Chapter 2 #2
I release the glass. I want my hands free for this. I rehearsed it in the car, in the mirror, in the shower this morning while I was shaving closer than I have in months, and now that it’s here all the careful architecture falls away and I just say the true thing that’s on my chest.
“I owe you an apology. For all of it. Our entire marriage.” She opens her mouth and I keep going, gently, because if I stop I’ll lose my nerve.
“I understand why you left. I’ve had a long time to understand it.
And I understand why you waited—why you stayed until I was back on my feet after Kesara.
” The word lands flat between us; she doesn’t know what it means and never will, just that it’s the place I went to and came back wrong from.
“I was a mess. I was hurt. I was distracted. I don’t think I knew how bad it was until I was through it.
You held the whole thing together while I put myself back together without any regard for how you were doing, and then it was only once I could stand on my own, you let go.
That was—God, Lyss, that was more grace than I deserved. ”
Her eyes have gone bright. She’s looking at me like I’m something precious she’s about to drop. But I continue to plough through my monologue.
“I know why you really left. I know, now, why I didn’t deserve you.
I didn’t prioritize you or our relationship.
I gave you a husband who was either gone or guarding the door.
I didn’t give you the family you wanted.
” I make myself say the next part, the part I never said when it would have mattered, because she should hear it even if it’s a decade late.
“I was scared to. I kept thinking, what kind of man brings a kid into the world and then goes to work knowing he probably won’t come back?
I thought I was protecting you by saying no to a baby.
But it was cowardly. I was just leaving you alone in a marriage and calling it good sense and caution. ”
The wine sits untouched in front of her.
“But I’m not that man anymore. I’ve changed, and not in the way people say that when they want something.
I mean it. I’m ready to put a family before the job.
I’ve seen the most hardened man go soft for love.
” Linc, of course I’m talking about Linc and Eden.
In this moment, that man is my role model.
“Look, whatever it takes to open the door to us again, I want to. It is not too late for us, Melissa. I don’t believe that.
I refuse to. I saw on your socials that you’re single.
I’m single. I want you. I just need to know if… ”
I run out of speech. My heart is going like I just cleared a stairwell. There it is. All of it, on the table next to the soy dish. The question I’m too nervous to ask hangs between us.
She doesn’t answer right away. Dammit. Perhaps that churchy hug was exactly what I first thought.
“Say something, please?” I plead as manly as I can, which doesn’t come across manly at all.
Her gaze drops to my phone, where I’ve left it face up on the marble like an idiot. The screen has woken itself one more time, and her own text is still sitting there in the notification, and above it, in clean white letters, the name I gave her in the worst month of my life.
Her jaw comes loose. “Jeff.” A laugh that isn’t quite a laugh. “Are you kidding me? Am I saved in your phone as Succubus?”
Heat floods up my neck. I flip the phone over so hard I’m nearly certain I cracked the screen protector. “It’s an old—”
“Oh my God.”
“It was a joke, it’s from years ago, I never—”
“Don’t.” She’s narrowing her eyes at me, but there’s a curl at the corner of her mouth, mischief surfacing through whatever else is going on in her face. “Don’t sweat it. You’re in my phone as Pompous Prick. So I’d say we’re square.”
The bellow of laughter that comes out of me is the first fully honest, unguarded, and uncalculated thing I’ve done all night.
“Pompous Prick,” I repeat.
“Capital P, capital P.”
“That’s fair. That’s actually completely fair.
” And before I can talk myself out of the gesture, I pick the phone back up, thumb it open, and find her contact in front of her.
I make sure she watches me do it. I delete the ugly word and type her name.
Her real one. Melissa Breyers. “Or Callen,” I say.
“I could change it to Melissa Callen if you want.”
Something in her face goes sorrowful, but I’m too far gone in my own hope to read reality.
“I tried all this time, you know,” I tell her.
“I’ve dated. I put myself out there. I tried to find a connection close to what we had.
Most recently, I even asked out my boss, and she let me down so kindly I thanked her for it.
” Vesper’s name will never cross this table; I don’t know if it’s my own embarrassment or respect, but either way, I won’t name her.
