Chapter 8 The Warning #2
I don’t tell him to sit again. Maybe I want him on his feet for this part.
“I should have told you where we were going,” he says. “I’ve admitted that. But you’re putting all these things together like they’re proof of something, and they’re not.”
“This morning.”
He stops.
“I came home this morning from Autumn’s couch. I stood outside our house and heard you laughing through the kitchen window.”
His face changes again.
“You were on the phone with Cheyenne.”
“It was about Tidewater.”
“No, it wasn’t.”
“Yes, it was.”
“I heard you.”
He drags a hand through his hair and grips the back of his neck.
“She called about a document. The conversation went off topic for a minute. That happens.”
“You were flirting with her.”
“I was not flirting.”
“You were giggling with her.”
“I don’t giggle.”
Despite everything, a broken little laugh escapes me.
“Fine. You were laughing. That laugh, Colt. The one you used to give me.”
His eyes close for a second.
“You didn’t hear me come through the front door. You didn’t hear me take off my shoes. You didn’t hear me walk past you and go upstairs. I showered. I got dressed. I came back down.”
“I was on the phone.”
“That is not the defense you think it is.”
“I saw your car and came outside.”
“Because you thought you imagined it.”
His brow pulls together.
“You had no idea I had been inside our house for almost an hour. But you had time for a nice, easy Sunday-morning conversation with her.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“I heard it.”
“It was a phone call.”
“I heard the way you sounded.”
He turns away from me, takes two steps, then turns back.
“Summer, I hear you. I do. I know I’ve been absent.
I know I fucked up your birthday, and there is no excuse for that.
But Cheyenne is my colleague. Tidewater has been brutal.
The hours, the pressure, my father breathing down my neck.
You’re already hurt, and I think maybe you’re seeing all of this through—”
He stops.
Too late.
“Say it.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“Say the word.”
He shakes his head.
“Insecure?” I ask. “Jealous? Paranoid? Overreacting?”
“I don’t think you’re paranoid.”
“But you think I’m wrong.”
“I think you’re taking separate things and turning them into one thing.”
“They are one thing.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Don’t you dare do this to me.”
My voice finally breaks loose.
“Do not stand there and turn this into something we are both doing. I am not coming home at midnight. I am not lying about where I am. I am not spending Sunday morning laughing with another man while you move through the house unnoticed.”
“I didn’t say you were.”
“You were about to tell me we’re looking at it through the wrong lens. There is no ‘we’ here, Colt. This is not happening to both of us.”
I press my hand to my chest.
“This is happening to me.”
He flinches.
“You are doing it.”
For a long time, neither of us speaks.
His face has gone blank in the way it does when something hits too hard and he needs time to decide where to put it.
Finally, he says, “I love you.”
His voice is rough.
“I love you more than anything in this world.”
“I know.”
That hurts him more than if I had said I didn’t believe him.
And the worst part is, I mean it.
“I know you love me, Colt.”
My eyes burn. I refuse to look away.
“You love me, and you are still doing this.”
He looks like I struck him.
“That’s what I can’t get past. Love should have made you notice I wasn’t at home last night. Love should have made you remember my birthday before a calendar did. Love should have made you look down that table and realize your wife was sitting alone while another woman had her hand in yours.”
“Summer.”
“But it didn’t.”
My voice drops.
“So love is not enough to protect me from you.”
His face breaks.
I feel mine trying to do the same and hold it together with everything I have.
“I have been protecting this marriage by myself. Making excuses for you. Swallowing things because I didn’t want to sound needy. Convincing myself I was imagining what was happening right in front of me.”
I wipe beneath one eye, angry to find it wet.
“That should never have been my job.”
He looks down.
“What do you want me to do?”
There’s panic under the question. He wants instructions. A list. Something measurable he can complete and hand back to me.
I don’t have one.
“I want you to fix it.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“It means look at your life.”
“I am.”
“No, you’re looking at me and waiting for me to tell you how to make me stop being upset.”
He goes still.
“I need space from you. From this house. From whatever is happening between you and Cheyenne that you refuse to name because you haven’t slept with her.”
“I’m not sleeping with her.”
“I know.”
He looks confused by the answer.
“That isn’t the only way to betray someone.”
His face empties.
“I deserve a husband who sees me. Not one who walks past me in his own house. Not one who remembers me when he needs somewhere to come home to.”
“I see you.”
“You forgot the day I was born.”
The words land between us.
He sits down again, but this time it isn’t because I told him to.
It’s because his legs seem to give out.
“You need to decide what your priorities are,” I say. “Look at where your time goes. Your attention. Your energy. Look at who gets the best parts of you and who gets whatever is left.”
He stares at the floor.
“And you need to take a hard look at Cheyenne. Because whatever you believe is happening between you, she believes something else.”
“She’s never said anything.”
“She doesn’t have to.”
“You don’t know what she thinks.”
“No. But I know how she looks at you.”
He rubs both hands over his face.
“And I know how quickly she moved her hand when she saw your wife.”
“Nothing is happening.”
“Then stop behaving like there is.”
His hands fall.
“One of you understands what this has become, Colt. I don’t know which possibility is worse. That it’s her and you’re too blind to see it, or that it’s you and you’ve gotten very good at lying to yourself.”
I start toward the hallway.
“Where are you going?”
“The guest room.”
“Summer, please.”
I turn back.
“Don’t follow me. Don’t knock. Don’t send me some beautiful text at midnight because you can’t stand sitting with what I said.”
He looks wrecked.
A month ago, that would have been enough to make me cross the room.
Tonight, it isn’t.
“Just think about it,” I say. “And this time, don’t think about what you can say to make it go away.”
I walk down the hall and close the guest-room door.
I sit on the edge of the bed and listen.
At first, there is nothing.
Then his footsteps move across the living room.
Back and forth.
They stop.
Start again.
He never comes to the door.
I can’t decide whether that means he is respecting what I asked for or relieved that he doesn’t have to face me again tonight.
I open my laptop.
The cursor blinks in the middle of the chapter I haven’t been able to finish for weeks. I start a new page.
My heroine has spent half the book convinced the danger is outside her house. Someone watching through windows. Footsteps in the yard. A shadow that keeps appearing at the edge of every room.
Then she realizes the doors were never keeping the threat out.
They were keeping it in.
The first paragraph comes fast.
Then the second.
It is the best thing I have written in months.
I write until two in the morning.
The whole time, some stupid, tender piece of me listens for his footsteps in the hall.
For a knock.
For him to say my name through the door and tell me he finally understands.
It never comes.
Eventually, the house goes quiet.
I close the laptop and turn off the light.
I told him I was drowning, and he argued about the water.
I told him another woman was living in the space between us, and he defended every reason she had been allowed inside.
He heard every word I said.
He just still thinks the problem is that I noticed.