Chapter 3 #2
I've imagined some version of this before, in that distant, stupid way women do when the world keeps telling them not to trust happiness too much. I thought I'd scream. Throw something. Demand details I'd never be able to unhear. Instead, I feel very far away from my own body.
“No speeches,” I say. “No lifetime. No rest of anything.”
“Please.”
That one word almost gets me. Not because it's enough. Because I remember every other time he's said it to me. Please come to bed. Please taste this and tell me if it’s terrible. Please don’t read that article. Please, Emerson, look at me.
I look at him now. His eyes are wet. I wish that mattered more than it does.
“I drove to the studio last night,” I say.
All the color leaves his face.
“I brought dinner. I thought we could eat together. I thought maybe if I showed up, we could stop doing whatever this has been. The hallway marriage. The polite marriage. The marriage where both of us keep walking around the locked doors pretending they’re furniture.”
He swallows. “I saw the bag.”
“Of course you did.”
His hand comes up, then drops again. “Charlotte.”
“I was going to tell you something.” My voice stays calm. Terribly calm. “Something I should have told you weeks ago.”
His eyes sharpen through the wreckage. “What?”
I almost laugh again. There he is. My Logan.
The man who hears a threat in the shape of a pause.
The man who would have moved heaven and the courthouse and every security company in three counties if I had said the words sooner.
The man I was trying to protect. The man who wasn't home to protect me because he was with her.
“No,” I say.
He steps toward me. “What were you going to tell me?”
“Nothing now.”
“Charlotte, if something happened?—”
“Something did happen.”
He stops.
I press my palm to my stomach, because it's still rolling, because I feel hollowed out and crowded at the same time.
“I came to you,” I say. “I drove through the rain to that studio because I decided I was done hiding. I thought the timing was bad, but I trusted us more than the timing.” My throat tightens for the first time. I hate it. “And I found out exactly why I shouldn't have.”
His face folds in on itself. He doesn't make a sound. Good.
I turn before he can speak and walk upstairs. He follows, but not too close. I can feel him behind me on the steps, a large broken shadow in the house we built together.
In the bedroom, I pull my suitcase from the closet. That's when his breath changes.
“No,” he says softly.
I set the suitcase on the bed.
“Don’t.” His voice is rough now. “Please don’t do this right now.”
I unzip the suitcase. The sound is small and final.
“I’ll go,” he says. “This is your home. I’ll leave. I’ll get out of your way.”
I cross to the dresser and open the top drawer. Underwear. Socks. The ordinary intimacy of laundry. My hands move with a calm that feels borrowed from someone crueler and stronger than me.
“I’m not staying in this house waiting for reporters to climb the hill,” I say. “I’m not sitting in the kitchen while strangers decide whether to pity me or laugh at me.”
“No one is laughing at you.”
I look over my shoulder. He looks sick the second he hears himself.
I turn back to the drawer. “Don't tell me what the world does to women like me. I’ve had ten years of practice.”
He has no answer.
I pack jeans. Sweaters. Bras. A black dress I don't remember buying. My hands skip over the blue silk nightgown Logan likes and then, because pain has a body and sometimes it's petty, I leave it there.
He stands near the doorway. Not crossing in. Not leaving.
“I ended it,” he says.
I close my eyes.
“She doesn’t matter,” he says, and the words come fast now, urgent, wrong. “Not like that. She never mattered. I know that sounds?—”
“Stop.”
He stops.
I turn with a stack of shirts in my hands. “Do you understand that telling me she didn’t matter makes it worse?”
His face changes.
I put the shirts into the suitcase. “You don’t get to destroy me over someone who didn’t matter.”
A broken breath leaves him.
“I was drunk,” he says. Then, immediately, “That’s not an excuse.”
“No,” I say. “It isn't.”
“I chose wrong. I know that. I know exactly what I did.”
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
I look at him then. Really look. The man in the doorway is the same man I've loved through championships and funerals, through bad knees and good mornings, through my fever and his father’s last breath.
He is broad shoulders and shaking hands.
He is my best friend. He is the person who knows how I take my coffee and where I hide emergency chocolate and what face I make when I am trying not to cry in public.
He's also the man in that video. And knowing that makes it feel like I don't know how to live in my own skin.
I go into the bathroom and gather my toothbrush, face wash, the moisturizer he once used by mistake and complained made him “too dewy for a man with a history of sports injuries.” The memory hits so hard I have to grip the counter.
Behind me, Logan says, “Let me fix this.”
I meet his eyes in the mirror. There's nothing clever left in me. No sharp line to make the wound look neat. Just the truth, flat and exhausted.
“You can’t.”
His mouth opens.
“You can regret it,” I say. “You can hate yourself. You can fire people and call lawyers and make statements and do whatever powerful men do when they want the floor to stop moving. But you cannot make me unsee it.”
He looks down. At his hand. At his ring.
I look away first.
Back in the bedroom, I zip the suitcase. It bulges at one corner, so I press my palm down and force it closed. That, finally, is what makes tears rise. Not the video. Not his confession. A zipper refusing to close around the life I can carry out.
Logan moves then, one half step, instinctive.
I lift my hand. He freezes.
“Don’t touch me.”
The words hurt him. I see it. I hate that I see it. I hate that some trained, married part of me wants to soften the blow I am bleeding from.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers.
“I know.”
And I do. That's the worst part. His remorse is real. It fills the room. It presses against my skin. It's still not enough.
I pull the suitcase off the bed. The wheels hit the floor with a dull thud.
At the bedroom door, I pause. Not because I'm reconsidering. Because eight years of marriage deserve one last moment of honesty, even if honesty is the only knife I have left.
“The thing I was going to tell you,” I say. “It mattered.”
He goes absolutely still.
I don't turn around.
“It was scary,” I say. “And I was stupid enough to think I didn’t have to be scared by myself anymore.”
His voice is barely there. “Tell me now.”
I close my hand around the suitcase handle.
“No.”
“Charlotte.”
“No,” I say again, and this time my voice breaks cleanly through the middle. I make myself keep walking.
Downstairs, the kitchen looks exactly the same. Cold coffee. Untouched plate. Morning light on marble. My phone still lies on the counter, face-down now, as if it's ashamed of what it showed me. I pick it up and put it in my purse.
At the front door, Logan is behind me. Close enough that I know he could stop me if he were a different kind of man. He doesn't. That almost undoes me too.
“Where will you go?” he asks.
I think of Lucy’s café. Her apartment above it. The narrow couch. Her furious love.
“Somewhere you’re not.”
He makes a sound like my name, but it doesn't fully become one.
I open the door.
The morning is bright in a way that feels indecent. Helena Bend spreads below the hill, river shining, rooftops warm, the whole town ready to wake up and read about me. Poor Charlotte. Mrs. Logan Delaney, finally measured and found wanting.
I step onto the porch with my suitcase. The air is cool against my damp face.
“Charlotte,” he says behind me. “Please. I love you.”
I stand very still. For one second, I let myself feel it. The old reflex. The part of me that turns toward his voice, toward his love, toward the life where those words were home. Then I look back at him. His eyes are ruined.
Good, some wounded part of me thinks.
And then, because I am still me, because loving him hasn't made me cleanly cruel, the thought hurts too.
“You didn’t just cheat on me,” I say. “You made them right.”
He flinches like I've put my hand through his chest. It's the only cruel thing I allow myself. Then I walk out, carrying the secret with me.