Chapter Ten — Grace
He was in the kitchen when I got home, tie already off, sleeves rolled up, chopping something for a late dinner he didn't know I wasn't going to eat.
The radio was on low. He didn't hear me come in at first, and I stood in the doorway for a second, watching him move around our kitchen with the total ease of a man who had no idea his life was about to change, and felt something in me harden into the specific, quiet resolve I'd been building in the car for the last twenty minutes.
"Hey," he said, glancing up. "I didn't hear you pull in. I'm making that chicken thing you like, figured you'd be starving after the studio all day."
I didn't move from the doorway. "If you could go back," I said, "would you marry me?"
He went completely still. The knife stopped moving. That told me everything before he said a single word, the stillness itself a confession that made whatever came out of his mouth next feel almost beside the point.
"Grace." His voice was careful, too careful, the voice of a man choosing each word like it might detonate. "It isn't what you think."
"What do you think I think?"
"I don't know what Elodie told you, but—"
"So you know Elodie told me something." I stepped further into the kitchen, my coat still on, my keys still in my hand.
"That's interesting, since I never said her name.
I said 'if you could go back,' and you went straight to Elodie.
How many people have I not mentioned that you're already worried about? "
He set the knife down very deliberately, like he needed both hands free for whatever was about to happen. "Garrett's divorce got into my head. I said some things at a couple of dinners I shouldn't have said. It didn't mean anything, Grace, it was talk, guys venting about their lives, it wasn't—"
"What did you say?"
"I said I wondered sometimes what my life would look like if I hadn't gotten married so young. It wasn't about you specifically."
"Someone asked if it was about me. Specifically." My voice didn't shake, which surprised me, given how much of me was shaking on the inside, my hands cold around my keys. "You said even me."
His jaw tightened, and for a second I watched him consider lying about it, watched the calculation move across his face before he apparently decided against it.
"I was talking hypothetically. It's a conversation men have when someone's going through what Garrett's going through. It doesn't mean I actually—"
"Who was there?" I asked. "When you said it. Who heard you?"
"Grace—"
"Who, Magnus."
"Garrett. Alden. Dale. A guy named Whit, I don't think you've met him." He said the names like each one cost him something, like saying them out loud made the thing more real than it had been a moment before.
"When did it start? The first time you said something like this. When was it?"
He hesitated, and I watched him actually try to calculate it, which told me it wasn't a single moment he could point to with any confidence. "I don't know exactly. Maybe a year and a half ago. Around the time Garrett and Priya started having problems."
"A year and a half." I moved past him, into the living room, needing to put distance between myself and the counter where this was happening, and he followed a few steps before stopping himself, like some instinct told him crowding me would make this worse.
"So for a year and a half, you've been sitting across from me at this counter, sleeping next to me, coming to my studio with takeout when I'm slammed, and also telling a table of men that marrying me cost you something.
Both of those were happening at the same time and I only got to know about one of them. "
"That's not how it felt from the inside."
"I don't care how it felt from the inside. I care what was actually happening." I turned back to face him. "You told them about Singapore."
"Grace—"
"Answer me. You told them Singapore was because of me."
"I told them the timing didn't work because of things going on in our life. I didn't say it was your fault, specifically."
"I sat at that same counter and told you to take it. I remember what I said. I said we'd figure out my dad's care however we needed to, that I didn't want you passing on something that big because of us. You remember that too, don't you? You have to. It wasn't that long ago."
He didn't answer right away, and something in his face told me he did remember, that the memory was sitting right there underneath whatever version of events he'd been telling at Hendrick's.
"And the graduate program," I said, something in me not willing to stop now that I'd started. "I gave that up the year your first warehouse needed every dollar we had. I never once heard you tell anyone that story. Just the ones where you gave something up."
"I didn't think about it that way at the time."
"Maybe you should have."
"I said I wondered sometimes what my life would look like if I hadn't gotten married so young. It wasn't about you specifically."
"Someone asked if it was about me. Specifically." My voice didn't shake, which surprised me, given how much of me was shaking on the inside, my hands cold around my keys. "You said even me."
His jaw tightened, and for a second I watched him consider lying about it a second time, watched the calculation move across his face before he apparently decided against it again.
"I was talking hypothetically. It's a conversation men have when someone's going through what Garrett's going through. It doesn't mean I actually—"
"I wasn't hypothetical," I said, my voice finally breaking on the word, twelve years of certainty coming apart in real time in our kitchen. "I was upstairs asleep in our bed while you were telling people you wished you'd built a life without me in it."
"That's not fair."
"Isn't it?" I stepped closer, needing him to actually look at me instead of at the counter between us, at the cutting board, at anything that wasn't my face. "How many times have you said something like this? Give me a number, Magnus. An actual number."
He opened his mouth and then didn't answer, his eyes moving away from mine, and the silence stretched out long enough to become its own answer, long enough that I had time to walk around the island and stand directly in front of him, forcing the conversation to happen at close range instead of across the safe distance of granite countertop.
