I’ll apologize again.
And somewhere in that twisted loop, he’ll gaslight me into believing I am indeed the problem. We’ll both forget how this even started—that he forgot to pick up our son. That he never planned to in the first place, because he didn’t even know when he was supposed to.
“Rhys, next time you say you’ll pick up the kids and can’t, I need you to let me know in advance.”
I look at his beautiful face, his blue-blue eyes, his clenched jaw.
I know this man so well, and yet, for years now, it’s as if I don’t know him at all—or maybe that’s a lie I tell myself, because the truth is, I don’t like what I know. Not anymore.
Being one of Baltimore’s top cardiac surgeons has given Rhys the much-maligned—and not at all inaccurate—God complex.
He wants us all to genuflect to him.
It makes him unattractive. It’s not the first time I’m thinking this.
“Please,” I add, schooling my face not to show emotion, because if I do, he’ll get provoked—and I don’t have the energy for another fight that leads to nowhere tonight.
Rhys picks up the water glass again, takes a slow sip, like he’s giving himself time to figure out how to respond to me. He finally goes for the true and tried.
“I’m exhausted, Jayne. I don’t want to do this right now.”
And there it is—the line that ends our communication. The one he uses to avoid giving me even the basic respect of a response.
He heads upstairs, leaving his quarter-empty glass on the counter. I stare at it, condensation pooling beneath it, a perfect ring marking its place—like he’s branded every surface in this house with his absence.
I empty the glass and put it in the dishwasher.
Then I lean on the counter and stare at the dark window, where my reflection looks back at me, tired and foreign.
Rhys and I have been together for twenty-four years. He was nineteen and I was seventeen when we met. We married eight years later and have now been married for eighteen years.
Two kids. Finn is sixteen, and Mikaela is ten.
One mortgage. In an affluent suburb of Baltimore.
Half a lifetime of “I’ll make it up to you.”And God knows how many years now of, “I’m exhausted. I don’t want to do this right now.”
I watch him leave.
I don’t ask if he’s eaten.
I don’t ask if he wants me to make him a plate, like a good wife whose husband saves lives for a living.
I just look at him take the stairs and then hear his footsteps fading toward our bedroom.
I sigh like so many women do when they feel unseen, invisible, ignored and then, I start cleaning the kitchen, putting away the leftover spaghetti I made for dinner.
“Mom?”
I turn off the faucet and look over my shoulder.
Finn stands in the doorway. At sixteen, he’s taller than me now—almost as tall as Rhys. Six-one already, and still growing.
“Yeah, baby?”
He crosses the room and pulls me into a hug.
Surprised but grateful, I wrap my arms around him, not caring that my hands are still wet.
