“Your father embezzled money from his own company, and when my father queried it, Harrison blew him off, then forged his name anyway, made him the fall guy. When the authorities came, your father handed mine over on a plate.” I breathe through the muscle in my jaw.
“I didn’t…I was,” she pauses, squeezes her eyes shut. “I was in Copenhagen.”
“I’m aware.”
“I tried to reach you but I didn’t have your number. So I wrote to you,” I add, softer, the part I don’t tell rooms. “Two letters. Hand-delivered to the club two weeks after your engagement party. A whole six years later I found out the country club manager tossed them before they reached you.”
Tears sheen her eyes and she shakes her head, but she doesn’t speak. So the words keep pouring out of me.
“We’d been thrown off Kane’s Reach by then. My mother sold every valuable thing we owned to hire a lawyer. But Harrison called his fixer. The forgery became ‘a misunderstanding.’ The misunderstanding became ‘a breach.’ My father went to prison. We lost our apartment. My mother scrubbed more floors instrangers’ houses. I learned which doors I wasn’t allowed to use by how fast someone shut them in my face.”
Her mouth opens, closes. “I?—”
Her hand flies to her mouth. “I didn’t know any of it, then or now. I swear I didn’t know. When I went back for the holidays, you were gone.”
Did you even look for me?
I swallow the words with a shrug. “Maybe you didn’t.” I won’t sand it for her. “Maybe you didn’t want to. Maybe Europe was convenient because distance launders what you don’t want under your nails.”
“That’s not fair, Vasso.”
“Fair?” I laugh once, without humor. “Fair is your grandfather being kind to my mother when her hands cracked from lye. Fair isnotyou kissing me like a miracle and then being told to marry a man with a better press kit. But both happened.” The laugh dies; the grief doesn’t. “Fair would’ve been a goodbye that wasn’t treated like a stain.”
She’s crying now and I hate it and I love that she isn’t hiding it. She crosses the room and lays her palm on my jaw. I don’t flinch and I don’t pull her in. I let her touch what I keep armored, even though it’s cracking.
“I think I understand you a little better now,” she whispers.
“What do you mean?”
“How you must hate me.”
The crack intensifies, threatening to expose emotions I need to keep under lock and key before they betray me. Again. “I feel a lot of things toward you,” he says, voice low, voice raw, “but I assure you, hate isn’t one of them,agapita.”
She gasps at that word…my endearment for her, blurted unbidden, makes her gasp even as it punches the air out of my lungs. The word drags a decade through the room and I hear aRhode Island summer, bouncing on greenhouse glass, the taste of stealing from a future we thought we were owed.
I kiss her.
It isn’t a punishment or a prize won. It’s an admission stamped on her tongue. I kiss like a man who’s been waiting to be believed. She goes up on her toes and answers with everything she didn’t say in a driveway and everything she just said in a room where we stopped lying to each other. My hands bracket her face, then her hips; her fingers curl in my shirt like she’s taking sides and I’m the only one that exists.
###
Naomi
When we break,it’s only because breath is finite. He rests his forehead against mine and I can feel the small tremor in his exhale, the one that says there was something under that story he didn’t know how to put down until I made a place for it.
“Thank you,” he says, barely a sound, but the power of it moves through me, shaking me anew.
“For what?” My voice is shredded silk.
“For listening,” he says. “For not minimizing it or telling me it was a misunderstanding.”
I huff a broken laugh. “I can hate what my father did and still… remember being a girl who wanted her family to remain whole.” The admission tastes metallic. “But I’m sorry I kept doors cracked I should have slammed.”
He swallows, jaw easing under my palm. “Just say the word, baby, and I’ll stand by you while we slam them together.”
Something unclenches in me I didn’t know I was strangling. I nod, against his mouth, against his breath, and then I kiss him again because some conversations deserve punctuation in a language older than English.
Then we stand there and kiss until the marrow of the argument warms, until my tears dry on his cheek, until the room remembers it is not a courtroom but a beautiful place where beautiful things are allowed to happen to people who have done the work to deserve them.
