down to a calm, hollow truth. "They don't mean anything to me because you don't even know what you are apologizing for."
"I just listed exactly what I'm apologizing for, Gwen," he countered, the defensive irritation instantly returning to his voice. "I apologized for the necklace. I apologized for missing the weekend. I am actively offering you a solution. I am trying to give you exactly what you asked for."
"I didn't ask for a scheduled meeting on Friday afternoon," I replied, wrapping my free arm around my torso to ward off the breeze. "I asked for a husband. And you don't have the capacity to be one anymore."
"That is entirely unfair," Reid snapped, the static popping sharply as his volume increased.
"I just secured a massive manufacturing facility that guarantees our financial security for the rest of our lives.
I am building an empire for us, and you are throwing a marriage away because a consultant bought a piece of jewelry.
You are not thinking logically. You need to come back to the city so we can handle this rationally. "
"I am not something for you to handle, Reid," I said, staring at a white-capped wave breaking violently against a jagged sea stack far below the bluff. "And I am not coming back to Seattle."
Silence stretched over the connection, long and agonizing, as my words finally registered in his brain.
"Gwen," he said, his voice suddenly dropping the corporate cadence, a sliver of genuine, unadulterated fear finally cracking through the polished veneer. "What are you saying?"
"I am saying that I am done competing with your ambition," I told him quietly, tears finally rising to burn the back of my eyes, though my voice remained remarkably steady. "I am done starving to death while you conquer the world. I need space, Reid. I need actual, permanent space."
"You have space," he argued frantically, the static nearly swallowing his words. "You are at the lighthouse. Take the rest of the week. Stay on the island. But I am coming out there on Friday, and we are going to fix this. I am not letting you walk away."
"Don't come out here on Friday," I instructed, my grip tightening on the smooth edges of the phone. "If you drive out here, if you try to manage me, I will leave the island entirely. Do not come."
"Gwen, you cannot just shut me out!" he shouted, the panic fully taking over. "We are married! You cannot just turn off your phone and walk away from this!"
"I already did," I whispered.
Before he could launch a counter-argument, before he could leverage his brilliance to twist my resolve, I pulled the phone away from my ear.
Staring at his name on the bright screen for one agonizing second, I mourned the brilliant, messy inventor I had fallen in love with, and then I firmly tapped the red button.
Call disconnected, severing the connection instantly.
I didn't stop there. Pressing the volume button on the side of the device, I held it down until the ringer was muted completely, ensuring that the machine would remain entirely silent no matter how many times he tried to dial.
Lowering my arm, I let the coastal wind roar across the bluff. It filled the silence left by his absence, whipping my hair wildly around my face.
Turning my back on the ocean, I walked slowly away from the cliff edge, back to the flat, lichen-covered rock. I placed the muted phone face down against the cold stone, leaving it to bake in the afternoon sun.
Picking up the oversized leather work gloves from the pile of discarded vegetation, I pulled them over my taped hands, adjusting the thick material over my knuckles. I walked back to the stone retaining wall, stepping over the piles of ripped roots and torn leaves.
Reaching down into the damp dirt, I wrapped my gloved hands around the thickest, most deeply entrenched blackberry vine I could find, and I went back to work.