Chapter 22 – Ariane – The Weight of Waiting
The clock above the nurse’s station ticks and tocks like it’s chewing on bones: vicious, watchful, and unstoppable.
I’ve been counting the strikes of each passing minute, because that seems easier than focusing on breathing.
To focus on my breath would be to deal with what makes so hard to breathe—to face what time is counting down to.
The chairs in the waiting room are some kind of ergonomic nightmare. No matter how much I fidget, I wind up with my hips tilted forward. It’s like I’m being punished for existing.
Meanwhile, of course, Mom manages to sit ramrod straight beside me with her ankles crossed in the ideal position of repose. Her pearls gleam as if they have their own source of light. She looks like a portrait that would whisper “don’t touch the wallpaper” if it could talk.
“Hold yourself together, Ariane,” she hisses like clockwork. She barely moves her lips when she says it, which I respect on a technical level. Ventriloquism for the image-obsessed. “People are watching.” They aren’t, but experience tells me it’ll accomplish nothing to argue this point.
“Okay, Mom,” I say, because what else is there.
I keep my hands clasped in my lap until my knuckles ache.
If I let them relax, I’m afraid they’ll start shaking and then I’ll start crying and then there will be fresh hell to pay for embarrassing my mother.
Does it even matter, though? Any of this?
Somewhere behind those double doors, Richard is lying, prone between a surgeon’s steady hands and god’s sense of humor. It has a way of making all of this—my tears, just as much as my mother’s posturing—seem so, so stupid. Pointless.
Every so often, a nurse pushes through with a chart and a serious face. Each time, my heart throws itself against my ribs, ready to leap right out of my chest.
It doesn’t help that, across the room, Finn stands with his back to the window and his arms folded across his chest. He looks like a soldier on duty, if soldiers made a habit of dressing up so debonaire.
He’s stunning in his dark slacks and charcoal button-down.
There’s nothing unkempt about him, even with his sleeves up his forearms and the tendon in his jaw working like he’s grinding glass.
The fluorescent lights make everyone else look tired and human; they only make him look more carved. He’s still and volatile at once, a thunderhead embodied by a vicious, magnificent man.
I should be thinking about Richard. About Julian—oh, that’s hilarious—about how I used to believe in words like fiancé and safe. But the truth is stupid and persistent: all I can think about is Finn. Finn’s mouth and the way I let myself fall like a girl who never learned that gravity hurts.
A pair of volunteers push a cart of coffee and cookies past us. The Styrofoam cups squeak against each other like they’re nervous too. Mom scowls until the offer her something and then thanks them without taking anything.
Apologetically, I take a cup just to make up for her antics.
“You shouldn’t drink that,” she says softly. “It makes you jittery.”
“I’m already jittery.” I smile in a way I hope passes for pleasant. “Might as well have a reason.”
Her eyes flick to my lap. For one beat, for two, for ten, I’m sure she’s seen it. The finger where my engagement ring has sat for months—until this morning, when I took it off. Defensively, perturbed by her cutting gaze, I curl my hand around the cup until the heat prints crescents into my skin.
“We must be strong for Richard,” is all she says. “He can’t have… complications. Stress aggravates recovery.”
“Mm,” I offer and then take a sip so I can say nothing else. It’s very strong, I’ll give them that.
“And we must keep the family’s dignity intact,” she adds, lower now, a private stage direction. “There are already rumors in town. You know how people are.”
“They’re bored?” I offer.
“They’re cruel,” she says. She tips her chin toward a woman with a mauve cardigan and a decisive haircut. The woman is whispering behind her hand to a man in camouflage. “They like stories that end with a person like you in shambles.”
A person like me. Well, that’s one way to put it. What is a person like me? Weak? Oversensitive? A sick, depraved woman who let her stepbrother pleasure her until she wept.
Swallowing a bout of hysterical laughter, I put the cup down before my fingers decide to spill it all over me.
Mom keeps going, the way she does when she’s on a roll—careful, composed sentences that come with their own ironed edges.
We can’t give people a reason, we must act with grace, your father needs calm around him.
She’s not wrong about any of it. That’s what makes me feel like my bones are chewing on themselves under my skin.
She’s so good at saying the reasonable thing that you forget to ask if it’s the truest thing.
