Chapter 12 #2
So they had it. One conversation, two people in folding chairs in an unfinished building, no yelling, nobody standing up.
She did not tell him about the ledger. She had promised and she kept it and she has never regretted keeping it.
She told him the rest.
She told him that she had spent a year building a version of him she could survive, and that the version was of a man who did not think she was worth the trouble of being reached, and that she had been wrong about the mechanism and right about the result, and that the two of those living in the same chest at once was making her feel like she was coming apart.
She told him she was not able to hate him properly anymore and that she resented him enormously for that.
She told him about the fourteenth of April on the floor of his office, in order, out loud, all of it, which she had never done — the register, the four times she read the September line, the sound the dog made, the fact that she had walked the whole house in the dark and had not been able to make herself open one door.
She told him that the worst part had never been Jocelyn.
"I know," he said.
"No, you don't, because everybody thinks they know and they're wrong. Brynn's wrong. Your mother's wrong." Kristin turned the cup around in her hands. "The worst part is that when I found it, I wasn't surprised."
Blake did not say anything.
"I sat on that floor and read three and a half months of my husband's whole interior life addressed to another woman," she said, "and the thing that went through me was not how could you.
It was oh — there it is." She looked up.
"I'd been living with a locked room in my own house for years and I had never once let myself say the words.
And then somebody handed me the key and my first feeling was relief, and I have not forgiven myself for that and I don't expect to. "
The yard light came on outside with its click.
"Can I say one thing," Blake said. "It's not a defense."
"Say it."
"I'd have gone the rest of my life." His voice was completely level and completely wrecked.
"If Halliday had never written and you'd never opened that box, I would have gone on exactly like that for thirty more years, and been perfectly happy, and told you I loved you every night, and never once noticed I'd stopped saying anything to you.
" He looked at the floor. "That's the part I can't get past. Not what I did. That I wouldn't ever have noticed."
Kristin sat with that.
"No," she said. "You wouldn't have."
"Yeah."
"I wouldn't have either," she said.
And he looked up at her.
"I want to ask you something and you can tell me to go," he said.
"Ask."
"Do you want me to stop coming?"
Kristin sat in a folding chair in her own building and turned the cup around twice.
Here was the honest answer, and she gave it, because they had agreed on tonight.
"I don't know," she said. "And I want you to hear the whole of that, because there's a version of I don't know that's a kindness and this is not that one.
" She set the cup down. "A year ago I'd have said no and meant it in every part of me.
In August I'd have said no and it would have been true.
Somewhere in there it stopped being a settled question and I did not give it permission to. "
"Okay."
"That's not good news for you."
"I know it isn't."
"Do you." She looked at him. "Blake, if it were still no, that would be finished.
You'd be a man I used to be married to and I'd be building a shed.
It's the not-knowing that costs. It's the not-knowing that has me sitting in a truck at night.
" She heard her own voice go, slightly, for the first time, and let it.
"You've made my life harder by getting better. I want that written down somewhere."
He nodded slowly.
"For what it's worth," he said, "I didn't do it to get you back."
"I know."
"I want to say the rest of it, since it's tonight.
" He had his hands flat on his knees, the way his mother sat, which neither of them noticed.
"I did it because the day you showed me that register, I sat in that kitchen and understood that a man wrote three letters and none of them reached me, and that if I'd been a person things reached, Dorothy Halliday's husband would have gotten an answer in September and would never have driven out here.
" He stopped and started again. "That's about him, not about you.
It's the only thing I've done in a year that isn't about you.
And I'd like credit for exactly none of it. "
"You're not going to get any."
"Good," said Blake.
And neither of them said anything for a while, and outside the wind came up along the north line and moved through the spruce, and that was the honest conversation, and it fixed nothing at all.
At seven o'clock he stood up.
"That's the hour," he said.
"Sit down," said Kristin.
He sat down. He sat down so fast it would have been funny in any other circumstance.
They stayed another forty minutes and talked about absolutely nothing — the shed, the stocks, a thing that had happened to Prewitt's hip, a man in Waconia who would not return a phone call about conduit — and at eight o'clock Kristin said, "Okay," and he went.
She stood in the doorway and watched the taillights go down County 110.
Then she went and sat in the truck, in her own shed, in the dark, and put both hands on the wheel.
You gave him forty extra minutes.
That was all. That was the entire thing. Forty minutes, about conduit, and she had been the one to say it.
Kristin Hovde sat in a cold truck at a quarter past eight on a Thursday in March and was frightened for the first time in a year — not of a man, not of a house, not of a February afternoon with a slate floor in it.
Of her own hand. On her own bolt. Moving.