Chapter 10 The Book Tour
Summer
I leave for Savannah in the morning and Colt is supposed to come with me.
He was supposed to. Past tense. Last night at nine PM, he got a call from Sonny about "a Tidewater compliance issue that needs immediate attention," and he sat on the bed with his phone pressed to his ear and his face pulled tight and when he hung up, he said, "Babe, I'm so sorry.
I have to stay. Dad needs me at the office first thing. "
I packed my bag while he stood in the doorway looking guilty.
"I'll make it up to you."
"You keep saying that."
He doesn't answer. He just stands there.
"Do you hear how often you say it?" I fold the dress on top of the suitcase. I don't look at him. "After every cancelled dinner. Every late night. Every empty chair. I'll make it up to you. And then you go right back to whatever you were doing."
"Summer..."
"Flowers and a reservation aren't a marriage, Colt.
They're what you do when you've forgotten how to do the actual relationship.
You think you're proving something to me by coming home for dinner two nights in a row.
You're not. That's barely the bare minimum.
That is what I should be getting on a Tuesday from the man I sleep next to.
That isn't winning me back, and then expecting credit for it.
You'd do more than that for a business associate.
Oh wait, you are actually exceeding expectations there. "
His mouth opens. Closes.
"And the worst part. Cheyenne isn't even the first thing that took your attention from me.
Your father took it. The deal took it. The Bennet name took it.
Cheyenne is the most recent one, and she happens to be a woman, so she gets to feel like the worst one.
But she isn't the source. She is the symptom.
The source is that you have decided, every day, that everything in that office matters more than your wife.
And then you come home with sunflowers like that's a wash. "
I close the suitcase.
"I am sleeping in the guest room and you are buying me sunflowers. That is where we are."
He doesn't have an answer.
I zip the suitcase. I check the side pocket for my charger. I do all of this slowly, on purpose, because what I'm about to say next, I need to say to his face.
I turn around.
"Look. When I get back, we are going to talk. Not like we've been talking. Really talk. Because I am not doing this anymore. I am not happy. You aren't happy. I am losing myself trying to fight a zero sum game I never agreed to play, and I am done."
His face changes. The wariness sharpens into something else.
"You could work remote from the hotel where I'm staying.
The Wi-Fi works. Your laptop works. The Tidewater compliance issue wouldn't know the difference between your office and a Sheraton.
But you aren't coming, because the deal is more important.
Which is fine. I am not going to argue about it.
I am just going to tell it like it is. It is funny how, when it is convenient for you, you can work from home, while I'm sidelined.
When it is time you should be spending with me, supporting me, present for me, something always comes up.
Something always comes up, Colt. For so long now. Always."
"Summer..."
"Take the next few days to think. Hard. Because I'm tired of making threats. I'm tired of having to call you out to get any action out of you, then watching you do the bare minimum, and then watching you act surprised that the bare minimum isn't enough."
He stands very still in the doorway. He looks like a man who just found out the floor is made of glass.
"Wait." He pushes off the frame. "Wait. Let me come with you. I'll call Dad. The compliance can wait two days. I'll meet you at the bookstore. I'll..."
"No."
"Babe, please..."
"You don't fix this with one trip, Colt.
You don't fix this by coming with me to my book signing because I held a knife to your throat about it that morning.
That isn't what this is. This is me telling you what I have been telling you for months.
This is me telling you for the last time.
Take the days. Sit in this house. Look around.
Decide if the man who lives here is still somebody I should be married to. Because right now I am not sure."
I pick up the suitcase.
"Don't call. Don't text every hour. Don't show up at the bookstore with flowers and a speech. Just think."
I walk past him.
At the bedroom door I stop. I don't turn around.
"It's like you don't even know you're losing me, Colt. You're losing me right now."
I drive to Savannah alone. Two hours on I-95 with the windows down and my Coastal Cowgirl playlist on Spotify turned up. Twangy guitar and women singing about leaving men who didn't deserve them. The patron saints of holding it together with sheer will and good winged eyeliner.
***
The signing at the bookstore goes well. The book is doing well. My career is going well. Everything in my life that doesn't involve the man I married is going well. I am clinging to that like a woman in open water clings to a piece of floating wreckage.
