Chapter 6 #2
The latch clicked, and only then did she exhale the breath she’s been holding since they ran out into the rain.
Pressing a hand to her chest as if she could physically push the erratic thrumming back down.
That tone. That quiet, leveled sincerity was a cheap shot.
It bypassed her logic and went straight for the heart.
Being alone should have felt better than this. Usually, solitude was her recharge station, the place where she organized the chaos of her life into neat rows. But right then, the silence in the tiled room felt loud.
She needed him to continue being the villain of this story.
God, she hated this part. The messy, unstructured aftermath where everyone sat around waiting for the emotional bleeding to stop.
Give her a shattered contract or a logistical nightmare any day, at least those had clear solutions.
This heavy, suffocating silence felt inefficient, just another way to pick at scabs that were better left alone.
Under the spray, the hot water soothed her frayed nerves almost as much as the chill in her bones. She slumped to the floor and stayed in the shower longer than she planned, afraid to leave the little bubble of steam that cocooned her. Tears trailed down her cheeks along with the spray.
Everett made a few honest admissions, but his truths were still a backhanded compliment. And the facts remained the same. He didn’t fight for them. Until he could face that his choices were responsible, his actions caused them irreparable damage.
Towel wrapped around her head, a heavy terry-cloth robe tightly wound around her body, she stepped out of the bathroom ready to slip into bed and try to forget this day had even happened.
Soup.
The smell hit her first: warm chicken broth, and suddenly she was back in time, fever-sick with the flu, watching him stir noodles while wearing nothing but boxers and that ridiculous apron she’d bought as a joke.
You’re terrible at being taken care of, he’d said, not looking up from the pot.
Lucky for you, I’m excellent at not asking permission. Her throat closed, the memory sharp as a blade between her ribs.
Her stomach rumbled. They hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and suddenly she was famished. She slipped into her bedroom and donned a jogging suit. Facing him in just her robe left her vulnerable in a way she wasn’t ready for.
As she joined him in the kitchen, he turned around and handed her a cup of soup.
“Here, I figured you could use this.”
The cup felt heavier than soup alone should, as if it held every kindness she’d forgotten how to want.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
Once on the couch, the fire warmed her skin instantly. The soup soothed her even more than she expected. Her heartbeat slowly steadied.
She should have been exhausted, but her mind kept cataloging the chaos into manageable boxes. Survival mode clarified priorities. He’d stepped up. He’d helped. That required acknowledgment, even if it messed with the narrative of abandonment she’d been clinging to.
Domesticity looked jarringly natural on him.
An unwanted reminder of the years when this was their routine: him starting coffee at 6:15 while she stumbled to the shower, the way he’d handed her the mug without looking up from his laptop, how they moved around each other in the kitchen like dancers who’d rehearsed the choreography a thousand times.
The memory of that rhythm made something crack open in her chest because he stopped dancing first, stopped making two of anything, stopped knowing exactly what she needed from him.
I’ve missed the sound of him moving through a room.
The thought slipped through her defenses before she could stop it, and panic flooded her system. No. Absolutely not. She could not afford to miss anything about him.
“I’ll shower quickly,” he said.
“Take your time.” Her voice came out too bright, artificial as stage lighting.
Every minute he spent in there left her alone with the adrenaline draining from her system.
She needed a distraction. A task. The water ran, and she closed her eyes against the intimacy of knowing he’s naked twenty feet away, water running down the same body that used to curve around hers in sleep.
Harper pushed off the couch. She needed wine. Action was better than introspection. If she can’t control the weather or the man in the shower, she can at least control the ambiance. Her thoughts are a minefield tonight.
The sight of him in those worn gray joggers, the ones she’d bought him five Christmases ago, landed with the precision of a gavel strike.
He looks softer. Less like the adversary she’s been battling in depositions and more like the partner who used to know exactly how she took her coffee.
It was infuriating. She had spent endless energy fortifying her life, eating dinner at exactly 6:30 every night, one place setting, one portion, no leftovers because cooking for one means complete control, and here he was, bypassing her security measures.
Safe. Warm. Quiet. Too quiet. This is a trap.
