Chapter 10
ten
VIOLET
Jake cooked for her in their—soon to be hers—beach house kitchen the next evening.
He'd come over early to set up, and when she came downstairs at seven the table was set, simply, with plates from the cupboard and napkins and candles he must have bought in town.
The cookbook was open on the counter, splattered with oil, a dish towel thrown over his shoulder.
He'd made the roasted chicken with rosemary.
She recognized the smell the moment she walked into the kitchen, and her chest constricted so violently she had to stop in the doorway.
The rosemary chicken. The recipe from the letter she'd never sent, the dinner she'd made and he'd missed, the candles she'd blown out alone at midnight.
He was making it now, in this kitchen, from the cookbook she'd annotated in handwriting he'd either seen or hadn't, and she couldn't tell which possibility was worse.
"It might be terrible," he said, not looking up from the stove. "I may have overcompensated on the garlic."
"It smells good."
"Don't sound so surprised."
They ate on the deck. The chicken was, against all reasonable expectations, good.
It wasn’t the version she used to make — his was slightly overcooked, the skin not as crisp, the potatoes softer than she'd have wanted — but it was good.
They ate with the sun going down over the water and the candles flickering between them.
He told her about work. She hadn't asked, but he offered it, and it was different from every conversation about work they'd had in their marriage. He wasn't performing. He wasn't listing accomplishments. He was telling her what he'd done and what it had cost.
"I've stepped back," he said. "Marty's running operations day to day. I'm still involved, but I've cut my hours to something that actually resembles a normal schedule."
"Since when?"
"Since you rightfully left me.”
Violet looked at him. He was turning his wine glass slowly, his fingers on the stem.
"I'm selling the penthouse," he said.
She blinked, startled. “Jake?—"
"It's not a home, Vi. It never was. You said that, and you were right.
I walk through those rooms and there's nothing in them that says two people lived there and loved each other there.
It's marble, glass and a view of the city I spent my career climbing.
I don't want to look at that view anymore.
It reminds me of everything I was doing while you were waiting for me to come home. "
Violet swallowed. She set her fork down.
"I'm not telling you this to guilt you," he said. "And I want you to know — when the divorce goes through, you can have anything. The house, the investments, whatever your lawyer asks for. I won't fight you on any of it."
"I don't want your money."
"I know. But it's there, and it's yours, and I need you to hear me say I won't make this difficult. I won't turn it into a negotiation. You've spent six years with a man who negotiated everything, and I'm telling you this is the one thing I won't."
Violet’s chest tightened. She forced herself to take a sip of her water.
"I've been thinking about staying here," he continued.
"In Belmar Cove. Not the cottage — I'd find something in town.
But this place..." He looked out at the water.
"I understand why you love it. It's real here.
The people are real. I've spent years surrounded by people who wanted something from me, and nobody here wants anything except for me to show up at the farmers' market and maybe bring better wine to writing group.
" He looked at her. “But if you want me gone, I'll go.
I won't hang around your town making you uncomfortable.
I just wanted you to know that if circumstances were different, I'd stay. "
Violet’s heart was hammering. She picked up her wine and took a long sip.
"What—what if I came back?" she asked.
The words surprised her. She hadn't planned to say them. They came out before she could stop them, quiet and testing, and she added immediately: "I'm not saying I will."
For a long moment he didn't speak. The candlelight caught the stubble along his jaw and the lines around his eyes that hadn't been there when they married.
He'd aged this summer. They both had. They looked like what they were — two people who'd been through something that had stripped them down to what was underneath.
What was underneath was older, more tired and more honest than either of them had been in years.
"If you came back," he said slowly, "it wouldn't be the same.
I wouldn't want it to be the same," he continued.
"The penthouse, the life we had — I don't want to rebuild that.
I'd want somewhere new. Somewhere we chose together, not somewhere I picked because it had the best view of the skyline I was trying to conquer.
