CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
TOWNES
She sat at the kitchen table, our kitchen table, in the same chair she used to sit in doing the books by lamplight before either of us had two nickels to rub together, and I sat across from her the way I used to when she'd read my early drafts and tell me the truth even when it wasn't what I wanted to hear.
"I've been watching you from a distance for weeks," she said.
"The speech. The text. The scarf you bought your mother without turning it into a reason to see me.
Turning down that songwriting request. I've been hearing about all of it secondhand, from people who weren't trying to report back to me, and I think that's what finally got through to me.
You weren't performing any of it for my benefit. "
"I wasn't," I said. "I didn't even think about you seeing most of it. I was just trying to be a different kind of person because I actually wanted to be one. Winning you back wasn't the reason. It was just a hope underneath it."
"I know," she said. "That's why it worked, if it's working.
I don't fully know yet if it's working. I want to be honest about that.
I still don't trust you completely, Townes.
I don't know if I will for a long time. Trust isn't something you can hand back in one folder or one speech, even a really good one. "
"I don't expect it back all at once," I said. "I don't think I've earned that, and I don't think one season of doing better erases a decade of not asking. I just want the chance to keep doing it, for as long as it takes, whether or not it ever adds up to you trusting me the way you used to."
She was quiet for a moment, turning something over. "I need to say something," she said, "and I need you to actually hear it, plainly, without turning it into anything."
"Okay."
"I love you," she said. "I never stopped, not for one day of any of this, and that terrified me more than almost anything, because I kept waiting for the love to run out so the leaving would feel simpler, and it never did.
But loving you and trusting you turned out to be two completely different things, and I spent years assuming they were the same thing because you're so good at making love sound like the whole answer.
It isn't the whole answer. Trust is built out of a hundred small honest moments, not one big beautiful one, and I think that's the thing you never understood about yourself, that you were spending all your currency on the big beautiful moment and none of it on the hundred small ones. "
I sat with that for a long moment before I answered, resisting the pull, the automatic reach for polish, rhythm, something engineered for impact the way my best lines always were. I made myself find the plainest words I had instead.
"I hurt you," I said. "You trusted me with the realest things in your life, and I used them.
I kept telling myself changing the details made it okay, because admitting it wasn't okay would have meant stopping, and some part of me didn't want to stop, because it was working, because it was giving me the career I'd wanted my whole life.
I put that career ahead of you more times than I can count, in ways so small I convinced myself they didn't add up to anything.
They added up to everything. I don't have a way to make that not true.
I can only tell you I see it now, all of it, and I'm not going to pretend a season of trying erases years of not trying. "
She was quiet, watching me, and I could see her deciding something, weighing it.
"I won't write about you anymore," I said.
"Not you specifically. Not us. I've thought about this for weeks, whether I could really mean it or whether it was just another beautiful sentence, and I think I do mean it.
Some parts of you are only yours. Some parts of us are only ours.
I spent years believing loving you meant turning everything we had into something I could shape into truth for other people.
I understand now that loving you actually means letting some of it stay exactly where it happened, between the two of us, never turned into anything else. "
She didn't answer right away, and I watched something move across her face, something that looked almost like grief, and I understood, a beat later, what it was costing her to hear me say it, because she knew as well as I did what songwriting had always meant to me, how completely it had shaped who I was since I was nineteen years old with nothing but a guitar and a legal pad.
"You understand what that means," she said quietly. "For you. That's not a small thing to give up."
"I know what it means," I said. "It means the biggest well I've ever drawn from is closed to me now, permanently, and I have to find a different way to write, a smaller way maybe, a way that doesn't depend on mining the person I love most for material.
I think that's fair. I think it's more than fair, actually, given what it cost you for me to keep drawing from it without asking. "
"I'm not asking you to give up songwriting," she said.
"I'm not giving it up," I said. "I'm giving up writing about you. There's a difference, and I think it's the difference I should have understood from the very beginning, before any of this happened."
She reached across the table, slowly, and put her hand over mine, the first time she'd touched me in months, and neither of us said anything for a long moment, just sat there with her hand resting over mine on the table where our whole marriage had once been built, plank by careful plank, before either of us knew how easily it could come apart.
"I'm not saying I'm coming home tonight," she said. "I need you to understand that. This isn't a scene where everything resolves because you finally said the right thing."
"I know," I said. "I'm not expecting that. I just wanted you to hear it, whether or not it changes anything tonight."
"It changes something," she said. "I don't know yet how much. But it changes something."