The treacherous rhythm of sharing comfort while the elements rage outside.
It would be effortless to let the Pinot Noir do the heavy lifting, to lean into the heat and pretend it all was just a clerical error, a misplaced decimal point in the ledger of their marriage.
But comfort is a luxury she stopped budgeting for a long time ago.
Finally, Harper set her empty cup aside, she’d scraped it clean without tasting a single bite, pure survival reflex, fuel without pleasure.
She picked up her wine. And took a sip as he finished his shower.
When he walked out and touched her shoulder, she flinched. The reaction surprised them both.
“I’m sorry,” they said in unison.
“I was distracted. I didn’t realize you were out of the shower.
” The lie slid easily from her lips. She knew.
She’d heard the water stop. The way he fumbled in the small bathroom drying off, and the click of the door as he exited and went into his room to dress, just as she had.
She’d been distracted by the sounds of him filling the small cabin as though their being there together was natural.
She’d jumped because it wasn’t anymore. And she’d missed that more than anything.
Changing the conversation seemed safest. But she wasn’t one for mindless babble. She’d always found it fake and exhausting to exchange meaningless small talk. So instead of doing the polite thing, the expected thing, she turned to the questions still haunting her.
“Just so you know, I’m not mad about the storm.
Or any of the things today forced us to do,” she began.
Her voice was steady, but her fingers trembled slightly on the glass.
“I’m mad because you didn’t come home. Don’t ask me why I can’t get past it.
I’m not trying to dredge up any of our past. Yes, I’m still hurt.
And yes, you’ve attempted to explain why it happened. But I’m still not satisfied.”
He closed his eyes briefly. “I know.”
“I thought you were coming back,” she breathed, the word ‘back,’ catching in her throat like a fishhook. “Every other time you left during a fight, you walked right back through that door later. Or the next day. Or after you cooled off.”
He nodded, staring at his hands. “I always did.”
“Except the last time.” He met her gaze. Her eyes stung with hurt she had kept buried for years.
“That time you didn’t come back at all. You shut me out. You blocked me, Everett. And for weeks, I didn’t understand if you were angry, or done, or—” She swallowed hard enough that he could hear it.
“I never wanted you to think—”
“But you did,” she whispered. “You made me believe that. And it destroyed me.” The admission tasted like ash, bitter and gritty, coating her tongue the way grief had coated everything that first year, her morning coffee, her toothpaste, the air itself.
“I hate acknowledging the devastation because it grants you power you don’t deserve.
For three years, I’ve treated your absence like a catastrophic system failure, assess the damage, reroute resources, and refuse to dwell on the cause.
But the lack of data was worse than the rejection itself.
It’s an open loop I can’t close, an unsolvable equation that keeps me awake at night long after she’d told everyone she was fine.
My brain keeps returning to it at 3 a.m., worrying it like a tongue probing a broken tooth, the pain almost a comfort because at least it was something I could feel. ”
The fire popped, and for a moment the light caught the wetness in Everett’s eyes before he bowed his head, hiding it.
“I left because I felt like I was breaking us more every day I stayed.”
“And blocking me?” Harper’s voice sharpened. “Vanishing?”
He exhaled shakily, his hand moving an inch forward before he caught himself.
“I broke myself too. I didn’t know how to talk to you without feeling like I was failing.
Every call. Every text. Your voice on my voicemail.
God, Harper, you sounded so small. Like you were shrinking, and it was my fault. ”
“You could’ve said that. At least you would have appeared to engage with me.”
“I didn’t know how,” he said again, but this time the words sounded ashamed, not defensive. “And I knew saying it wouldn’t fix it.”
“It would’ve hurt less than your silence.
” She could have fought with him. She could have handled screaming, accusations, even a clean break.
Those are concrete problems with actionable solutions.
Silence is just a vacuum. It sucked the oxygen out of the room and left her gasping for answers that never came, her lungs burning with questions she’d learned to stop asking out loud, though they still screamed in the cavern of her chest.
He nodded, his hand moving to his chest as if the belief sat there like a stone he had to carry. “I believe that now.”