16. Bree
Bree
I was sitting in the passenger seat and, like every evening since Gavin had joined Meat Cute, he was driving me home from the deli.
It had been two weeks since Gavin started working there. By the end of that very first week, he had already established this quiet, unspoken routine, all on his own, without either of us ever discussing it out loud.
After that incredible spa day with Mom, the one where both of us walked out feeling like we’d somehow added a few extra years onto our lives, Gavin started giving me these small things, every single day, just for me to celebrate myself with, just to pamper myself a little.
Some days, I’d be sitting in the little back office of the deli, sending over changes to my latest illustrations for the purple dragon book, and he’d just walk in with a cup of tea for me, set it down, and leave without making a big thing of it.
One day, while I was out front helping with the lunch rush, Gavin came up behind the counter and held out an iPod.
“Here,” he said. “I want you to try something.”
“What is it?”
“There’s a podcast already loaded up. It’s called You, Already Enough.
This woman host, she just talks to other women, every episode, about choosing peace, about actually feeling appreciated instead of waiting around for somebody else to hand it to them.
About how amazing they already are, without having to prove a single thing to anyone.
” He shrugged, a little sheepish. “I heard a clip of it on my drive out here and I immediately thought of you. Figured you could listen while you work today.”
“You’ve been listening to a podcast for women?”
“Don’t tell anyone,” he said, grinning. “Just give it a shot.”
So I did. I plugged the earbuds in and kept them in all day, all through the lunch rush, all through the afternoon lull, and by the time I finally pulled them out that evening, I felt so full of energy, so genuinely, quietly positive, that I actually caught myself smiling at total strangers for absolutely no reason at all.
And of course, every single time Dad asked me to do something around the deli, Gavin would somehow already be there, halfway through doing it himself before I could even get started.
One evening after closing, I found Gavin out in the backyard, setting up two chairs with a cozy little table between them, a soft blanket draped over one of the seats, and a book resting on top of it.
The next day, he volunteered, just like usual, to take over restocking the walk-in cooler for me, and casually suggested I go sit out in those chairs for a while and relax instead.
When I finally sat down, I noticed the book was a collection of poetry about self-appreciation by a poet named Nadia Kessler, someone I’d mentioned loving once, months and months ago, in passing, and apparently he’d remembered.
I knew right away he’d left it there specifically to make me feel appreciated, to give me a real chance to just sit and relax.
I started reading, and I got so completely wrapped up in the words that I genuinely didn’t notice it had gone from afternoon to evening until Gavin came walking back out to find me.
“It’s time to pack up,” he said.
“Already?” I said. “This book is really good, Gavin. Thank you.”
“It’s just a small thing, really,” he said. “You need to know how appreciated you are.” He paused. “Can I drop you home?”
He’d asked me that exact same question every single day since he’d started working there.
He pampered me constantly, but somehow without any expectations attached to it at all.
Sometimes he’d sit with me in the deli office while I worked on my illustrations, and he’d just check his email, or read something on his phone, or crack open a book of his own.
We wouldn’t even say much to each other most of the time.
But that old familiarity, the one from way back before everything fell apart, when we just understood each other without trying, when our whole world felt complete just being in the same room together, that feeling had slowly started coming back to me.
Now, he pulled the car into the little lot outside his studio apartment and came around to open my door for me.
“A walk?” he asked, again, the exact same question he’d asked every single day for the past two weeks.
“Sure,” I said.
We walked the three blocks over to the lake near my parents’ house, the one with the pretty curved wooden bridge across it. We walked side by side, our fingers just barely brushing against each other the whole way.
“Your turn today,” he said.
Every single day since he’d started at the deli, we’d taken this exact walk, and every single time, we’d take turns asking each other questions.
Any question at all. And we’d actually answer them honestly, no dodging, no deflecting.
It felt like rewinding all the way back to that very first night, the so-called one-night stand, back when we told each other absolutely everything with no walls up at all. It was like starting completely over.
He’d asked me about my childhood dreams. He’d asked me what he’d done over the last four years of our marriage that had genuinely disappointed me the most. We’d talked about how unheard I’d felt every single time he dodged the whole conversation about having kids.
We had genuinely talked more, real conversations, in these past two weeks than we had in our entire marriage combined.
“Your turn to ask a question, Bree,” Gavin said.
“That night, at the field,” I said. “Why did you hug Wren the exact same way you hug me?”
The question actually made him physically wince. But ever since we’d started this whole ritual, he hadn’t dodged a single question, not once.
“I was missing you,” he said. “I was missing your presence so badly that night, I genuinely started feeling like there was this huge gap sitting between us, and I was so scared I was losing you completely. I felt lost. And I started feeling like Wren was the only thing keeping me steady. She told me she’d always be there for me, and she said she thought everything would work out fine between you and me, and I was so happy, so genuinely happy, to hear somebody say that out loud, that I just hugged her.
I know now that even that was part of a bigger manipulation on her end.
But in that exact moment, she said the one thing I desperately needed to hear, that there was still hope for me to get you back, to fix things, that everything would eventually go back to normal.
It was pure relief, in that second. But I shouldn’t have done it. I know that now. And I’m sorry.”
He said all of it so plainly. No twisting his words around to try to make me emotional. No dressing it up.
This was exactly what I had wanted from him this entire time.
I felt this knot rise up in my throat, and I swallowed it back down.
“Okay,” I said. “Your turn to ask.”
“Bree,” he said. “I want to restart the documentary. With Lavi running it. But this time, I want the whole thing to be about you. As a dedication to you. As a real appreciation of you. Will you let me do that?”
I stood there on that little bridge, not entirely sure I’d actually heard him right.
Gavin wanted to make his own life’s documentary about me?
Had I actually just heard that correctly?