Chapter 12 #2
"The independent DNA test comes back this week," I tell her. "It's going to confirm I'm not Hudson's father. Because I'm not. Because you drugged me in Santa Barbara and told me we'd slept together when we never did, and then you spent months bleeding me dry for a kid that was never mine."
She doesn't deny it. That's the thing that gets me. She doesn't even try to pretend.
"You ruined my marriage," I say, and my voice is shaking with rage, or maybe grief. "You ruined my life. My wife is gone, my daughter is gone, and it's because of you."
Kendall leans against the doorframe, completely calm, and looks at me almost with pity. "I didn't ruin anything, Taz. You did that yourself. I just gave you a reason."
The words land hard. Because she's right.
She's a liar and a con artist and she drugged me, but she's right about this one thing: she didn't make me neglect my wife for years.
I did that. I can see every year of it. Molly in our bedroom doorway in that robe, telling me she was lonely, and me reaching for my tie.
Molly on the bathroom floor while I took a call in the hall.
The empty chair at the ultrasound. Kendall didn't put any of that there.
She just walked through the doors I'd already left open.
"My lawyers are ending the lease," I say, because I can't let her see how deep that landed. "They'll handle the notice and the process. But I'm done funding your life. I'm done paying for any of this."
Her composure finally slips. "You can't just—"
"I can," I say. "And I am. Whatever happens next is between you and the law and Jensen and whoever else you've conned over the years. But I never want to hear your voice again. I never want to see your face. You're done."
I turn and walk away before she can respond. I hear her calling my name after me, but I don't turn around.
The kitchen table is covered in paper by midnight.
I've been writing for hours. My hand is cramping and my coffee went cold three cups ago, but I can't stop. Because Jensen was right about one thing: you can't live with this stuff eating you from the inside. You have to get it out.
Molly,
I keep wanting to begin with proof that I didn't sleep with Kendall. You deserve that proof, and you'll have it. But it doesn't answer what you asked me in the hospital. You asked why I kept leaving you alone.
After Dad died, work gave me somewhere to put the grief.
Then it gave me somewhere to hide from conversations I didn't want to have.
By the time we moved to LA, I had learned to call every avoidance an obligation.
You paid for that habit. You lost evenings, your work at Sagebloom, and the husband who used to listen when you talked about things that mattered to you.
You told me. I remember you saying you were lonely.
My answer was to send you to Ojai, as though the problem was transportation, and then I looked at my phone before you finished speaking.
I can't claim I didn't understand what you needed.
I decided I could meet that need later, and I kept moving later.
Kendall's lie gave me another excuse. I told myself I was protecting you while I made decisions you had a right to know about.
I let you believe you were asking too much, and you sat through scans alone.
Then I turned off my phone while you were close to giving birth, and I missed our daughter's arrival.
When you finally told me exactly what would happen if I left again, I still left.
I turn to a clean sheet. Page two. What changes, and how.
I have resigned from the day-to-day job. Next comes getting help to understand why I made being needed elsewhere more important than being present at home. I will answer the questions you want answered. I won't ask you to comfort me while I do it.
You don't owe me a return to the marriage because I'm changing things I should have changed years ago. Clem deserves a father who shows up, and you deserve care that doesn't require you to surrender your boundaries. I need to become that man whether you ever choose me again or not.
I'm sorry I made my love a thing you had to wait for.
I sign it and seal it for my lawyer to forward separately. She can leave it unopened. The evidence is already on its way, and none of it depends on her agreeing to see me.
That night, the drive to Ojai takes two hours, and this time I don't turn around at the county line.
I've been to Molly's grandmother's farm a hundred times.
We planted the lavender along the driveway together.
I know which floorboard creaks in the hallway and which window sticks in the summer heat.
I know this place almost as well as I know the ranch, because for years it was hers and she shared it with me.
The farmhouse looks abandoned when I pull up the county road, long after dark. Shuttered windows, no lights, a darkness that says empty for years. Miguel took the hives to his orchard when we left, and the house looks like nobody's touched it since Molly's grandmother died.
I almost drive past. I almost convince myself this was a stupid idea, that she's not here, that I should go home and let the lawyers find her through proper channels.
Then I see them.
My headlights sweep the yard as I slow at the bend, and there's enough light to catch the shapes behind the barn. Tiny white onesies, maybe four or five of them, hanging on the old clothesline that Molly's grandmother used to use for her quilts.
My heart stops.
She's here. My wife and my daughter are here, fifty feet away from me in the dark, and I could walk up those porch steps and knock on that door and—
And what? And have her slam it in my face? And scare her when she's already hiding? And prove I'm still the same man who puts his needs above hers?
I sit in my truck with my hands on the steering wheel and I watch the onesies move slightly in the night breeze. Tiny clothes for my tiny daughter, drying in the same place where Molly used to hang her grandmother's sheets.
My hand never leaves the wheel. I don't knock.
I put the truck in reverse, and I drive home, and I start planning how to become someone worth letting back in.