Chapter Twenty-three
GRANT
The real test came sooner than either of us expected it to, arriving almost exactly when we'd both started to feel, cautiously, that the worst of it was finally behind us, that we'd earned some measure of ease after everything.
A prestigious film, the sort that wins the major awards rather than merely dominating the box office for a weekend, offered me a leading role shooting overseas for four full months, dates that overlapped almost exactly with the premiere window scheduled for Sienna's own film, a scheduling collision that felt, on paper, like exactly the impossible conflict our old life would have simply resolved in my favor without a second thought.
My instinct, immediate and entirely reflexive, was to simply turn the offer down without even discussing it with her first, a grand, sweeping gesture meant to prove, loudly and unmistakably, that I'd finally learned my lesson, that I would never again let my career eclipse something that mattered to her.
Sienna found out about the offer before I ever had the chance to tell her myself, through an industry contact who mentioned it in passing, assuming she already knew, and she was genuinely furious about it in a way that caught me completely off guard, storming into the kitchen where I was reading the offer letter for the third time.
"You don't get to do that," she said, her voice sharp in a way I hadn't heard directed at me in months, sharper than even our worst arguments during the separation.
"You don't get to punish your entire career indefinitely as some kind of penance for what happened between us.
That's not real partnership, Grant, that's just a different kind of imbalance dressed up as growth, and I absolutely refuse to be the reason you shrink your own life the exact way I once shrank mine for you.
Do you understand what you'd be doing? You'd just be trading one version of the problem for its mirror image. "
"I genuinely thought that's what you wanted from me, some kind of proof."
"I want you to actually ask me," she said, "instead of unilaterally deciding on your own, once again, what protecting me is supposed to look like from your side without ever checking whether I agree.
That's the entire lesson you were supposed to learn from all of this, and you're about to fail it completely, just in the opposite direction this time, and somehow still without consulting me. "
We sat with the actual, practical problem instead of the emotional story either of us had been quietly telling ourselves about it, spreading the offer letter and the production calendar and Sienna's own premiere schedule across the kitchen table like pieces of a puzzle neither of us had tried assembling together before, and discovered, once we finally looked at it head-on together, that it wasn't nearly as unsolvable as the emotional weight surrounding it had initially made it feel.
The production could reasonably adjust the shooting schedule to front-load my required scenes early, something Marcus confirmed with a single phone call once I actually asked the question instead of assuming the answer.
I could fly back specifically for her premiere itself and return to set again the following morning without much real disruption to either project.
It would cost some convenience, certainly, and a bit of money in rebooked travel, but it cost nothing that actually mattered in the end, nothing that either of us would remember in five years.
"I want my wife back," I told her honestly, once the revised schedule had finally been settled between us, both of us leaning over the same calendar, close enough that our shoulders touched.
"You can't have the woman I was," she said, not unkindly at all, just clearly, in the plain, direct way she'd learned to say difficult things over the course of the year that had changed us both so completely.
"That particular woman doesn't exist anymore, Grant.
I built something different out of what was left of her, something I like better, if I'm honest."
"I know that," I said. "I'm asking for the woman you are right now, today. Not her. Never her again, actually, now that I think about it clearly."
She looked at me for a long, quiet moment, long enough that I genuinely wondered whether I'd said the wrong thing after all, long enough that I nearly filled the silence just to escape the discomfort of waiting, and then something in her expression finally opened, slowly, like a door that had been closed for necessary repairs rather than closed permanently for good, hinges that had needed oiling rather than replacing entirely.
"Okay," she said. "Then let's actually build it properly this time. All the way through, start to finish, not just the easy parts that are simple to talk about out loud over a kitchen table on a good day."