Chapter 17
ADELAIDE
Grant called on a Thursday. She was in the garden, pulling dead heads from the lavender, when his name appeared on the screen.
She sat back on her heels and felt the familiar tightening in her chest, the conditioned response of years of managing his tone and shaping herself into whatever version of Adelaide the conversation required.
She let the feeling arrive. She let it sit. Then she answered.
"Hello, Grant."
"Adelaide." The professional voice. The one that established terms before the first sentence was finished. "My lawyer tells me you've filed."
"I have."
"You're sure about this."
"I am."
A pause. She could hear him recalculating. "The terms are aggressive."
"They're fair."
"I'm not going to fight you on the apartment. You never liked it anyway." Something bitter beneath the surface. "But the rest of it, the asset division, the timeline, you're pushing for something that doesn't reflect the reality of what we built together."
Adelaide pulled off her gardening gloves and set them on the stone. "I'm not interested in negotiating."
"Everything is a negotiation, Adelaide."
"Not this."
The silence that followed was longer than any he'd allowed in their previous conversations. She waited through it. She did not fill it. She did not soften her position or offer an alternative framing or do any of the things she had spent years doing to make his discomfort manageable.
"You've changed," he said.
"Yes."
"I don't know who you are anymore."
She pulled a sprig of lavender from the bush and held it between her fingers. The scent rose, sharp and clean. "That makes two of us. I'm just the one who's happy about it."
He hung up without saying goodbye. She sat in the garden afterward, turning the lavender in her fingers, and when the tightness in her chest faded, she went inside, called her lawyer and confirmed everything.
She felt nothing but the clean, uncomplicated relief of a woman who was finishing what she'd started.
She told Jaxon about it later, in his truck outside Le Jardin, matter-of-factly, and watched something move through his face that was not satisfaction but recognition.
He started the engine, drove her home and kissed her at the gate.
She went inside and stood in the kitchen and felt the house around her, solid and quiet and hers.
The mornings turned cold. She bought a heavier coat from the secondhand shop on the high street and boots that were practical rather than beautiful and looked nothing like anything she had owned with Grant.
She cleaned the house room by room, not in the frantic way she'd straightened things after Grant's first visit, but slowly, with attention.
She cleared the back room and found boxes of childhood things: drawings, school notebooks, a shoebox of photographs that included three of Jaxon at seventeen, lean, sunburned and grinning at the camera with the easy confidence of a boy who had not yet learned that the girl behind the camera would break his heart.
She brought the photographs to dinner and slid them across the table.
Jaxon looked at them for a long time without speaking.
Then he looked at her, and there was something in his face she hadn't seen before.
Something that lived below the surface of his steadiness.
Something that had to do with being seen, truly seen, by the same eyes that had seen him then.
"I was an idiot," he said.
"You were seventeen."
"Same thing." He touched the edge of one photograph with his thumb. "You kept these?"
"They were in the back room. In a shoebox. My mother kept them, I think."
"For ten years."
"She kept a lot of things I didn't know about."
He slid the photographs back toward her. "Keep them."
"I was going to give them to you."
"Keep them," he said again. "They belong in the house."
The sentence was small. It was not small at all. His face on her shelf. The past given a place inside the present. She felt her hand tighten around her glass and did not try to hide the reaction, because hiding reactions was something she had done in her old life and she was not doing it anymore.
The leaves turned. The lavender went dormant. She planted bulbs along the front path, crocuses and daffodils that would come up in spring, and the planting of things that would bloom months from now felt like an act of faith she would not have been capable of six weeks earlier.
Jaxon fixed the electrical panel on a Sunday. She held the flashlight, handed him tools, and they argued about their favorite bands. An argument with no resolution and no stakes and therefore the best argument she'd had in years.
"I'm holding a live wire. Do you really want to argue with me right now?"
“I do.”
She handed him the wrong screwdriver on purpose.
He took it, looked at it, looked at her.
"This is sabotage." She laughed so hard she dropped the flashlight, and in the sudden dark she heard him laughing too, and the sound of his laughter mixing with hers in the mudroom of her mother's house was so ordinary and so full that she stood there in the darkness holding a screwdriver she'd deliberately misselected and felt, with the unforced certainty of something arriving rather than being reached for, that she was happy.
The deep-rooted happiness of a woman standing in a house that needed work, holding a flashlight for a man who didn't need her to be anything other than present.
The happiness of someone who had stopped trying to earn the right to feel it.
By the time the first term ended, she had completed the foundational coursework and begun her observation hours at the primary school in Beaumont.
She sat in the back of a classroom and watched a woman named Claire teach nine-year-olds how to mix colors, and the children's hands were covered in paint and their faces were focused and unself-conscious and one boy held up a sheet of paper covered in brown, because he'd mixed everything together, and said, "Look, it's mud!”.
Claire had said, "Beautiful mud," and Adelaide had felt something open in her chest that she hadn't known was closed.
She could do this. She could stand in a room and teach children that the mess was the point, that the brown was beautiful, that the doing mattered more than the result.
She could teach them the thing she had spent ten years forgetting and was only now learning again.
The letter finally came.
