I didn’t take that lightly. Whatever I projected on the outside, whatever certainty I walked around with when it came to her, underneath it I understood what she was giving up and what she was trusting me with by doing it. That wasn’t something I was going to waste.
My phone buzzed on the table.
Ivy.
One text. Three words.
I told him.
I read it twice. Set the phone face down on the table and looked out at the yard where this woman’s dog was currently digging a hole near my fence with absolutely no remorse about it.
It was done.
Whatever came next, whatever Brendon did with what she had just handed him, whatever fallout was coming, it was done.
I picked the phone back up and typed back.
Come home.
I had been rehearsing this conversation in my head for two weeks and none of the versions I had practiced felt anything like what was actually happening in this living room right now.
Brendon was sitting on the edge of the couch looking up at me and his face was doing something I had never seen it do in three years. Not angry, not cold, just completely open in a way that made him look younger than he was, like every layer of composure and polish that he walked around with every day had just fallen off and what was underneath it was just a man who didn’t understand what was happening to him.
“I don’t understand,” he said. For the third time. “Ivy, I genuinely do not understand what you’re telling me right now.”
“I know,” I said. “I know this feels like it’s coming from nowhere and I’m sorry for that. I am. But I need you to hear me when I tell you that this isn’t about something you did wrong.”
“Then what is it about.” Not a question. A statement that was waiting to become one.
I looked at him and I tried to find the version of this that was kind without being dishonest and I kept coming up empty because there wasn’t one. There was just the truth and the damage it was going to do and the fact that I owed him the truth more than I owed him comfort.
“We’re not a good fit,” I said. “Not the way two people need to be when they’re building a life together. I’ve known it for a while and I kept telling myself it would work itself out but it hasn’t and it won’t and staying isn’t fair to either one of us.”
He stared at me.
Then he got off the couch and got on his knees in front of me and I felt my chest crack open because I had never seen Brendon on his knees for anything in his life other than to propose and he didn’t want to get down then, honestly.
“Don’t do this,” he said. His voice was different now. Lower. Stripped of everything. “Ivy please don’t do this. Tell me what’s wrong. Tell me what I need to fix and I will fix it. Whatever it is. I will fix it.”
“You can’t fix it Brendon.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do know that.” I looked down at him and felt every complicated thing I had been carrying for weeks move through me at once. “You deserve better than this. You deserve a woman who is all the way present, all the way in it, somebody who fits the life you’re building without having to reshape herself to do it. That’s not me. I’ve been trying to be that and I can’t keep doing it.”
“What does that mean.” He searched my face. “What do you mean reshape yourself.”
I exhaled. “When I’m with you I have to be a different version of myself. The version that fits your image, your world, the way people see you. I smoke. I like to go out, I like to be in the streets sometimes, I’m not a stay home and host dinner parties woman and every time I’m around your people I feel like I’m performing something I’m not.”
“I don’t care if you smoke,” he said immediately. “Smoke. Just do it outside because of my allergies, that’s all I’ve ever asked.”
“See.” I looked at him gently. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Even that. Even something that small has a condition attached to it and I understand why, it makes complete sense, but that’s not— I can’t explain it better than that Brendon. We just don’t fit. And I am so sorry.”
He stayed on his knees for a long moment.
Then something shifted in his face. The grief was still there but something was moving underneath it now. Calculation. The part of him that had built a career on finding leverage and using it.
He stood up slowly.