"I don't know," he said finally, so quietly I almost didn't hear it. "A handful of times, maybe. Over the last year or two."
A handful. Not once, in a moment of weakness he could have taken back the next morning over coffee.
A pattern, repeated enough that a room full of men had formed an opinion about our marriage before I'd ever known there was anything to have an opinion about, repeated enough that his own friend's wife had been walking on eggshells around me for a month out of guilt she had no obligation to feel.
"Why," I said. It wasn't really a question, or it was the only question, the one underneath everything else. "You have everything, Magnus. You have a company you built from nothing. You have a marriage that everyone tells us looks easy. What exactly is it that you think I cost you?"
"I don't think you cost me anything," he said, and something raw came into his voice now, something closer to the truth than anything he'd said yet. "I think I got scared of things I wanted to do and it was easier to say the marriage was the reason than to say I didn't have the nerve."
"Then why didn't you say that? At the dinner. Why didn't you say 'I'm scared,' instead of 'even Grace'?"
He didn't have an answer for that. He stood there, hands braced on the counter behind him now, looking at me like a man watching something he loved walk toward the edge of a cliff and having no idea how to stop it.
He took a step toward me, one hand half raised like he meant to touch my arm, and then stopped himself, letting it drop back to his side, some instinct telling him correctly that it wasn't his to reach for right now.
"I love you," he said. "That part was never a lie, Grace. Whatever else I said, whatever I let people believe, I have never once actually regretted marrying you."
"I believe that you believe that," I said, and it was true, and it was also the worst thing I could have said, because believing it changed nothing about what he'd actually done.
"But you let a room full of people believe something else.
You let them build a whole story about our marriage where I'm the reason you didn't get to live bigger, and you sat there and let it happen, more than once, and you never once thought I deserved to know that story existed. "
"I was going to fix it."
"When? After how many more dinners?"
He didn't answer. I stood there for a long moment, waiting, giving him every chance to say something that would change what was happening, and he didn't, because there wasn't anything to say that would have been enough in that moment, not with the specific words still sitting between us, unretracted.
I went upstairs without saying anything else.
I heard him follow as far as the bottom of the stairs and then stop, some instinct telling him not to crowd me, and I stood in our bedroom for a moment before I could make myself move, looking at a room that had looked exactly the same an hour ago and now felt like it belonged to a version of my life I could no longer fully claim.
I pulled a bag out of the closet and started filling it, methodically, clothes for a week, the toiletries I kept in a travel bag for exactly this kind of unplanned trip, though I'd never once imagined using it for this.
My hands moved through the motions of packing on their own, folding shirts I'd folded a thousand times, while the rest of me stood somewhere outside my body watching a woman pack a bag in a bedroom that still smelled like the candle I'd lit that morning without any idea what the day would hold by evening.
He appeared in the doorway when I was almost finished. "Grace. Please. Can we talk about this?"
"We are talking about it. You're just not liking what it sounds like from this side."
"Where are you going to go?"
"Tiffany's."
"For how long?"
"I don't know, Magnus. I genuinely don't know.
" I zipped the bag and looked at him, really looked at him, at the face I'd loved for twelve years, still handsome, still familiar, still somehow a stranger in this exact moment.
"I need you to understand that this isn't about the wondering.
Everybody wonders things. It's about the fact that you turned it into a story you told other people, a story where I was the villain, and you let that story exist in the world without me knowing about it, and I don't know yet what that means about the rest of it. About whether I actually know you."
"You know me."
"I thought I did." I picked up the bag. "I need some time to figure out if that's still true."
I stopped in the doorway of the bathroom on my way out, catching sight of both our toothbrushes still sitting in the same cup they'd shared for eight years, a detail so small and so ordinary that it nearly undid me more than anything he'd said all night. I made myself keep walking.
I walked past him at the door, and he stood aside to let me, because there was nothing he could say in that moment that would have made me stay, and some part of him seemed to know it, his face doing something complicated that I didn't have the capacity to interpret right then.
"Grace," he said, at the front door, his voice cracking on my name. "I love you. That part was never a lie."
"I know," I said, and it was the worst part of all of it, that I still believed him, and it changed nothing. "That's what makes this so much worse."
I loaded the bag into my trunk with hands that had finally started shaking now that there was no one left to watch me hold it together, and stood in our driveway for a moment looking back at the house, porch light already on even though it wasn't dark yet, a habit Magnus kept out of some old superstition about coming home to a lit door.
I had walked out that door a thousand times before, for work trips, for errands, for ordinary Tuesdays that meant nothing.
This felt entirely different, my own front door suddenly belonging to a house I wasn't sure I could call mine anymore, and I made myself get in the car before I could stand there long enough to change my mind.
I drove to Tiffany's with my hands too tight on the wheel, twelve years of certainty coming apart somewhere around the interstate, and didn't cry until I was parked outside her building, sitting alone in the dark with the engine off, letting it happen all at once, the whole weight of it finally allowed to land now that there was no one left to be steady in front of.