Chapter 24 #2
Something moves in his expression, the warmth underneath the steady, the thing that surfaces when I say something specifically myself.
"End of January," he says.
"Possibly."
"If he's panicking," he says carefully, "it might be because his lawyer is telling him to take the settlement and he's looking for a reason not to."
"Or because someone forwarded him a photo of me at a New Year's party looking like someone who isn't devastated."
"Probably both," he says.
"He hates it," I say. "That I'm okay. I can feel it." I pause. "Not because he wants me to suffer. Because I think he needed me to be not okay to maintain the version of this where he didn't cause permanent damage."
Ethan looks at me.
"He wanted me to be sad," I say. "Not cruelly. Just — he needed the evidence that I'd been hurt to match the scale of what he did. If I'm fine, then what he did was really bad. Unforgivably bad." I pause. "And I am fine. And it was."
"Yeah," he says.
"I'm not fine in spite of him," I say. "I'm fine because I left and came here and built something and the fine has nothing to do with him." I look at the window. "He's watching because he can see that, and it's the worst thing I could do to him without trying."
Ethan is quiet for a moment.
"What do you want to do?" he asks. "Not about Jason. Tonight. What do you want?”
I look at him. What do you want? Not what are you going to do about this or how does this affect the proceedings? What do I want?
"I want to cook dinner," I say. "I want to not burn the garlic.
I want to eat at this table and talk about the Arts Center show and whether the second roll of film is going to be any good and whether the espalier needs anything before March.
" I pause. "I want Jason to be a two-minute administrative task and not the rest of my evening. "
He stands up and goes back to the stove.
"Lower heat," he says, adjusting the burner.
"More patience," I say.
"Don't let the distraction run the pan," he counters.
I get up and stand beside him at the stove, and he hands me the wooden spoon without commentary, and I stir the garlic and it's fine — the right temperature, it smells right, it's doing what it's supposed to do.
"There," he says.
"There," I say.
We eat dinner and talk about the Arts Center show, the second roll of film and whether the espalier needs anything before March.
We do the dishes. He shows me where the ladder print is, on the wall in the hallway, where he can see it when he comes in the door, and it looks right there, the November light and the man who belongs.
I look at it for a moment.
"Good placement," I say.
"It's a good photograph," he says.
"I took it," I say. "But you're in it. You look like yourself."
"That's what you photograph," he says. "Things that look like what they are."
I look at the print. At the man in the November light who has been, for three months, the most consistently himself person I've ever known.
"I'm going to photograph this house," I say. "When the third roll comes in. The library wall. The kitchen window at the right angle."
"Okay," he says.
"And you," I say. "Again. With better light."
He looks at me. "Okay," he says again.
I don't know what Jason does after the three unanswered calls and the forwarded texts and the social media watching.
I find out three days later when Patricia calls with the voice she uses when something requires management.
"Jason contacted Ethan Mercer directly," she says.
I go still.
"A text. His lawyer is handling the fallout, it's not an approved contact and it puts Jason in a difficult position with the proceedings. I wanted you to know before you heard from another source."
"What did he say? To Ethan?"
"I don't know the full content. What I know is that it's been documented and it works in our favor. Delaney, this is actually good for the settlement."
"I know," I say. "I know it's good for the settlement."
I hang up and sit in Elise's kitchen with Gerald on the counter, the January light coming through the east window, think about a man I don't miss, reaching for the one thing he calculated might still matter to me.
He went to Ethan.
Not to hurt Ethan, but to complicate things. To introduce a version of the story where I'm a woman in transition, a woman who was married until four months ago, a woman whose judgment should be questioned.
He went to Ethan because he finally understood that the other things he'd tried — the calls, the voicemails, the therapy-twice-a-week, the not fair to either of us — hadn't worked.
So, he went to the one person he calculated might change my mind.
He didn't understand, and probably couldn't, that the person he went to is the least likely person in the world to do what Jason hoped. He didn't understand that Ethan Mercer is the opposite of a man who can be leveraged.
Patricia called. I know about Jason's text.
I was going to call you tonight.
What did he say?
He asked me to consider whether I was taking advantage of someone in a vulnerable situation.
And?
I documented it and sent it to Patricia.
Ethan.
I didn't think that was a question that needed a response. But for the record, no. I'm not.
I know.
I know you know. Are you okay?
And here is the thing — the thing I need to record honestly, because I've been recording things honestly for fourteen weeks: I'm not scared.
I'm not wavering. I'm not looking at Jason's decision to contact Ethan and feeling anything except a clarifying, clean, specific anger on behalf of the man who has spent three months being precisely the opposite of everything Jason assumed about him.
I'm fine. I'm angry, but I'm fine.
Angry is appropriate.
He's going to try to use this in the proceedings. He's going to say something about you.
Let him. Patricia has the text. It helps you.
It might complicate things.
Or it might speed them up. Sometimes people make decisions that work against them.
Come for dinner. I'll burn the garlic on purpose so you feel better.
I laugh out loud in Elise's kitchen, alone, at a text message.
Don't you dare. I'll be there at 6.
I'll have the garlic on low.
Good. More patience.
I put my phone down and look at the January light through the east window and think about what Jason has done.
He reached for the thing he thought would shake me.
He found the thing that won't. That's going to cost him in the proceedings. Patricia knows it. I know it. Somewhere, his own lawyer probably knows it.
I sit at Elise's kitchen table in January in Millhaven, North Carolina, in the life I built from nothing in fourteen weeks, and I think: he can't touch this.
Not because Ethan is armor. Not because the cottage is a fortress, but because I'm not the same woman that was stood at the threshold of our bedroom, in the home that we built, who believed in a marriage that was being betrayed.