She was sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of tea when the post arrived.
She recognized the legal envelope before she opened it.
The decree inside was two pages. Formal.
Impersonal. The dissolution of her marriage reduced to numbered clauses and judicial signatures.
Adelaide Taylor, née Mercier. Grant David Taylor.
The marriage solemnized on the fourteenth of June. Dissolved by order of the court.
She read it twice. She sat with it. She did not cry.
She did not feel triumphant. She felt the strange, hollow lightness that came with the removal of something that had been pressing on you for so long you'd forgotten it was there.
She felt her lungs expand. She felt the chair beneath her and the table under her hands and the tea growing cold, and she felt, with a clarity that was neither joy nor sorrow but something cleaner than both, that she was free.
Free of the person she had been inside that marriage. Free of the woman who shrank. Who put away her paints. Who checked the lock three times and ate dinner alone and mistook a beautiful apartment for a home.
She set the decree on the table. Showered.
Dressed. She looked at herself in the mirror, at the woman looking back, and did not arrange her expression or smooth anything into place.
She just looked. And what she saw was someone she recognized.
Someone with paint on her left hand and laugh lines at the corners of her eyes and hair that was longer and looser than it had been with Grant.
A face that was bare and a body that had softened at the edges in the way bodies did when they were fed regularly and touched with kindness and allowed to exist for their own sake.
She drove to the shop.
Jaxon was in the yard, stacking lumber in the last of the afternoon light.
Beau saw her first and came trotting across the gravel.
Jaxon looked up, straightened and stood with a plank of cedar in one hand and sawdust on his shirt.
She watched his expression shift from surprise to attention to something more focused as she got out and walked toward him.
She could see the moment he understood. Before she said a word.
Something in her posture or her gaze or the way she crossed the gravel without hesitation, without folding her arms, without any of the self-protective gestures she had carried since arriving in Clarington.
He set the plank down slowly. His eyes did not leave her face.
"It's final," she said.
Two words. She watched them land. Watched something move through his expression that was not relief or triumph but something deeper, something that had been held in suspension for months and was only now being allowed to settle.
"Yeah?" His voice was rough.
"Yeah."
He reached for her. He pulled her toward him and kissed her.
For the first time without anything standing behind her, without anything unfinished, without any door left open that she hadn't chosen to close.
She kissed him the way she had wanted to kiss him since the night on his step when she'd leaned her head on his shoulder and felt his warmth through his sleeve and understood that this was what she'd been missing for ten years.
This. A man who held still when she reached for him.
A man who let her come to him. A man whose mouth met hers without agenda, without performance, without any purpose other than being present inside the same moment.
His hands came to her face, both of them, holding her there. She felt the tremor in his fingers and loved him for it.
She pulled back just enough to see his face.
His eyes were bright. His jaw was tight.
He was holding himself together the way he always did, with that steady, controlled stillness, but the stillness was different now.
It was not the stillness of a man protecting himself.
It was the stillness of a man trying not to ruin a moment by wanting it too much.
"I love you," she said. "I think maybe I never stopped.
Even when I was too stupid to know it. Even when I was married to someone else and living in a city that didn't fit me and putting away my paints because my husband didn't like the stains.
Even then, some part of me was still yours.
I just didn't know how to get back to it. "
Jaxon looked at her. His hands were still on her face. His thumbs moved against her cheekbones, a tiny involuntary gesture that said more than any word he could have offered.
Then he spoke, and his voice was rough and low and stripped of every layer of steadiness he usually carried.
"I love you," he said. "I have loved you since I was a teenager.
I loved you when you left. I loved you when I was sanding oak at eleven at night because it was the only thing that kept me from driving to the city and standing outside your apartment like an idiot.
I loved you when I bought this shop and when I built that house and when I dated women who were perfectly good and couldn't figure out why I kept looking past them.
" His jaw worked. His eyes were bright. "I loved you every single day you were married to someone else, and I hated myself for it, and I couldn't stop.
I never could. You are the only woman I have ever loved, Addie.
The only one. And I am done pretending that's something I got over. "
Adelaide felt the words land in her chest, one after another, each one reaching a place she had kept sealed for so long she had forgotten it was there.
Her eyes blurred. She did not try to stop it.
She let the tears come because they were not grief, they were not relief, and they were not any single thing she could name.
They were ten years of distance collapsing into the space between his hands and her face.
"Say it again," she whispered.
"I love you."
She laughed, wet and shaky. "Again."
"I love you, Addie." He pressed his forehead against hers. "I love you. I'm not going to stop saying it. You're going to get tired of hearing it."
"I won't."
"You will. I'm going to say it when you're painting. When you're burning toast. When you're giving me the wrong screwdriver on purpose. When you're standing in the square kissing me in front of the whole town. You're going to hear it so often it stops meaning anything."
"It won't stop meaning anything."
"No," he agreed, his voice dropping to something quieter, something that belonged only to the two of them standing in the sawdust yard with Beau circling their legs. "It won't."
Then he picked her up. Adelaide made a sound that was half surprise and half laughter and put her arms around his neck.
"What are you doing?" she said.
"Taking you inside."