“Perfect.” I held up a jersey knit skirt, smoothed it out, folded it. “Are you okay?”
“No.” He ran a hand over his face. “I am not qualified for this. I don’t know how anyone could be qualified for this but I definitely am not.”
I nodded. He didn’t notice. “I was thinking that—I think I should go. Not right now but tomorrow. I should go back to Thomas House.”
He pushed up on one elbow. “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I should move back to Thomas House. I think it would be better. For everyone but Gennie in particular.”
“Please explain to me how that makes any fucking sense, wife.”
“From the start, we said we’d protect Gennie. She wouldn’t get caught in the middle, right?” He glared at me, his eyes narrowed to slits and his mouth cut in a sharp scowl. “She’s in the middle, Noah. She thinks we’re going to have a baby and abandon her.”
“She also thinks her mother chose a prison sentence over her,” he said, each word ice-cold. “Clearly, there are some misunderstandings rooted in the fact she’s a child who has experienced multiple emotional traumas in the past year.”
“Listen, I can’t risk hurting your kid because we decided to get fake-married so I can inherit my grandmother’s farm.” I threw a bra into the basket. “And the longer I’m here, living in Gennie’s house and participating in her daily life, the more it’s going to hurt when I leave.”
“It’s going to hurt regardless. She’s been attached to you from the start.”
“All the more reason for me to go,” I said.
“You told her you’d be there for her. You said you’d be there if anything happens to me. How do you reconcile saying that to her tonight and then moving out tomorrow?”
“You have a family here and I am intruding on that,” I argued. “I can play the part of the fun aunt she visits on long weekends and summer holidays. I can be that person for her. But we can’t fake our way through this when there’s a real kid involved.”
“You can’t walk away now and pat yourself on the back. She’s loved you since the day you showed up here and I think you know that.”
“I know what it’s like to be a kid and have people visit—never stay, just visit—in my life. I know how confusing and lonely that feels. The sooner I leave, the better it will be for everyone.”
With a huge groan, Noah pushed up from the mattress and gained his feet. “Yeah, I don’t buy it.”
I went back to the laundry. This bra wasn’t going to fold itself. “Don’t buy what?”
He waved a hand. “Any of this.”
“It’s not a matter of whether you buy it or not,” I said. “And I’m not asking for your permission.”
“This story you’ve thrown together, the one where you save everyone by walking away, it doesn’t impress me. It ignores most of the relevant facts of this situation and it fails to recognize that you will save no one and succeed only in hurting everyone.” He folded his arms over his chest. “But go ahead. Tell me all about how it will be better for you to be alone at Thomas House instead of here with us.”
“What do you want us to do, Noah?” I pushed my fingers through my hair. “Should we stay married forever?”
He lifted his shoulders. “And what’s wrong with that?”
“What’s—what’swrongwith that?” I sputtered. The bra flew out of my hand and ended up under the bed. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe the part where I talked you into marrying me because I’m randomly sentimental about Lollie’s farm and have some silly, half-formed idea about transforming it into a wedding venue. Or the part where I convinced you that I wouldn’t let your niece get caught between us and I’d do everything to protect her. Or even the part where I said we could have sex and it wouldn’t complicate things too much.”
“I mean, yeah, that last part is pure delusion,” he said.
I rolled my eyes. “We are old friends with good sexual chemistry—”
“Really good,” he added.
“—but we’ve built this thing on a pile of empty cardboard boxes and it’s about to cave in. Even if we wanted to, even if I hadn’t forced this relationship from thin air, it wouldn’t work.”
Noah stared at me for a long moment, his arms crossed and his jaw ticking. Then, “Why not?”
“Because it’s not real,” I whisper-yelled. “Everything about this is fake and we’re—”
“Not everything.” He reached out and ran the back of his finger down the column of my neck, over the rise of my breasts. “It hasn’t been fake for a long time and you know that.”
