Chapter 22
Chapter Twenty-Two
Charles found me alone at the farmer's market that Saturday, which seemed less like coincidence than I wanted it to, given how carefully he positioned himself between me and the exit before he started talking.
"I made a mistake," he said, and the words came out with none of the cruelty I'd grown used to from him, just something that almost passed for humility if you weren't paying close attention. "Lucy isn't what I thought she was. None of it was what I thought it was."
I asked him what, exactly, he'd expected it to be, watching his face for the particular flicker of self-justification I knew was coming.
"I thought I wanted something simpler," he said.
"Someone who wasn't always working, always building something separate from me.
I see now that I was wrong about what I wanted.
" He reached for my hand, and I pulled it back before he could close the distance.
"I see now what I had with you, and what I threw away. "
"Is Lucy still pregnant," I asked, watching his face carefully, "or has that part of the story also turned out to be simpler than you thought?"
Something flickered behind his eyes, quick and uncertain, gone before I could fully read it.
"She's still pregnant," he said, but the conviction had gone thin around the edges, and I wondered, not for the first time, whether some small part of him had already started noticing the inconsistencies that would later unravel her completely in front of two hundred witnesses.
It would have been almost funny, if it hadn't been so familiar, watching a man rewrite history in real time to make himself the victim of his own poor judgment rather than the architect of someone else's pain.
He hadn't suddenly remembered loving me.
He'd watched another, more dangerous man value me publicly, completely, in front of an entire city, and decided retroactively that he'd wanted that value all along, now that it had a price tag visibly attached.
"You don't want me back, Charles," I said. "You want to be the kind of man other men envy, and you've just realized Donovan Winthrop is currently winning that particular game with something you used to own."
He didn't have an answer for that, mostly because there wasn't one that wouldn't confirm exactly what I'd said.
I walked away from him in the middle of a crowded market, past stalls of late season vegetables and a man selling honey from his own hives, and I felt nothing that resembled temptation, not even the smallest flicker of it.
Only a kind of distant, clinical pity for a man who'd thrown away something real and was now trying to negotiate his way back into a performance he'd never once understood was a performance to begin with.
I told Donovan about it that evening, expecting some flash of the territorial anger I'd seen in the hallway weeks earlier. Instead he just listened, quiet and attentive, and when I finished he asked only one question.
“Did he hurt you?”
Not whether I'd been tempted. Not whether I needed reassurance about his own intentions. Just whether I was alright, which struck me, sitting across from him at our kitchen counter, as the single most generous question anyone had asked me in longer than I could remember.
I assured him I was okay, and only then did he relax. Something inside of us was growing, and it was undeniable that it was wanting to blossom together.