Two hundred people in line. Three hours of signing.
My hand cramps. My face aches from the smiling.
Three hours of it. Behind this table, with a Sharpie in my hand and a reader telling me my book got them through the worst year of their life, I am not Summer Bennet.
I am Summer Rain. The words I put into the world matter in a way nobody can take from me.
Not Colt. Not the Bennets. Not Cheyenne fucking Aldrich.
Patricia takes me to dinner after. My publicist. Sixty-two, silver-haired, terrifying. Orders a martini before we've sat down.
"The book is magnificent. Your best. Whatever is feeding this new edge in your writing, don't stop."
"What edge?"
"Anger." She says it like she'd identify a grape varietal. Appreciatively. "Your heroine isn't surviving the plot. She's dismantling it with the energy of a woman who has been underestimated one too many times."
I take a sip of wine. I think about the paragraph I wrote in the guest room at two in the morning. The threat inside the house.
"How's Colt?" Patricia asks.
"Great. Busy."
She nods. Doesn't say anything. Patricia has been married three times. She looks at me like veterans look at recruits.
"Eat your crab cake. And call your friend Autumn."
***
I call Autumn from the hotel.
"How was the signing?"
"Two hundred people."
"And you?"
"Something feels wrong, I feel off."
"Wrong how?"
I try to explain. The feeling isn't specific. Bigger than the fight. Bigger than the birthday. A low-frequency hum in my body that hasn't stopped since I left.
"You know that feeling when you're driving and the car starts pulling to one side? Not enough to swerve. Just enough that you're always correcting. That's what everything feels like right now. Like I'm constantly compensating for a pull I can't see the source of."
"What does your gut say?"
My gut says go home. My gut says don't wait until Monday.
"My gut says go home early."
"Then go home early."
***
Saturday is back to back.
Coffee at eight with my agent, who flew in from New York for the signing and is staying long enough to argue with me in person about the second book in the contract.
She wants me to commit to a duology. I tell her I will think about it.
She tells me to think faster. We eat eggs. I love her in spite of everything.
Eleven, Patricia. The launch tour for the new book is being mapped. Eight cities. She wants Charleston and Savannah. I tell her to add Atlanta. We go through the schedule line by line and I drink three coffees because my brain has been operating on three hours of sleep for far too long now.
Two o'clock, lunch with Patricia and a buyer from Books-a-Million who flew down to pitch a regional event. Patricia eats half my sandwich without asking. I let her.
Six o'clock, a private dinner at the bookstore owner's house.
A thank-you she insisted on after the signing, also a soft pitch for next year's event slot.
Eight women around a long table. Wine that costs more than my hotel room.
They ask me the questions every reader asks.
I answer them like the questions are new.
The dinner is supposed to run two hours.
The dinner doesn't run two hours.
Our host is a widow in her fifties who has decided this is the most fun she has had in months and is going to extract every minute of it.
The plates come out slow. A second bottle.
A third. Someone has a book they want me to read for a blurb.
Someone else wants to know whether I outline.
Our host is on her feet refilling glasses I didn't ask to be refilled.
I can't leave. Not gracefully. Not without burning a relationship I will need for the next launch.
It is just past ten when she finally walks me to my car. She presses a bottle of the wine into my hand and says, "Drive safe, honey. Get home to your husband."
I check out of the hotel at ten thirty. My phone has a folder full of new contractual fires to put out, and the only thing I want is to be in my own kitchen with Colt's bare feet under the table and the last of the bolognese reheating on the stove.
I get on I-95 at quarter to eleven.
The drive is two hours. I spend them arguing with myself.
You're overreacting. Maybe.
He's probably at home. On the couch. Rugby highlights. You'll walk in and he'll look up and smile and you'll feel ridiculous.
Or maybe.
I don't finish the thought. I'm not ready for where it goes. So I drive and I don't think and I sing along with the playlist and I tell myself I'm doing this because I want to surprise my husband. Because I love him. Because I want to walk through the door and find him and remember why we work.
The Charleston exit is thirty minutes ahead. The marsh is dark on both sides. The jasmine is in the vents.
I keep driving.