Chapter 34
Rose
Lizanne stood on the doorstep in her dark wool coat. She looked tired in the way that came from having spent herself completely and not yet knowing whether it had been worth it.
“I saw it,” Rose said.
“I know. Quinn texted me.” A pause. “Can I come in?”
Rose stepped back.
Lizanne came into the hallway and looked toward the living room, where Quinn had appeared in the doorway. She raised a hand. He raised one back. From further inside the house, Daisy conducted her kingdom at considerable volume.
“Your family helped me set it up,” Lizanne said.
Rose looked toward the living room, where her mother sat very studiously looking at anything else. “Of course they did.”
They went to the room Rose had been staying in—her old teenage bedroom, still carrying faint traces of who she’d been at seventeen. Lizanne sat on the edge of the bed. Rose sat beside her.
“I’m sorry I didn’t believe you about Trina,” Rose said. “That’s on me. I should have come to you when Jeremy first made contact instead of handling it quietly and hoping it would go away. I was doing exactly what I accused you of doing.”
“We can learn from it,” Lizanne said. “If there’s a future to learn it in.”
Rose looked at her. “Is it really true? About Jeremy—all of it?”
Lizanne reached into her coat pocket and produced a folded set of papers.
“I tracked him down. Called him.” She held Rose’s gaze.
“When he sent that Christmas card, he meant it. He’s married now.
A daughter, eighteen months old. He said the guilt had been building for years—he felt he’d deprived Daisy of a father and wanted to make it right.
When he didn’t hear back, he decided to let it go.
He said there’d been too much upheaval already. ”
“Then Trina found him,” Rose said.
“I made a stupid comment in the car. Somehow, she found him. She told him the marriage was fake. That we were using Daisy for the cameras, that Daisy hated being filmed, that she was frightened every time the crew arrived.” Lizanne’s voice stayed level, but only just. “She told him you were saying terrible things about him to Daisy. That’s what made him file. She paid for the lawyer.”
Rose’s ears rang. She pressed her hands together in her lap. “He believed her.”
“He did. But your lawyer’s letters started arriving and he began to have doubts.
By the time I reached out to him, he was already having second thoughts.
” Lizanne unfolded the papers—an email exchange.
Jeremy’s old address, the same one Rose had blocked years ago.
Underneath it was the paper trail he’d kept — enough to lead back to Trina — the same documents Lizanne had handed the producers to verify before she ever sat down for that interview.
“His wife found out what he’d done. She made him return the money. ”
Rose looked at the last page—the bank transfer confirmation. He had returned it. Every last bit of it.
“I’m not telling you he’s reformed,” Lizanne said. “I’m telling you he did the right thing at the end, and I wanted to be certain before I brought it to you. I didn’t want to give you something half-finished.”
“I understand,” Rose said.
Lizanne’s composure shifted then.
“I need you to forgive me,” she said. “Not just for Jeremy, not just for Trina—for all of it. For how it started. For every time I decided I knew what was best.” Her voice dropped.
“I have spent these last few days in that house understanding what it feels like to have everything that matters absent. It’s the way it used to be, and I didn’t know how much I hated the way it used to be until I had something different. ” A pause. “Come home.”
Rose felt her throat tighten. “When you put it that way, there isn’t much to forgive. We were played against each other by someone who knew exactly which levers to pull.”
“There’s still the Jeremy payment.”
“Yes. I’m still angry about it.” She paused. “But I know why you did it, and I know it came from the same place everything else comes from.” She reached over and took Lizanne’s hand. “We’re going to have to keep working on that.”
“I know.”
“I’ve missed you,” Rose said. It came out simpler than she’d intended, stripped of the walls she’d been building for two weeks. “I’ve missed you and I want to come home.”
Lizanne’s hand tightened around hers.
The noise of the house moved around them—Quinn’s voice from the kitchen, a shriek from one of the children that sounded catastrophic, her mother’s voice restoring order. Then Lizanne turned toward her and there was nothing left to negotiate.
The bedroom door had a lock Rose hadn’t used since she was sixteen. She used it now.
The room was small and the evening light came through the curtains in thin pale strips. The house held people on the other side of a single door, which meant they had to be quiet as mice.
Lizanne kissed her the way she kissed her when there was no camera. As though she were parched and Rose were water.
Rose pulled back far enough to look at her. They hadn’t been apart long, and yet it felt like an eternity.
She pushed the coat from Lizanne’s shoulders and Lizanne let it go without looking away from her face.
Rose reached for the buttons of her blazer and worked them open slowly, one at a time, because she wanted to establish that they were not rushing.
The blazer followed the coat. Then the blouse beneath it, which Rose drew from the waistband and unbuttoned from the bottom up, taking her time about it.
Lizanne’s hands found the hem of Rose’s sweater. She paused there. Rose lifted her arms in answer.
Then they were both in just their skin from the waist up and Lizanne’s mouth found her throat and stayed there while her hands moved to Rose’s back and drew her in.
