Chapter 24 Ghost
Summer
Something shifts.
I can't explain it rationally. I wake up and the air in my apartment feels different.
Charged. Like the barometric pressure dropped and my body registered it before my brain caught up.
I tell myself I'm being ridiculous. I go through the routine of the day.
Drink coffee. Write. Go to class. Eat lunch.
The feeling persists. Someone is here who wasn't here before.
I know who it is. I would know him anywhere.
***
Flowers arrive at my apartment the next day. Not at the club. To me. Sunflowers. No card. I stare at them. My hands are shaking and I don't know if it's nervousness or anger. The muscle memory of a woman who received these same flowers from a man who didn't know what he was apologizing for.
Then a first edition of The Shining in perfect condition.
The book I told Colt about on our third date.
The one that made me want to be a writer.
I told him at King's Diner with cheese fries between us that no book had ever put me inside a place like that one did, that I'd read it at thirteen with the covers over my head and the flashlight shaking, so scared of that hotel I could feel the cold of its hallways, and that I wanted to do that to someone someday.
Make a place so real it kept them up at night.
He remembered.
I call Sam. "He found me."
"What do you want to do?"
"Nothing. If he wants to talk, he can face me."
"You're not the woman who left Charleston. Whatever he came expecting to find, she isn't here. You meet him where you are. Don't shrink. Don't soften. Don't make yourself small."
"I won't."
***
I walk out of my building with coffee and my laptop bag. Heading to the coffee shop where I write on weekends.
He's across the street.
Leaning against a rented car. Looking terrible.
Thinner than I've ever seen him. Beard grown past trimmed into wilderness.
Dark circles. His clothes are clean but not pressed, which for Colt Bennet is the equivalent of a distress signal.
He sees me and straightens up off the car getting ready to cross over to me.
I put my hand up to stop him. This is on my terms.
His eyes are clear. The fog I left him in is gone.
The man I last saw was deep in his father's orbit, deep in the deal, deep in whatever Cheyenne was in the process of pulling him into.
He had been disappearing slowly for a long time, and he had done it to himself.
The man across the street isn't that man.
Whatever held him under, it doesn't have him anymore.
I cross the street. My heart is a fist inside my chest. I stop three feet from him.
"You look terrible."
He almost smiles. The ghost of the grin from back then. "You look incredible."
I do. I know I do. The dress has nothing to do with it.
Two months of classes and walking and learning to take up space again has done something visible.
I stand in my body. I move like I belong in any room I enter.
The woman he left at that gas station could be pushed to the side.
The one in front of him is the goddamn main event.
"I'm not inviting you in."
"I wouldn't expect you to."
"How long have you been here?"
"Five days."
Five days. And instead of ambushing me, he sent flowers and a book and waited for me to come outside on my own terms.
"Walk with me."
We walk. Not to the coffee shop. I can't have this conversation in a place with other people's lives happening. We head toward the park.
"You have thirty minutes. Talk."
He talks.
The PI. The headhunter email. Cheyenne's quarterly payments. The phased strategy. The deleted calendar entries, including my birthday. The Rohypnol purchase. The Venmo trail. The security footage. The embezzlement.
I don't want to glaze over this. "I had an affair, Summer.
" His voice cracks on the word. He doesn't soften it.
"an emotional one. I want to call it what it was.
Every late night. Every cancelled dinner.
Every time I chose her company over yours.
Every time you stood in the living room and told me what was happening and I said...
" He stops. Swallows. Tries again. The words aren't coming smoothly.
He's not delivering a speech. He's trying to get the truth out through a throat that doesn't want to cooperate.
"I called you insecure. When you were being perceptive.
I told you it was stress. When it was me. Choosing wrong. Every day."
This isn't the Colt who forgot my birthday.
"And when I was drugged that doesn't erase any of it.
My affair happened first. It happened because I opened the door.
My father's plan only worked because I gave them the material to work with.
I want to be clear with you about that. The drugs are what was done to me.
Cheyenne in my office, Cheyenne at my elbow, Cheyenne in your seat at every dinner for so long, that was a choice I made every day I made it.
I am owning it, Summer. I am not hiding behind it. "
We're standing at the edge of the park. The lake is gray and choppy. The wind makes my eyes water. I let it.
"Your father tried to erase me like a line item."
"I know. And I'm going to destroy him."
"Cheyenne?"
"I'm told she'll be arrested. Drug charge. Felony."
"Good."
Silence. The wind. The lake. Two people standing in the ruins of something they built.
"I'm not ready to forgive you."
"I'm not here for that."
"I don't know if I'll ever be."
"Then I'll have earned that too."
"I still love you Colt but I'm not ready.
You fucking destroyed me. Annihilated our relationship and everything that we had.
You gaslit me every time that I raised my concerns.
You made me feel unsafe in spaces that should have been sacred.
I started to question my own thoughts and beliefs about what I saw and knew to be true. "
I watch him register the sentence. His jaw goes tight at the corner. He keeps his face still. He is doing the visible work of not reacting, and I see the work, and I respect it.
"I want to show you Summer. I want to show you how sorry I am.
Show you how much I love you. I was so fucking stupid.
Stupid to have fallen for Sonny's bullshit.
I was so eager for his attention and approval that I lost myself in the process.
I lost the most important person in my life for an ounce of validation from someone who needed my compliance at any cost."
I look at him. Really look. The man standing in front of me isn't the man who forgot my birthday.
He's thinner and sadder and more broken than I've ever seen him.
But there's something in his face that wasn't there before.
Accountability. The look of a man who has stopped telling himself stories and started telling the truth.
"I don't know how to forgive you, Colt. I don't know how to stop being angry at you. I don't know how to trust you again. If I can trust you again."
"Will you ask Patrick to pause the proceedings?" His voice is careful. "I haven't filed a response. I've been letting the clock run out on purpose. I'm not asking you to stop it. I'm asking you not to finish it yet."
The wind takes my hair and I push it back. He hasn't moved. He is looking at me with an expression I haven't seen on him in years, the one that lives underneath all of his other expressions and almost never gets used.
"I can do that."
He exhales. His shoulders come down. "Thank you."
"I love you, Summer."
The volume of the sentence is wrong for the lake and the wind. He says it quietly. The quiet is louder than any other volume those three words could have come in. He isn't asking me to say it back. He is putting it down on the bench between us so it can be there.
"I love you so completely it is the only thing in me anymore that I am sure of.
I betrayed you. I betrayed our vows. I betrayed the man I was when I married you, and I am ashamed of what I let him turn into.
I know what I am tearing down. Sonny. The firm.
The man who chose his father's approval over you.
That work is mine to do. I am not asking you to hold me through it.
I am not asking for forgiveness today. I am not asking for it next month.
I am asking you to let me try to earn it.
One piece at a time. For the rest of my life if that is what it takes. "
He swallows. His voice is wrecked.
"I am not going anywhere. Not because I am stubborn.
Because there is no version of my life that doesn't include me working every day to deserve you again.
If you take a year, I am here. If you take five, I am here.
If you tell me to leave Chicago tomorrow, I will go and I will write you letters and I will keep doing the work, and I will be the man you can come back to, if you come back.
And if you don't come back, I will be that man anyway, because I owe you that man. I should have already been him."
I turn and walk away. I don't look back. Not cruelty. Survival. Because if I look back and see him standing in the wind with his hands in his pockets and his heart on his face, the part of me that loved him for eight years will want to close the distance.
I'm not ready.
I walk home. Put the sunflowers in water.
I sit on my kitchen floor and I cry. I can't tell what it is, only that it isn't grief and it isn't rage, and it doesn't stop for a long time.