CHAPTER 84
WHAT JULIAN DID NOT ASK
By noon, the house had become too quiet for Miles.
Serena went upstairs to shower, and the water moving through the pipes sounded like a private language.
He remained in the kitchen with the legal pad, reading the rules until they stopped looking like rules and started looking like a map of all the places he could still get lost.
His phone lay beside the coffee mug. It had been silent all morning. That should have relieved him. Instead, he found himself glancing at it with a frustration he did not want to name.
Julian had not written.
Of course Julian had not written. Rule five had not existed last night, but the spirit of it had.
A man like Julian would not send a morning-after message into another man's marriage.
He would wait. He had been waiting since the first bottle, perhaps.
Waiting was one of the ways he made himself dangerous.
Miles picked up the phone, put it down, then laughed once under his breath at himself. He was jealous of a message that had not arrived and resentful of the restraint that kept it away.
That was new information.
He went to the back door and looked out at the wet patio. Their small garden held the rain in shining beads. A clay pot had tipped slightly in the wind, exposing roots at one edge of the rosemary. Miles opened the door, stepped into the cold, and righted it with more force than necessary.
He was washing mud from his hands when Serena came downstairs in jeans and an old sweater, hair damp, face clean of last night's makeup.
The sight of her nearly undid him. Not because she looked less beautiful, but because she looked more reachable.
The woman from the vineyard had not disappeared.
She was here, barefoot, carrying her own coffee mug, the same and not the same.
'You are thinking loudly,' she said.
'Julian did not text.'
She froze for half a second, then set her mug down. 'No.'
'I keep checking.'
The confession embarrassed him so much that he almost softened it with a joke. He did not.
Serena came closer. 'Do you want him to?'
Miles dried his hands on a towel slowly. 'I want to know whether I want him to.'
She nodded as if the sentence made perfect sense. Maybe it did, in this strange new country.
'Part of me hoped he would apologize again,' Miles said. 'Part of me hoped he would not. Part of me wanted proof that he was thinking about us. Part of me wanted proof that he understood he had no right to.'
'That is a lot of parts.'
'Yes.'
Serena leaned against the island. 'I checked my phone too.'
Miles looked at her.
'Only once,' she added, then winced. 'Twice.'
He felt the familiar surge, jealousy rising with its many colors. But beneath it came something else, almost a relief. They were both ridiculous. They were both human. The desire had not become a clean philosophical exercise just because they had written rules on a legal pad.
'What did you want?' he asked.
'The same impossible thing,' she said. 'To know he was thinking about me without him trespassing by saying so.'
Miles absorbed that. The answer hurt less than the lie she might have offered.
'He did the right thing,' Serena said.
'I know.'
'Do you hate that?'
Miles looked toward the black-sleeved bottle. 'A little.'
She smiled sadly. 'Me too.'
The honesty sat between them, almost companionable.
Miles realized that Julian's absence had entered the house as powerfully as his presence might have.
He had left them alone with what he had awakened.
That was either kindness or strategy. Maybe, with men like him, the difference was not always visible from outside.
Serena took the legal pad and read the rules again. Then she turned it over, drew a line down the center of a blank page, and wrote two headings.
What We Want.
What We Fear.
Miles stared at the columns.
'More ink?' he asked.
'More ink,' she said.
So they sat together at their kitchen table while rain silvered the windows, writing down the things Julian had not asked for and the things his restraint had made impossible to ignore.