18. Lena
LENA
I went to the diner.
I told myself I was just going to look one more time, to see if anything had changed since the last time I'd walked past. That was a lie. I knew what I was doing. I parked down the block and sat in the car for five minutes before I made myself get out.
The door was unlocked when I tried it.
Inside, the smell was different. Not sawdust and paint like before. The air was cleaner now, sharper, like someone had opened the windows and let the cold in. My boots sounded loud on the floor as I walked in and stopped just past the threshold.
Theo stood at the far end of the room, near the counter. He had a paintbrush in one hand and a rag in the other, and there was a can of paint sitting open on the floor beside him. He looked up when he heard me. He didn't say anything. Neither did I.
I'd told myself I wouldn't come here if he was working. I'd convinced myself he wouldn't be here at all, that maybe he'd given up or handed the job off to someone else. But there he was, paint on his hands and the front of his shirt, and I couldn't make myself turn around and leave.
The booths along the wall were finished.
The cracked vinyl was gone, replaced with deep green leather that looked soft even from where I stood.
The stitching was clean, the seams straight, and the wood frames had been sanded smooth and stained dark.
The counter was done too, the blond wood I'd seen half-built now running the full length of the room, the surface sealed and glossy under the overhead lights.
The stools were back, six of them bolted to the floor in front of the counter, their chrome bases polished until they shone.
He'd cleared everything out. The broken chairs, the overturned tables, the layers of dust and grime — all of it was gone.
The floor tiles I'd seen mismatched and patched were clean now, the grout scrubbed white.
The walls were half-painted, the lower section a warm cream that stopped in a neat line about four feet up.
Above it the old water-stained plaster was still visible, waiting.
The kitchen door in back stood open. I could see new stainless steel inside, a stove that looked like it had just been installed, shelving that wasn't there before.
There were tools scattered on the floor near the door, a level and a tape measure and a box of screws, like he'd been in the middle of something when I walked in.
God, he'd done all of this.
Theo set the paintbrush down on the edge of the paint can and wiped his hands on the rag. He didn't move toward me. He stayed where he was, near the counter, and I stayed near the door, and the space between us felt like something I couldn't cross even if I wanted to.
"Lena," he said.
Just my name. Nothing else. His voice was quiet, careful, like he thought I might bolt if he said the wrong thing. Maybe I would have.
I should have said something. Asked him what he was doing, or why he was here, or any of the hundred questions that had been sitting in my chest since Maggie first told me about this place.
But I couldn't make the words come. I just stood there like an idiot, staring at the booths and the counter and the paint on the walls, trying to make sense of it.
He crossed the room. Not all the way to me — he stopped a few feet away, close enough that I could see the paint smudged on his forearm and the exhaustion sitting heavy in his shoulders. He looked like he hadn't slept in days. Maybe he hadn't.
"I didn't know you'd be here," I said. My voice came out rough, unsteady. I hated how uncertain I sounded.
"I'm here most days." He said it plainly, like it was just a fact and not something that made my throat go tight. "I didn't think you'd come back."
I swallowed hard and looked past him at the counter. "I wasn't going to."
"But you did."
"Yeah." I met his eyes. "I did."
He gestured toward one of the booths, the closest one, the leather still so new it probably hadn't been sat in yet. "Will you sit with me?"
I hesitated. Everything in me said this was a bad idea, that I should leave now before this turned into something I couldn't take back. But I was already here. I'd already walked through the door. Leaving didn't seem possible anymore.
"Okay," I said.
Theo slid into the booth and I sat down across from him. The leather was soft under me, and the table between us was solid, real, the kind of thing that would last. He didn't reach for me. He kept his hands on the table, fingers loosely curled, and I kept mine in my lap.
We sat there for a minute without talking.
I didn't know what to say. I didn't know what he wanted me to say.
The quiet stretched out between us, not comfortable but not unbearable either, and I found myself looking at his hands.
They were rough, calloused in places I didn't remember them being before.
There was a cut across his knuckle that looked recent, and paint under his nails he hadn't scrubbed out yet.
"You've been doing this yourself," I said. It wasn't a question.
"Yes."
"All of it?"
"All of it." He glanced around the room, then back at me. "The floor, the walls, the booths. The counter. I'm still working on the painting, and the kitchen needs another week or two, but the rest is done."
I stared at him. "Why?"
"Because it needed to be done."
"That's not an answer, Theo."
He was quiet for a long moment, his gaze steady on mine. Then he said, "Because this place mattered to you. It mattered to us. I let it go, the same way I let everything else go, and I wanted to bring it back."
My chest ached. I didn't want to feel this, didn't want to let his words land the way they were landing, but I couldn't stop it. "You've been doing this for months."
His voice was low, even. "I started a week after you told me you wanted a divorce."
