CHAPTER FOURTEEN #3
And Sharon opened the door of her mother's house and let her husband in out of the cold, not forgiven, not decided, not resolved, just let in, which was its own small enormous thing, the first door she'd opened to him in months, and neither of them pretended it was more than it was, and neither of them pretended it was nothing, because they were both finally, after seven years, done pretending.
POV: Sharon
They talked for three hours at her mother's table, and it was terrible, and it was the best conversation of their entire marriage, and both of those were true, which she was starting to think might be the epitaph on everything about them.
It was terrible because she didn't spare him.
She'd promised herself she wouldn't spare him and she didn't. She made him sit in it, the six years, one erasure at a time, the family friend and the birth certificate and the podium, and she watched him not flinch away, not explain, not build a pool, just take each one and say yes, that happened, yes, I did that, yes, you're right about what it cost. He'd learned to sit in it.
That was new. The old Jackson would have been reaching for the reasonable voice by minute ten.
This one just sat in the wreckage with her and let it be as bad as it actually was.
"I need to ask you something," she said, near the end, when they were both wrung out. "And I need the true answer, not the answer that helps your case."
"Okay."
"If the story had never broken. If that intern never found the license.
Would you have become this? Or would you still be driving down on Thursdays six years from now, still saying soon, still introducing me as a family friend at the next gala and the one after that?
" She held his eyes. "Because that's the thing I can't get past, Jack.
It's not that you changed. It's that it took a national scandal to change you.
If you needed the whole world to force your hand, then this isn't growth, it's just a man who finally got caught.
And I need to know which one I'm sitting across from.
And you don't know the answer, and I don't either, and that's the problem I've been chewing on for two months. "
Jackson was quiet for a long time. She respected that. The old Jackson would have answered fast, would have said of course I'd have changed, would have given her the comfortable lie with total sincerity because he'd have believed it in the moment.
"I don't know," he said finally. "I want to tell you I'd have gotten here on my own.
I can't. Maybe I would have. Maybe Ethan would have asked me one more question I couldn't answer and it would have cracked me open.
Or maybe you're right, and I'd have kept saying soon until you left anyway, later, more tired, with less of your life left to start over with.
I genuinely don't know, and I'm not going to pretend I do to win the point.
" He turned his coffee cup a quarter turn on the table, lining up the handle, the old tell, and she saw him catch himself doing it and stop.
"But here's the only thing I can offer you on that.
It doesn't matter how I got here. It matters whether I stay here now that I am.
You can't know the first one. Neither of us can.
But you can watch the second one. For as long as you want.
Years, if that's what it takes. Watch whether I stay this man when there's no scandal forcing it, when it's just Tuesdays and nobody's watching and there's nothing to win.
That's the only proof that means anything, and it's the only proof I can actually give you, and it takes exactly as long as it takes. "
And Sharon looked at him across her mother's table, and did not feel the certainty she'd had two months ago, the clean cold certainty of leaving, and did not feel its opposite either, the certainty of return.
What she felt was the thing she'd been most afraid of and had started, slowly, to understand was not a weakness after all.
She felt willing to find out.
"Okay," she said. "Then we find out. Slowly. On my terms. And the first time you say soon, Jack, the first time you manage me, the first time I catch you performing instead of being, I'm done, and it's for good, and you don't get another porch."
"The first time I say soon," Jackson agreed, "you never have to see me again except across a custody handoff. I'll sign that. I'd sign it in blood."
"A verbal agreement's fine. I've had enough of your signatures on documents.
" And she almost smiled, and he almost smiled, and outside the window the light was going long and gold over her mother's yard where an old dog slept in the last of it, and neither of them called it a beginning, because they'd both learned what it cost to name a thing before it had earned its name.
But it was one. Quietly. Unnamed. The smallest possible true beginning, with all the proving still ahead of it, and for once neither of them tried to make it bigger than it was, and that, more than anything Jackson had said, was how Sharon knew that something in him had actually, finally, changed.