" He paused. "Somewhere lived in. With your own office to write in. Bookshelves for all your short story collections. A place we both truly live in, Vi. An actual home.”
She stared at him. He was describing the life she'd wanted for years.
The life she'd tried to build inside a marriage that was designed around his ambitions.
A messy, warm, bookshelf-overflowing life with a kitchen that smelled like rosemary and bread, the life they'd had in that first apartment with the candle in the wine bottle, before everything got big, expensive and empty.
But could she trust it?
“That’s what you want right now. In this moment. At a candlelit dinner on a deck overlooking the ocean. It's easy to want things in a moment like this, Jake. It's easy to be the person who says all the right things when the sunset's behind you and the wine is good.”
"You're right," he said, to her surprise.
"It is easy right now. And I know that doesn't prove anything.
I know words don't mean anything to you coming from me, and I've earned that.
But I need you to hear this, even if you don't believe it yet.
" He set his glass down and looked at her directly.
"My success means nothing without you. The company, the money, all of it — it means nothing.
I built an empire and lost the only person who mattered, and I'd trade every dollar of it for one more chance to sit at a kitchen table with you, eat a meal I made with my own hands and ask you about your day and actually listen to the answer. "
Violet closed her eyes. Expelled a sigh.
"I believe you mean it," she said. "Right now, I believe you."
"And tomorrow?"
"Tomorrow's the part I'm afraid of."
Jake nodded. He didn't argue. He didn't promise.
The acceptance was so different from every other version of Jake she'd known — the man who pushed, the man who closed, the man who couldn't hear no without converting it into maybe — that something inside her shifted.
Shifted, like tectonic plates shift, deep and slow, with consequences that won't be visible for a long time.
Violet stood up from the table. He stood too. They carried the plates inside together. She washed, he dried, and they moved around the kitchen in a silence that was warm and close and full of something neither of them was naming.
At the sink, their hands brushed. She didn't pull away.
He turned toward her. The dish towel was still over his shoulder.
His sleeves were rolled to the elbow. His forearms were tan from weeks of sun and she could see the muscle in them, the sinew.
His running was a habit now. He had always been well-built, he had a personal gym at home and in the office, but this was different. More natural, in a way.
"Vi," he said. Softly.
Violet looked up at him. They were standing very close. His eyes were so blue, so focused and so entirely on her that she couldn't breathe.
This time, she kissed him.
Violet rose onto her toes, put her hand on the back of his neck and pressed her mouth to his.
The sound he made — a low, broken exhale, as if he'd been holding his breath for weeks — went through her entire body.
His hands found her waist. Jake pulled her against him, gently, then less gently, and she could feel the restraint in his arms, the way he was holding himself back even as his body pressed closer.
She opened her mouth against his and he deepened the kiss, his hand sliding into her hair, his other arm tight around her lower back.
Violet was shaking, and she didn't care, because this was what she'd been starving for.
The hunger behind his kiss. The evidence that he wanted her: urgently, because he'd spent weeks looking at her, listening to her, learning her.
He wanted her, the woman she was becoming, not the wife she used to be.
Jake pulled back just enough to look at her. His breathing was ragged. His hand was still in her hair.
"I don't want you to stop,” she whispered.
Jake studied her face. Looking for doubt, for hesitation, for the moment she'd pull away and tell him that can't happen again, the way she had on the beach on the Fourth. But Violet held his gaze. Steady.
He kissed her again. Slower this time. Deeper.
His mouth moved from her lips to her jaw, to the hollow beneath her ear, to the side of her neck.
She tipped her head back, gripped his shoulders and let herself be kissed, let herself be wanted, let herself feel what it was like to have his full attention on her body instead of on a phone or a deal or the inside of his own relentless ambition.
Jake lowered himself to his knees.
She looked down at him. Billionaire Jake Howard, on his knees on the kitchen floor of the beach house, his hands on her hips, his face tilted up to hers. He looked reverent.
“I should have been worshipping you all along, Vi. Let me," he said. "Please."