“I tried my damnedest, Lyss. I never stopped thinking about how I took for granted what we had. Not once. And I think—you texting me last week, the way you look tonight—I think maybe you didn’t either.
Maybe our divorce wasn’t the end. Just a pause. ”
I lean in. I’m all the way out over my skis now and I don’t care.
“Two of my closest friends are getting married next week. Quietly. Off the books, basically. It’s just family, the smallest thing you’ve ever seen.
Their names are Lance and Cricket.” Their names sound absurd in my mouth, in this restaurant, in this conversation. “I’d really like you to come with me.”
“Lance and Cricket.” She repeats it slowly. One eyebrow lifts, amused, wary. “Those are—wow. Are those real names?” The brow climbs higher. “Or are those, what? Operative names.”
And there it is. The hairline crack the whole evening’s been built over.
I grimace before I can stop my face from doing it. “Lyss. Please don’t ask me questions I can’t answer.”
Her amusement retreats like a tide pulling back. She ducks her head, looks at her own hands, at the ring that isn’t there anymore.
“It’s always this,” she says quietly. “It’s always exactly this, Jeff.
” She doesn’t say it cruelly. That’s the part that guts me.
She says it like she’s noticing weather, not rejecting a man with his whole heart in his hand.
“You belong to two different worlds. You always have. And one of them I’m not allowed inside.
I’m not allowed to even know their real names. ”
“Melissa—”
“I’m sorry if I misled you. I’m not here to get back together.
” Her words go through me like a clean round, the kind that adrenaline masks so you don’t feel the pain until moments later.
She reaches across and lays her fingers, briefly, on the back of my hand, and then takes them back.
“I’m sorry. I should have…I should have led with it.
But I didn’t think—” She steadies herself.
Clears her throat, finds the businesswoman in her spine.
“I’m here to tell you I want to relieve you of the alimony.
And the portion of the military retirement.
My lawyers are filing to end the payments, effective immediately.
I wanted to tell you to your face before you got a letter.
I’m good now, okay? I’m great. I don’t need your help anymore.
I never said it, but I was grateful for it.
All those years. You never missed once.”
I sit here with my respectable drink and my fresh haircut, and my rehearsed speech still warm in my mouth, and I feel the floor drop out from under me.
I blink at her. The words arrive in the wrong order and I have to reassemble them. When they finally lock into place, logic declares what my heart doesn’t want to. There’s only one reason she’s releasing me from alimony.
“You’re getting married.”
Her hand drifts to her stomach. Rests there. Flat against the slate-gray dress.
“Probably,” she says, and there’s a helpless little smile in it. “Knowing Ben, he’ll ask the second I tell him.” She presses her lips together. “We’re expecting.”
The bartender laughs at something behind us. A cork pops somewhere. The world keeps insisting on going.
“Why haven’t you told him yet?” I ask. Of all the things. That’s the one that comes out.
“Because I wanted to do this first.” She trills her fingers against the glass base of the flute, not touching the wine that her unborn baby can’t consume.
But she plays with the condensation pooled at the bottom of the glass.
Eight years of marriage and we even fidget alike.
“I wanted to start the next part of my life with a clean conscience. And I can’t do that until I tell you something I should have told you a very long time ago. ”
“Lyss, you don’t—”
“I do.” Her eyes come up to mine and they’re swimming now, but there’s a steadiness underneath, and I understand that she has rehearsed her speech in a mirror too.
“When you were deployed. Kesara.” Again that word, the one she can’t possibly understand and is about to make mean something new.
“I met someone. It started while you were gone. I’d already decided I was going to leave you.
I want you to know it wasn’t impulse, it wasn’t a fling, I’d made up my mind months before you—” She stops.
Restarts. “And then you came back. The way you came back. Half dead and not sleeping and flinching at the dishwasher, and I thought, how? How do I leave a man like that? So, I didn’t.
I stayed. And I let it keep going, the other thing, in the background, for almost two years, until I was sure you could stand on your own.
And then I served you the papers, and I let you believe it was about us drifting, about you not fighting for me, because that was kinder than the truth.
Or I told myself it was kinder. I think it was just easier. For me.”
She wipes under one eye with the side of her finger, careful of the makeup, a reflex so human it nearly breaks me.