God. I pressed my lips together and looked down at the table, blinking hard against the burn in my eyes. He'd been here the whole time. Working. Rebuilding this place with his own hands while I was at Maggie's convincing myself he didn't care, that he'd already moved on.
"I don't understand," I said, and my voice cracked. "You had an affair. You chose her. Why would you do this?"
"Lena—"
"No." I looked up at him, and I could feel the tears starting, hot and furious. "You don't get to sit here and act like you're fixing things when you broke them in the first place. You don't get to rebuild a diner and pretend that makes it okay."
"I'm not pretending anything." His voice was rough now, strained. "I know what I did. I know I wasn't there. I know I made you feel like you didn't matter, like you were invisible in your own marriage, and I will spend the rest of my life regretting that."
I sucked in a breath. He'd never said it like that before. Never laid it out so plainly, with all the blame on himself and none of it on me.
"I can't undo it," he said. "But I can do this. I can show you that I'm not the man I was when you left me, that I'm not going to stop trying just because it's hard or because you've already signed the papers."
A tear slipped down my cheek and I wiped it away, angry at myself for crying, angry at him for making me feel this much. "This doesn't fix it."
"I know."
"It doesn't mean I forgive you."
"I know," he said again, quieter this time.
I wanted to yell at him. I wanted to tell him he was too late, that he'd already lost me and no amount of work on this building was going to change that. But the words wouldn't come. Because I wasn't sure they were true anymore.
"I miss you," I said, and it came out like a confession, small and broken. "I hate that I miss you. I hate that I came here today because I wanted to see you and not just the diner. I hate that I still—" I stopped, swallowing the rest of it. I couldn't say it. Not yet.
"Lena." He said my name like it hurt. "I miss you too. Every single day. Every hour of it."
I looked at him, really looked at him, and saw the exhaustion and the paint and the cuts on his hands, and I thought about him here alone, working in the cold, rebuilding the place where we used to sit and talk and plan a future that felt impossibly far away now.
He'd done this. Not for a camera, not for his reputation, not for anyone else. For me.
Before I could think about it, before I could talk myself out of it, I stood up. He stood too, uncertain, and I stepped around the table and into his arms.
He caught me, his hands coming up to my back, pulling me in close.
I pressed my face into his chest and felt him exhale, shaky and uneven, like he'd been holding his breath for months and had just now let it go.
He smelled like paint and sawdust and something underneath that was just him, familiar in a way that made my chest crack open.
God, I'd missed this. I'd missed him.
His hand came up to the back of my head, his fingers threading into my hair, and for a minute we just stood there, holding on to each other like we were drowning. My hands fisted in his shirt and I could feel his heartbeat against my cheek, fast and hard, matching my own.
Then reality crashed back in.
I pulled away. Not far, just enough to put space between us. He sat back down in the booth, his hands falling to his sides. I stepped back until I felt the edge of the booth behind me.
"I can't do this," I said. My voice was shaking. "I can't let myself believe this is real."
"Lena—"
"No. Listen to me." I wrapped my arms around myself, trying to hold it together.
"You're here now. You're doing this now.
But what happens in six months? What happens when the cameras call you back, or when the next big project comes up, or when you get bored of playing the devoted husband?
What happens when you decide this was enough and you go back to the way things were? "
"I'm not going back."
"You don't know that." My throat was so tight it hurt to talk. "You think you won't, but you don't know. And I can't—I can't go through this again. I can't give you everything I have and watch you forget I exist. I can't be that person again."
He didn't argue. He just sat there, his hands loose on the table, his face drawn and pale under the lights. "What do you want me to do?"
"I don't know." I shook my head, blinking hard against the fresh wave of tears. "I don't know what I want. I just know I'm terrified that if I let myself believe you've changed, I'll wake up one day and find out I was wrong."
"Then don't believe it yet," he said, his voice so quiet I almost didn't hear him. "Just let me keep showing you. That's all I'm asking."
I wanted to say yes. God, I wanted to. But the fear was louder than anything else, louder than the part of me that still loved him, louder than the ache in my chest that said I'd just walked away from the one thing I wanted most.
"I have to go," I said.
He didn't try to stop me. He just nodded, once. I walked past him, past the counter and the booths and the half-painted walls, and pushed through the door into the cold. The air hit me like a slap and I sucked in a breath, trying to steady myself.
I didn't look back.
I got in my car and sat there with my hands on the steering wheel, shaking. My face was wet and I wiped at it with the heel of my hand, furious and heartbroken and so tired I didn't know how I was going to drive.
He hadn't asked me to stay. He hadn't begged, hadn't pushed, hadn't demanded anything. He'd just let me go.
I started the car and pulled away from the curb, and in the rearview mirror I saw the diner receding behind me, its windows glowing warm against the winter gray.
He was still in there. Still working. Still waiting.