Rose felt the familiar architecture of her—every line of her shoulders, the angle of her collarbone, the warmth of her chest pressed flat against Rose’s own—and the relief of it made her close her eyes.
“You’re shaking,” Lizanne said, very quietly, against her neck.
“I’m aware,” Rose said.
Lizanne drew back to look at her. She brought one hand up to cup Rose’s jaw, her thumb tracing the line of her cheekbone with the focus she brought to everything she actually cared about. Rose turned her face into it slightly without meaning to.
Then Lizanne kissed her again, slower, and walked her back toward the bed.
Rose sat down and pulled her in by the waist and Lizanne came, bracing one hand on the headboard and looking down at her with that expression that only existed in private—the composure stripped back and nothing underneath it but her.
Rose reached up and unhooked her bra and Lizanne let it fall. Rose pulled her down.
Lizanne settled over her and her mouth moved from Rose’s lips to her jaw to the curve of her neck to her chest, taking her time, and Rose pressed her hand flat to the back of Lizanne’s head and kept her there.
Lizanne’s hands worked the rest of their clothes off without urgency and the full length of her settled against Rose and Rose exhaled against the top of her head.
They had been here before—in the pool house, in the shop, in the careful half-dark after the wedding—but this differed from all of those.
The first time had been a collision, urgent and slightly disbelieving.
The shop had been stolen time, quick and electric.
This was neither. This was the version that came after you had nearly lost something and found yourself on the other side of it, and it moved accordingly—slowly, with attention, with the specific tenderness of two people who had both been frightened and were not frightened anymore.
Lizanne’s mouth traveled lower and Rose’s breath caught.
She was in no hurry about that either. Her hands pinned Rose’s hips gently to the mattress.
Rose let her, because Lizanne knew exactly what she was doing and had since the first time.
She twisted her fingers into the bedsheet and bit down on the inside of her cheek and focused on being quiet.
Lizanne’s mouth was patient and deliberate, the pressure exactly right, and Rose felt it build in long slow waves.
“Lizanne—” she started, and didn’t finish.
Lizanne lifted her head just enough. “I’ve got you,” she said, barely audible. Just that. Then her mouth returned and Rose stopped trying to think.
She came apart slowly, the way she always did with Lizanne—not sharply but deeply, from somewhere in the center of her, her whole body pulling tight and then releasing in stages. She pressed her free hand over her own mouth and held on.
Lizanne held her through it. When Rose’s breathing steadied she moved back up beside her, and Rose reached for her.
“Your turn,” Rose said, against her mouth.
“I wasn’t keeping score,” Lizanne said.
“I know. Neither am I.” Rose rolled her onto her back and looked down at her.
Lizanne looked with nothing in her face but steadiness and warmth and presence—and underneath that, unmistakably, want.
Rose had spent two weeks telling herself she was angry, which was true.
She had not spent enough time admitting that underneath the anger she had simply missed being looked at like that.
She took her time. She’d learned Lizanne the way you learned something you intended to keep and she used everything she knew now.
Lizanne’s composure cracked in increments: the sharp breath when Rose’s mouth found her hip, the way her hand tightened in Rose’s hair, the single low sound she made that she immediately suppressed.
When Lizanne finally came it was with Rose’s name in her mouth and her hand pressed to her own lips, her whole body arching and then settling, and Rose felt something loosen in her chest that she hadn’t realized had been held tight for two weeks.
She moved back up beside her. Lizanne’s breathing was still uneven. Rose lay her head on her shoulder and waited.
Afterward they lay in the narrow bed in the thin light with Rose’s head on Lizanne’s shoulder. From the kitchen something fell with a crash. Quinn said something. Her mother replied with something considerably more pointed.
“Your family,” Lizanne said, at the ceiling.
“Our family,” Rose said.
A pause.
“Our family,” Lizanne agreed, “is a natural disaster. I love them,” Lizanne said. “I would also like it noted that our house has enough square footage that you cannot hear every single thing that happens in the kitchen from the bedroom.”
Rose laughed—properly, the kind that came from her chest. “You think that’s bad. Four of us in a three-bedroom house growing up. Quinn used to narrate his video games out loud.”
“Out loud.”
“At volume. Full commentary.”
Lizanne looked at her. “We are going to find a middle ground,” she said. “Between your family and my square footage.”
“That almost sounds like a proposal.”
“It’s a practical observation.” She turned to her then. “Although… I think you are owed a proper proposal.”
“Lizanne…”
“No…You are. Rose… Despite the fact that we are already married and you already live at my house with your family, I want to ask you this…Will you take me, Lizanne Elizabeth Connors, as your wife? Despite all of my shortcomings?”
Rose’s eyes grew. “Your middle name is Elizabeth? Your name is … Liz Liz?”
It wasn’t the right answer. Rose knew that. Lizanne did too. And yet, as they both broke into laughter, they each understood that it was, in its own way, the perfect one.
“I do. Liz Liz. But after this revelation, I do not want to hear one more joke about how mom, Daisy, and I are a bouquet of flowers.”
“I promise,” Lizanne replied and the two kissed once more, this time, more united than ever before.