Chapter Twenty
Robert
Iflew to Costa Rica on the jet, because the distance made anything else impractical, but I booked a room at a different hotel from the lodge where Jill was staying, a forty-minute drive along the coast, exactly as she'd asked, and I told her when I landed rather than surprising her, a single text sent from the tarmac, and then I waited, the hardest part of the entire trip, for her to decide when and where she wanted to see me, the two days that followed stretching longer than the three weeks that had preceded them.
I spent the flight down rereading the six pages I'd written in Kyoto, still folded in my jacket pocket, checking and rechecking whether the words held up in daylight the way they'd felt true at two in the morning in a hotel room half a world away.
They did, mostly, though I found myself wanting to add things, whole paragraphs about the closet full of contact sheets, about Olivia's list, about my mother's confession at the kitchen table, and I made myself stop editing and simply let the letter stand as it was, imperfect and unfinished in the way honesty usually is.
I spent those two days at my own hotel doing something close to nothing, which was its own kind of foreign territory for me.
I swam in the mornings, badly, out of practice in a way that embarrassed me a little.
I ate alone at the hotel restaurant, watching families and couples move through their vacations around me, and I found myself, on the second evening, striking up a conversation with the bartender, a young man named Andrés who asked, without any particular agenda, why an American businessman was sitting alone at his bar for the third night running.
"Waiting to see if my wife still wants to be married to me," I told him, surprising myself with how easily the truth came out to a stranger.
Andrés considered that while he polished a glass. "That's a big thing to wait for," he said. "You nervous?"
"More than I've been about anything in years."
"Good," he said, setting the glass down. "Means it still matters. I see a lot of men come through here who stopped being nervous about their marriages a long time before the marriage ended. Nervous is better than numb."
"How do you know that? You look like you're what, twenty-five?"
Andrés laughed. "Twenty-six. But I've worked this bar six years, and this bar sees a lot of men exactly like you, sitting exactly where you're sitting, working up the nerve to fix something they broke somewhere else.
You learn the pattern. The ones who make it usually look the way you look right now. Scared, but still showing up anyway."
"And the ones who don't make it?"
"They stop coming back to the bar," Andrés said. "Either because it worked out, or because they went home and it didn't. I never find out which. I just hope, for your sake, it's the first kind."
Two days passed before her message came, an address and a time, a small open-air restaurant near the water where she suggested we meet for dinner, and I arrived early, because I had spent three weeks arriving late to nearly everything that mattered and I intended, at minimum, to get this one thing right, sitting alone at the table for twenty minutes before she arrived, watching the tide inch closer up the sand, rehearsing nothing, having decided somewhere over the Gulf of Mexico that rehearsed words would only get in the way.
Andrés had given me one more piece of advice before I left the bar that final night, unprompted, delivered as he wiped down the counter one last time.
"Whatever you do," he'd said, "don't bring anything.
No flowers, no gift, nothing that could look like you're trying to buy the conversation back onto easier ground.
Just bring yourself. If she wanted things from you, she'd still be at your house.
" I'd thought about that the whole drive over, my hands empty, no jewelry box in my jacket this time, no reservation held at a restaurant where I'd once proposed, only myself and whatever I actually had to say.
I saw her before she saw me, walking up the sandy path toward the restaurant, and the change in her stopped me mid-breath.
Sun-browned, her hair lighter than I remembered, wearing a simple cotton dress instead of anything I would have chosen for her from a boutique, and there was a looseness in the way she moved that I hadn't seen in years, maybe not since the earliest days of our marriage, before I had slowly, without ever intending to, taught her to hold herself more carefully, her whole posture different, unguarded in a way that made her look, absurdly, younger than I'd seen her look in a decade.
She saw me and stopped for a moment at the edge of the path, and I watched something cross her face, not quite a smile, something more careful than that, an assessment, and then she came the rest of the way and sat down across from me without either of us reaching to embrace the other, both of us understanding without discussing it that we hadn't earned that yet.
"You look well," I said, and immediately wished I'd said something less generic.
