I click off the lamp and turn on my side. The sheet brushes the bruise, and a flicker runs through me, not pain, not quite pleasure—just proof. I pull the blanket higher and breathe through it.
Sleep comes slowly, then all at once. The last clear thought I have is a plain one, not a list, not a wish. Just: You’re still you.
Morning will come. Coffee will help. Concealer will help. The scarf will help. Work will help.
And under the scarf, under the blouse, under everything I put on to look like the woman who cannot be rattled, a crescent of color will wait and fade in its own time.
I will let it. I will learn what it has to teach me without letting it change who I am.
I turn the pillow cool and let the ocean sound do the rest.
Chapter Twelve
Roberto
I take the long road by the water because I need the distance, the curve, the empty stretch that lets a man try to outdrive his own head. Headlights pull a pale ribbon across the guardrail.
The inlet is a dark thumbprint to my right, flat and black until the moon shoots a silver line across it. The wind comes in off the bay and gives the car a steady push, like it’s reminding me I’m small and insignificant.
I crack the window. Salt air cuts through the car, cold and clean. It smells like iron and tide grass and the soft rot of the marsh, the same way it has since I was a kid sneaking out here to think I had a secret no one else knew.
I take the curve I always take a little too fast, feel the tires bite, feel the body roll and settle. The engine hums. The asphalt ticks. A bar of red taillight from a truck up ahead bends and vanishes.
I tell myself Iregret it.
That’s the first line my brain reaches for, like trying to put a lid on a boiling pot. I say it out loud to test the words in my mouth.
“I regret it.” The words sound reasonable, even.
They’re a lie.
I try again, dress it up. I regret losing control. I regret breaking a rule that exists for a reason. I regret letting heat decide what discipline should have crushed.
I can’t make it stick.
Not when my hands are on the wheel, and I can still feel the ghost of her skin on my palms. Not when my jaw tightens, and I know exactly what it’s remembering: the soft give at the place where her shoulder meets her neck, the taste of her there, the sound she made when I set my teeth into it and stopped pretending I was going to be careful.
The sound was not polite. I hear it now like she’s in the passenger seat, eyes tipped up at me, mouth parted.
I press my foot down and the car lifts, then I force myself to let it go again.
I do not regret touching her.
I regret the way I pulled away, the clean cut, the mask I reached for like a weapon. I regret the look that slid through her when I did it—confusion, then hurt, a flash of anger she swallowed because she thought she had to. I regret that more than any rule I broke. Decimated is more apt.
I tell myself excuses because that’s what I do for a living. I can stack them like bricks until a wall grows in front of the truth.
She works in a department that answers to my family. It exposes both of us. It’s reckless. If it got out, it could look like a power play, a favor, and she’s earned every inch of her place with her mind, not her body.
All of that is real.
None of it tastes like regret.
What I feel is a different thing: a knife-edged, bright certainty that I meant every kiss and every breath and every ‘yes’ I asked for and got.
That I would ask again if the world were different. That I would have kept asking if I hadn’t seen the future the way I always see it—fast, cold, and honest.
The way I was forced to see it when Maria was gone one day. I woke up one morning with my wife by my side. And I went to bed without her. Just like that.
