CHAPTER ELEVEN
Shelby
He came to me that night in the bedroom, sat on the edge of the bed while I brushed out my hair at the vanity, and offered the wrong apology first, the way I’d expected he might.
“I’m sorry about the radio,” he said. “I was frustrated, I said something I shouldn’t have, and I never meant for anyone to hear it. Especially not you.”
“Would it have been less true if I’d never heard it?”
He didn’t answer right away, which told me plenty on its own.
“I want to ask you some questions,” I said, setting down the hairbrush, turning to face him fully. “And I want you to actually try to answer them instead of telling me why the question is unfair.”
“Okay.”
“What time do I get up in the morning?”
He blinked. “Early. Before me.”
“What time, specifically?”
“I don’t know exactly. Five something?”
“Four forty-five. What am I working on right now, with the breeding program?”
Silence.
“What’s been worrying me about Maggie the last two weeks?”
More silence, longer this time, his jaw working like he was searching for an answer that simply wasn’t there to find.
“Why did I stop riding Juniper?”
“You stopped riding Juniper?”
“Two months ago, Gibson. Because her hip’s been bothering her and I didn’t want to push it before the vet could get a proper look, and I’ve been walking her out by hand every evening instead, which is why I’ve been fifteen minutes later getting to dinner most nights, which you have never once asked me about. ”
He was quiet, and I could see something happening behind his eyes, a rush of vertigo, a man understanding the floor he’d been standing on for years wasn’t where he thought it was.
“What’s the name of the young horse I’m most excited about right now?”
“I don’t know,” he said, quiet now, all the defensiveness gone out of him.
“It’s Copper. I’ve mentioned him at dinner four times this month.” I kept my voice even, because I needed to get through this without it collapsing into something neither of us could recover from. “Now ask me the same questions about Delaney.”
“Shelby, please…”
“Ask me. Or I’ll ask myself, and you already know the answers, so let’s just say them.”
He was silent.
“What’s Delaney’s plan for her cattle rotation this fall?”
He knew. I could see him knowing it, could see the specific, detailed knowledge sitting right behind his eyes, information he’d absorbed easily and completely because he’d been paying real attention when she gave it to him.
“What’s she worried about with the loan on the north pasture?”
He knew that too.
“What bloodline issue does one of her mares carry three generations back?”
“Shelby, please.”
“You know all of it,” I said. “Every single answer. And you barely know what’s happening in the life of the woman you’ve been married to for thirteen years.
I believe you love me, Gibson. That’s what makes this so hard.
You stopped being curious about me so long ago that you don’t even remember what that curiosity used to feel like. ”
I reached for my phone and opened the calendar I kept for the breeding barn.
“Copper’s first show date is in here. So is Juniper’s follow-up appointment, the mare arriving from Kerrville, and the meeting I moved twice because Maggie needed me at school.
You have access to this calendar. I shared it with you three years ago. ”
He looked at the screen and swallowed. “I know.”
“When was the last time you opened it?”
His eyes dropped. “I don’t know.”
That answer hurt more than anger would have.
I scrolled back through months of entries, each one a small piece of a life he claimed to love.
“This is what I mean when I tell you I’m invisible.
I’m not asking you to memorize every appointment.
I’m asking you to care enough that my days exist in your head somewhere. ”
“They should,” he said. “You’re right.”
“And I don’t want you learning them now so you can pass a test tomorrow. I don’t want a husband who studies me for a week because he’s scared. I want the man who used to call me the morning after a date because waiting until afternoon felt too long.”
His face tightened at that, because he remembered that man too. “I don’t know when I stopped being him with you.”
“Neither do I. I only know I noticed after you started being him for somebody else.”
He put his head in his hands, and for the first time since this whole thing started, I watched something crack open in him that wasn’t just apology or defensiveness but something closer to genuine grief.
“I don’t know how this happened,” he said, muffled, into his palms.
“Neither do I,” I said. “But I know it happened, and I know I can’t keep living inside a marriage where my husband can answer a pop quiz about his friend’s ranch and fail one about his own wife.”
He looked up at me then, and his eyes were wet, and for one unguarded second I saw the boy underneath the billionaire, the man who’d once chased me around a county fair parking lot just to get my phone number, utterly lost.
“Tell me how to fix it,” he said. “I’ll do anything.”
“I don’t think you can fix it tonight,” I said, gently, because some part of me still loved him too much to want to hurt him more than the truth already had.
“I think you have to actually become someone who knows the answers, and that’s not a conversation.
That’s a change. And I don’t know yet if you’re capable of it. ”
He reached for my hand across the bed, tentative, and I let him take it, because even in the wreckage of that night I wasn’t ready to withhold every point of contact between us.
“I want to try,” he said. “I know wanting isn’t the same as doing. I know I’ve said that before and not followed through. But I need you to know the wanting is real, even if you can’t trust it yet.”
“I believe the wanting is real,” I said. “I’ve never doubted that you love me, Gibson. That was never the question I was asking.”
“Then what do I do? Tell me the actual thing to do, not the feeling to have.”
I thought about it for a long moment, turning the question over honestly instead of reaching for something easy to hand him.
“Ask me a question tomorrow morning that you don’t already know the answer to.
Then actually remember the answer the next day, and ask a follow-up.
Do that every single day, for longer than feels necessary, until it stops being an assignment and starts being who you are. ”
“That sounds so small.”
“It is small,” I said. “That’s exactly why it’s the only thing that will actually work.
Grand gestures are easy for a man like you, Gibson.
You can buy grand. You can’t buy small, patient, everyday attention.
That has to be renewed, over and over, on days when nothing is on fire and no one’s watching to see if you do it right. ”
He was quiet for a long time, still holding my hand, and when he finally spoke his voice had lost some of its earlier desperation and settled into something steadier, more sober.
“Okay,” he said. “Small. I can start with small.”
He tried, the very next morning, in a way that was almost endearing in its clumsiness.
He asked me, over coffee, what I was most looking forward to that week, and when I told him about a new mare arriving from a breeder in Kerrville, he asked three follow-up questions in rapid succession, visibly working to prove something, the effort so transparent it was hard not to smile even through the residual hurt of the night before.
“You don’t have to interrogate me,” I said, gently. “Just ask one thing and actually listen to the answer. That’s the whole exercise.”
“Right. Sorry. I’m overcorrecting.”
“A little,” I agreed. “But I’d rather have overcorrecting than nothing at all.”
It was a start, however clumsy, and I let myself notice it as a start rather than dismissing it as too little, because some stubborn part of me still wanted, badly, for this effort to eventually add up to something real.