"I am well," she said. "That surprises me too, if it's any comfort."
We sat at a table near the water, waves breaking softly somewhere beyond the low wall that separated the restaurant from the beach, and for a while neither of us said much, ordering drinks, watching the tide come in, both of us circling the actual conversation the way two people circle something they've been rehearsing for weeks and are suddenly afraid to say out loud, the silence between us different from the silences of our marriage, charged rather than empty.
"I'm not going to defend the sentence you heard," I said finally, because I understood, watching her across that table, that leading with an explanation was exactly the mistake I'd already made in every message since Rome.
"You heard what you heard, and given everything that came before it, you had every reason to believe the worst version of what it meant.
I built that reason, over twelve years, one missed dinner at a time. "
Jill was quiet for a long moment, turning her glass slowly on the table, the ice catching what was left of the evening light.
"I know what you meant now," she said. "Bobby told you what he heard, and your messages have made it clear enough.
But knowing what you meant doesn't undo what it felt like to hear it, standing outside that door with a cake I'd baked from your mother's recipe. "
"I know," I said. "I'm not asking you to feel differently about that night. I'm asking whether there's a version of this marriage you'd actually want to come back to, or whether I've made this one unrecoverable."
"I don't know yet," she said. "I want to be honest with you about that, right now, before this conversation goes any further. I don't have an answer tonight."
"I'm not asking for one tonight."
We ordered food we barely touched, the conversation moving in fits and starts between easier subjects, her trip, the photographs she'd been taking, a careful accounting of the small facts of the last month that neither of us had been present for in the other's life, and slowly, over the course of the meal, something in the tension between us loosened, not resolved, but loosened, the way a held breath finally releases even when the thing that caused it hasn't gone away.
"Tell me about Kyoto," I said. "The real version. Not what you put in a text message."
She was quiet for a moment, looking out at the water. "It was the first place on this whole trip where I stopped performing being okay," she said. "Even to myself. I just let myself be however I actually was, hour to hour, and it turned out that was allowed. Nobody needed me to have it together."
"I'm sorry I made you feel like you always had to."
"I know," she said. "I'm starting to believe you mean that. I'm just not sure yet what believing it is supposed to do next."
We finished dinner slowly, talking in a way we hadn't talked in years, about Costa Rica, about Luis and Rosa's ceviche, about the photographs she'd taken and what Mark had said about them, none of it touching the company or the calendar, and when the check came I let her reach for it before I did, a small thing, but the first time in twelve years I had let her decide how a meal between us would end, watching her hand close around the little leather folder with something that felt, unexpectedly, like relief.
"Can I ask you something," she said, as the waiter cleared our plates, "and you can decide not to answer if it's too much."
"Go ahead."
"Were you ever going to tell me about the assignment Mark offered me? Before all this happened, I mean. If you'd found that folder some other way, on some ordinary Tuesday, would you have said anything, or would you have just quietly put it back where you found it?"
I sat with the question for a long moment, unwilling to give her a comfortable answer she hadn't earned.
"Honestly, I don't know," I said finally.
"I'd like to believe I would have. But I think the version of me from six weeks ago might have looked at that folder and felt guilty for about a day and then found some reason the timing still wasn't right to bring it up.
I'm not proud of that answer. It's just the true one. "
She nodded slowly, absorbing that, and something in her expression told me she'd expected exactly that answer and had asked anyway, needing to hear whether I'd give her the honest version or the comfortable one.
She walked me partway back toward the road afterward, the two of us silent for most of it, and at the point where our paths would split, toward two separate hotels, two separate rooms, she stopped and looked at me for a long moment.
"Thank you for coming," she said. "And thank you for not asking me to decide anything tonight."
"Whenever you're ready to talk again, tell me where and when," I said. "I'm not going anywhere unless you ask me to."
She nodded, and turned, and walked away down the dark road toward her own hotel, and I stood there for a long time watching her go, understanding that I had just spent an entire evening with my wife and had not once tried to close the distance between us, and that the not-trying had been, somehow, the hardest and most honest thing I'd done in this entire marriage.