What I don’t remind her of is the man who was here once again because now he knows exactly where to find us.
He came back to demand money, and I did what I do best: intervention. Every inch my mother’s daughter.
But it hasn’t bought us more time. He just came for the show. I could tell that.
As it turns out, my mom’s braver than I am.
She doesn’t get crippled by paralyzing waves of anxiety and fear, not the way I do.
I can’t even talk to her about the fear that pulls behind my ribs like a tide going out.
Nor the love that makes my throat tight when I think of Richard’s lopsided grin and the way he claps after his own jokes.
She would only condemn me for it, I know.
If feelings were furniture, Mom would be the velvet rope that keeps you off the couch.
Her phone buzzes. She glances at the screen and stands. “I’ll be right back. Don’t—” She stops herself, smooths a palm over her skirt, and gives me a look I’ve known since childhood. Behave. She doesn’t have to say it for me to hear.
As soon as she steps away, my lungs expand like someone cracked a window in my chest. I flex my hands. The coffee cools into something undrinkable and relieved.
Finn shifts by the window, just enough to catch my eye.
It’s not an invitation. It feels like gravity thickening under my feet.
I look away first, because I am not fourteen with a diary and a highlighter anymore.
I am twenty-four with two hands and a naked finger and a head full of things I regret and crave in equal measure.
What’s going to happen when she decides she did notice the absence of my engagement ring? She’s not stupid; she’s just selectively blind. And eventually even selective blindness trips over the furniture.
A nurse with a blonde bun comes out from the secure doors and calls out a last name that isn’t ours.
My heart still tries to leap through my sternum.
A toddler starts crying. The mauve cardigan lady hands the child a cookie and goes back to whispering.
I could write a paper on small-town crisis theater.
Thesis: there is nothing we won’t rehearse if it keeps us from saying the messy thing out loud.
I stand because sitting feels like confessing.
My legs are pins and needles. I tell myself I’m just stretching.
My feet take me anyway, past the rack of outdated magazines, past the vending machine that offers four kinds of chips and exactly zero salvation, down the corridor where the lights are softer and the floor glows with those quiet safety strips you never notice until you need them.
I press my palm to the cool painted wall and breathe in for four, out for six. It’s a trick I teach my freshmen before exams. Works about half the time. The other half, you fake it.
Footsteps. Not rushed. Not hesitant. Certain. I don’t have to look to know it’s him. My body recognizes the pattern the way you learn to recognize a song after the first two notes.
“Shouldn’t be alone,” he says gently, pouring over the nape of my neck like warm honey. His breath fans over my skin, and goose bumps erupt all over me. I’d be mortified if I weren’t so consumed by too much else.
“I’m not,” I argue, tilting my head toward the waiting room. “There’s a whole crowd of us pretending it’s fine.”
He steps into the spill of light. His tie is loosened. There’s a crescent of shadow under each eye, like he hasn’t slept in a week. He probably hasn’t. I probably haven’t either, but I don’t wear exhaustion the way he does, like it’s a threat he’s made friends with.
“Tell me something good?” I ask. It comes out quieter than I mean for it to, a string pulled too tight.
He watches me like I’m an equation that keeps rearranging itself. I’ve almost given up expecting him to give me something when he finally says, “The surgeon really is excellent. He’s in the best hands he could be.”
“Good.” I nod. My throat is dry. My mouth says the adult things it’s supposed to say, but my chest is full of that other language—the wordless one that lives under your ribs and wants and wants and wants.
He glances at my hands. I brace for it. But he doesn’t say anything about the ring I’m not wearing. Maybe he already knows. Maybe he doesn’t need trophies. Maybe he understands that absence can be a louder announcement than presence.
“This isn’t… ideal,” I say, for lack of anything better. “I feel like I’m sitting inside a refrigerator display case.”
One corner of his mouth kicks, almost a smile if you squint. “You always did go for poetry.”
“I’m trying out observational comedy. New career path. Think I have a shot?”
“Terrifying,” he says lightly, and the word has this elegant bite to it that makes me want to take a step closer. I don’t. I’m not that brave. Or I’m too brave. One or the other.
“Mom’s going to ask,” I blurt, because silence is worse. “About the ring. About… everything. She’ll ask in that voice that makes you think she’s being pastoral when she’s actually performing triage on our reputation.”