"You promised you'd call."
"I know."
"You sat in this kitchen all night while I was in your bed waiting and you didn't pick up the phone."
"I know, Billie."
I am not tender about this. I'm not performing patience or the version of a woman who accepts this because she loves him. I'm angry the way I was angry about the private tier — genuine, direct, no humor in it.
"You memorized my schedule. You know how I take my coffee and which side of the bed I sleep on and you counted my freckles while I was asleep — yeah, I know about that. You are the mostobsessive, attentive, relentlessly present man I have ever met." I hold his gaze. "And you couldn't pick up the phone."
He doesn't answer. His face is doing something I haven't seen before. Not the controlled version. Something raw. Cracked.
"I didn't know how," he says.
"How to call me?"
"How to need you." His voice is quiet. Stripped. "When I can't fix something, I go still. I've always gone still. I don't know how to sit with something broken and ask someone to sit with me."
"That's your answer? You don't know how?"
"It's the most honest thing I've said in thirty years."
I look at him. Sitting at his kitchen table. Unslept. In yesterday's clothes. His hands on the table the way they were on the counter in my dad's kitchen a lifetime ago.
The anger doesn't leave. But something comes in beside it.
"You're going to learn," I say. "Because I'm not doing this — the baby, the family, all of it — with a man who goes silent when it gets hard. You can watch me and count my freckles and memorize my schedule. I love that about you. But you also have to be able to pick up the phone at eleven at night and sayI need you.Can you do that."
A long beat.
"I don't know," he says. "I've never tried."
"That's not good enough."
"I know." He stands up. Crosses the kitchen. Stands in front of me. He is taller and broader and older than me and he is looking at me like I am the only solid thing in a room that's been shifting under him all night. "I'll learn." His hands come up to my face. Both hands. Holding me the way he holds things he's afraid of losing. "You said I'm going to learn. So I'm going to learn."
I look at him. The silver at his temples. The gray in his stubble. The dark eyes that have been watching me since before I knew they were watching.
"I went to my dad this morning," I say.
His hands tighten on my face. "You—"
"I told him everything. The streams. The content. You. The baby. All of it."
"Billie—"
"He said he raised me to know my own mind and he can't be angry that it worked." I hold his gaze. "He left the door open."
Something moves through his expression. Not relief. Something more fragile.
"Declan."
"Yeah."
"Don't do last night again. Not everything needs to be fixed. Some things just need someone to understand."
25
