“Someone had to. Here.” I shoved the mug at him. He frowned at the inscription before taking it but didn’t move from the doorway.
“Maybe if you’d spent more time at home than at the clubhouse, I would have remembered how you take your coffee.” The words were out before I could stop them, years of resentment distilled into a single sentence. I hated how any attempts to be the bigger person went out the window as soon as he was within six feet of me.
Teddy froze, mug halfway to his lips. “Seriously? We’re fucking doing this now?”
“I’m simply pointing out that your absence was so notable, I’ve forgotten basic details about you.” I gripped my own mug tighter, needing something solid to anchor me.
“My absence.” He set his coffee down with deliberate control, the kind that meant he was seconds from losing it. “Right. ‘Cause I was the one who checked out. Not you, with your gym obsession and your sudden need to ‘find yourself’ after?—”
“After our son died?” My voice cracked on the last word. Levi’s name remained locked up in my throat, because if I let it loose—if I said it out loud—everything I’d worked so hard to rebuild would come crumbling down.
“Yes, Teddy, I joined a gym. Shocking behavior, really. I should have been more like you and just run off to the clubhouse every night.”
“At least there, no one jumped my ass over every little thing.” His voice rose, filling the space between us with decades of accumulated frustration. “Nobody gave me shit about what needed fixing in the house, or how loudly I was breathing, or chewing, or existing. They were just happy to be in my company. Didn’t need me to be someone Iwasn’t. Didn’t look at me like I was failing some test I didn’t know I was taking.”
My stomach pitched, every insecurity I’d buried deep clawing to the surface.
There was no mistaking,theywere the club girls. Young. Uncomplicated. Draped over every surface of the clubhouse in tiny shorts and tank tops that left nothing to the imagination. Women who were down for anything and everything. Women who didn’t have stretch marks from three pregnancies or crow’s feet from decades of squinting into the sun at soccer games.
The mug nearly slipped from my hands. I set it down carefully, taking a second to arrange my face into something that didn’t screamYou may as well have just gutted me with a butter knife.
“Makes sense.” I forced a laugh. “Why deal with your grieving wife when you could have twenty-somethings serving you beer and hanging on your every word? Good for you.”
Teddy rubbed at the back of his neck, and when he looked at me again, there was something raw in his expression. “That’s not—Christ, Kels. That’s not what I meant. I didn’t?—”
“Didn’t what? Didn’t mean to let it slip that you found comfort with women half your age while I was home trying to hold what was left of our family together? Didn’t mean to admit to—” I couldn’t say it. Couldn’t put words to the fear that had haunted me for years, the one that whispered I wasn’t enough, wasn’t young enough, wasn’t fun enough to hold his attention anymore.
My cheeks burned with humiliation, remembering all those nights I’d waited up, wondering if he’d come home at all. Wondering if the distance between us was grief or something else. Someone else.
I pressed my palms flat against the counter, needing something solid to keep me from either throwing my coffee at him or dissolving into the kind of tears that would prove I still gave a damn.
“Never cheated on you, Kels.” His voice was low, intense. “Not once. Not ever.”
I wanted to believe him. God, I wanted to believe that whatever broke us, it wasn’t that. But the way he’d said it—theywere happy in his company—kept echoing in my head. The casual cruelty of it. Theimplication that I hadn’t been happy with him, hadn’t wanted his company, when the truth was, I’d wanted it so badly I’d made myself sick with it.
“It hardly matters now. We’re divorced. You’re free to screw whoever you want to,” I said, proud of how steady my voice sounded when everything inside me was collapsing. “Just like I am.”
The lie came easily. There hadn’t been anyone else. Hadn’t even been the desire for anyone else. I’d been too busy trying to remember how to exist with the weight of his and Levi’s absences pressing down on me. But he didn’t need to know that. Didn’t need to know I’d taken to sleeping in the middle of the bed just to make it feel less empty.
Teddy shook his head. “Jesus, can’t even share a meal without it turning into World War Three.”
“You’re right.” I studied the pattern in the granite. If I looked at him, he’d see everything written on my face—the hurt, the humiliation, the pathetic fact that I still cared what he’d done or hadn’t done with other women. The pathetic fact that I didn’t want to be alone. “We can’t. Which is why you should go.”
“C’mon, Kels?—”
“Please.” The word cracked down the middle. “Just go.”
I heard him shift behind me, the floor creaking under his weight. Heard him pick up his mug, set it back down. The hesitation in every movement, like he was fighting himself.
“Ain’t how I wanted this to go,” he said quietly.
I would have laughed if I didn’t think it’d come out as a sob. “How did you want it to go, Teddy? What exactly did you think would happen when you showed up here?”
“In my defense, I didn’t know you’d be here.”
“But if you had?”
Silence. Then, so soft I almost missed it, “I don’t know.”
