“You do know what I’m talking about.”
“I really don’t.” She paused. “But hypothetically if someone had done something like that, it would only be fair. Considering.”
I shook my head. She had put a tracker on my car. I had put an investigator on her and she had turned around and put one on me and hadn’t said a word about it for weeks. Just been sitting on that information and using it quietly.
I respected it more than I was going to tell her.
“Hypothetically,” I said.
“Hypothetically.”
“Alright.” I let it go. “What else.”
She was quiet for a moment and the quality of the quiet was different from her usual quiet. Something was sitting in it that hadn’t been there before.
“I think it’s almost time,” she said.
I set my coffee down. “Say that again.”
“I said I think it’s almost time.” Her voice was steady but I could hear the effort behind it. “To end things with Brendon. I’ve been sitting with it and going back and forth and I keep arriving at the same place.” She stopped. “I’m probably going to get a hotel for a little while. After I break the news. Just to give us both some space from the house.”
I sat there for a second and didn’t say anything because I needed the moment to be what it was without me rushing past it. She was really going to do it. I had known she would get here but knowing it and hearing her say it with her own voice in her own time were two different things.
“You don’t need a hotel,” I said.
“Griz—”
“I’m serious. You don’t need a hotel. Come here.”
“I can’t just—“
“Yes you can.” I kept my voice even. “You handle what you need to handle and then you come here with us.” I looked at Goldie across the yard. “She knows where the couch is already.”
Ivy was quiet for long enough that I thought the call might have dropped.
“You make everything sound simple,” she said finally.
“It is simple. Everything else you’re adding to it is the complicated part.”
“My whole life is about to change.”
“I know.”
“I built something real with him. Three years. A house, plans, a future that made sense on paper.” Her voice didn’t break but it got smaller. “He didn’t do anything wrong. That’s the part that doesn’t go away. He’s a good man and I’m about to blow up his life.”
“Yeah,” I said. Because she deserved honesty more than she deserved comfort right now. “You are. And that’s going to sit heavy for a while and there’s nothing I can say that makes that part easier.” I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees. “But staying doesn’t fix it either. Staying just means you’re both living inside something that isn’t true anymore. That’s not fair to him either.”
She breathed out slow.
“When?” I asked.
“Soon,” she said. “I just need a few more days to figure out how to say it.”
“You don’t need to figure out how to say it. You just say it.”
“That’s easy for you to say.”
“Nothing about any of this has been easy,” I said. “But you’ve known what you were going to do since before you wrote that note in the hotel room. You knew then. Everything since thenhas just been you taking the long way to something you already decided.”
