But that was the one thing he hadn’t needed to figure out. He’d always known he loved Rosie like he loved breathing. Knowing he wanted her was the easy part—the hard part was knowing how to have her.
“The only thing I ever knew for sure about my life was that I wanted you in it,” Tom said. “You’re the planner, Rosie. But you’re my only plan.”
He pulled off his backpack and set it down, coming out with a big manila envelope and a ring of keys and fobs. He hadn’t been sure how this gesture would be received, any more than showing up uninvited. But she couldn’t say she didn’t know what he wanted after this.
“I brought you something.” He took Rosie’s hands and turned them palms up to fold them over the key ring. “I talked to my roommate, and he’s willing to extend my sublease for two more weeks. He won’t be in town, so that’s two bedrooms. Here’s a copy of my key. The day before that lease is up, Ximena’s getting induced, and then she’s staying with Luísa’s parents for the six weeks after the baby comes. I’m housesitting. They’ve got two bedrooms. Here’s a copy of their key. Afterthat, Boyd has reshoots in Dubrovnik, and we can have his whole townhouse to ourselves. Here’s the key and security code. And then he’s back through the end of the run. And…happy to have us all stay with him. So. That’s three months, but I’ll start looking for the next place tonight. Somewhere big enough for us and Max.” Tom took a deep breath, aware of how scraped together his proposal sounded. “I can take care of both of you.” That was the part he was dead solid on. He could promise they’d be safe, and he could promise they’d be loved.
Rosie wavered on her feet, looking tired and scared and so, so beautiful to him, the way she had since the day he’d first laid eyes on her in the registrar’s line and scrambled for an excuse to speak to her. He put his whole heart into his voice because his entire world was there in his arms, and he didn’t know if he could keep her there. All he could do was offer this to her and know, finally, that he could make good on every word.
“I spent a decade waiting for you to call me and tell me I could come home. Well, I could have called too, any day before I did. That’s what this is.Come home.I miss you. I love you. I want you in every single one of the days of my life, the good ones and the bad ones. Come home whenever you’re sure. I already am.”
29
Adrian found Rose sitting in the dark fifteen minutes later. Her parents had converted her bedroom to storage while she was in college, but it still felt a little like her own private space.
Rose’s very bones ached for Tom to come back and hold her through the rest of this uncomfortable, lonely day, but he’d have missed his train if he didn’t leave right then. It was bad enough that he’d spend eight hours riding the train in a single day—missing the start of tech week would have been worse.
“Did you really make him leave?” Adrian stuck his head in and asked, voice wary.
“He has rehearsal,” Rose said.
It hadn’t been easy to talk him into going. It had taken the threat of getting Boyd and Ximena on the phone to mediate the situation before he agreed to leave. And Rose wasn’t even positive he wouldn’t be back tomorrow. Her heart felt overfull enough to shatter again.
Adrian’s pretty face was unimpressed, but it was probablystuck that way. He came and sat down on the same stack of plastic tubs as Rose while he waited for her to say more. That was one of Adrian’s better qualities. He wasn’t a hugger, which Rose could have really used right now, but he was good at companionable silence.
“I didn’t expect him to come,” Rose eventually said.
“I think he knew that,” Adrian replied, sounding judgmental.
Rose chewed on what Adrian might mean by that. Adrian openly disapproving of her was a new thing. Their entire friendship was predicated on giving each other sober, adult advice that they knew the other person would not follow.
“It’s not that I didn’t want him here,” Rose added.
“Hmm,” said Adrian. “That part, I’m not sure he knew.”
Her hands clenched on the little pile of papers and keys Tom had left her. It was beyond thoughtful. But he had the chance to celebrate a career-topping triumph right now, and she was an exhausted mess who had a new dependent, a finance job to get back to, and an inn to sell. She didn’t know how they started again, exactly, but if she hadn’t worn out his enthusiasm for the idea with three months of renovations, asking him to turn into a part-time caregiver for her aunt was probably not the best follow-up.
She knew Tom wanted her to expect more from him. That just ran directly against her instinctual suspicion that nobody would love her if she made it at all hard to do.
“You know, he asked me to give him his wedding ring back,” Adrian said.
“Why do you have his wedding ring?” Rose asked, startled.
Adrian shrugged. “He tossed it across my living room after you served him with some particularly nasty piece of divorce paperwork. I thought he might still want it someday, so I picked it up and stashed it in my garlic keeper.”
She gnawed her lower lip. “Do you know why he wants it now?”
“I assume because he wants to start wearing it again?” Adrian said, casual expression not quite hiding his interest in her reaction. He reached into his jacket pocket to retrieve a garlic-scented plastic baggie containing a slightly tarnished white-gold band.
Rose took the ring and clutched it with her pile of keys and door codes. One more thing she didn’t know how to handle. It felt almost like it was burning in her hands.
“I don’t still have mine,” she muttered, cheeks heating. It had just been a cheap little fourteen karat gold claddagh ring, because that had been all Tom could afford, but she’d never taken it off until the day she dropped it into the East River.
How did this happen? How did they pick back up? What would she evensayto people?
After ten years apart, Tom and I have decided that divorce is no longer working for us. We ask for your support as we consciously couple, determined to remain friends as we transition to a life together.
“I didn’t—I really didn’t think this would ever happen,” she admitted to Adrian.
