My pulse is so loud in my ears that I am sure he can hear it. “I didn’t mean for this to happen. I am so sorry, Brian.”
“For what?” he asks, his voice deceptively soft. “For lying to me? For leaving us after that bomb dropped? Making me pick up the pieces for Meret?” His eyes narrow. “For fucking him?”
I flinch. A memory circles the drain of my mind: me, asking Win if she felt she was cheating on Felix. Win’s response:There are times I wonder if my whole marriage has been me cheating on Thane.
“You left yourchildbehind,” Brian accuses. “You abandoned her, when she’d just found out…” He shakes his head, unable to even mention the DNA test. “Do you know how much she’s cried these past three weeks, thinking she lost a fatheranda mother? Do you have any idea how selfish that was?”
Later, when I replay this, I will realize it was that last adjective that broke a bridge of clay in me, a structure that had remained standing far longer than it ever should have. “Selfish,” I repeat. “Selfish? Do you know how many people I’ve put in front of myself for the past fifteen years? My mother. My brother. My clients. Meret. You. Even Wyatt. Everyone else’s welfare was more important than mine. I amalwaysthe last person I think about. So just for a minute—oneminute—I did. I know I didn’t do this the right way, if that even exists. I know I should have told you what I was thinking, where I was going. But I had to go, for my own peace of mind. I couldn’t stay here and pretend everything was fine, like usual, and let this eat away at me, wonderingwhat if.Eventually, there would have been nothing left of me.”
When I finish, I am breathing fast, like I’ve run a marathon to reach this conversation.
Maybe I have.
I realize that this white-hot anger is the most undiluted emotion Brian and I have had between us in a long time. I think he realizes it, too. This time, when our eyes meet, the storm between us is gone. It’s just him and me, like it used to be, standing in puddles of regret. “Why wasn’t it enough?” he asks softly. “Why weren’tweenough?”
“I wanted it to be enough. I went to Cairo because I needed to know if this was all in my imagination. You know. If I’d taken a memory and blown it out of proportion.”
“If you felt disconnected, we could have fixed that. Instead you tried to latch on to something new.”
Something old,I correct silently.
“I thought we were a team,” Brian says. “We made it through the deaths of people we loved. We built careers. We were raising ateenager. I thought I leaned on you and you leaned on me and even if it was lopsided sometimes, it always evened out.”
“I thought that, too,” I confess.
“Then…why?”
I do not have an answer for him—why we are drawn to certain people, why some soothe our angles and edges better than others.
Brian closes his eyes. “I keep thinking: I did this to you.”
I realize when he says this that I have not thought about Gita for a long, long time. I wonder if he turned to her, after he came home from the North Carolina hospital. If he cried in her arms.
If I still have the right to feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach when I think about that. If Ieverdid.
But then I realize that’s not what he’s talking about. “Every night when you were away, I’d lie awake and hope you were miserable. You lie to me for fifteen years…you screw me over and you screw over our kid…and there’s no punishment?” He swallows. “I feel like I manifested that plane crash.”
He’s wrong. The crash wasn’t retribution, but thereisa price I have to pay. No matter how happy I am with Wyatt, that joy is poisoned. It comes at the cost of someone else’s happiness.
Brian reaches out, his hand stopping just short of my shaved scalp. “I wanted you to be hurt. But not this like, Dawn,” he says. “Never like this.”
I am stunned that scientific, methodical Brian could believe, even in passing, that his dark private thoughts had anything to do with an airplane malfunction.
“There’s another universe where I got angry, and you were gone forever. So…I don’t know. Maybe it’s superstitious, but I thought if I didn’t yell anymore, you’d…stay.”
I open my mouth, close it. “I’m sorry,” I finally manage. Again.
Brian’s eyes are dark and soft. They move from my own eyes to the curved scar on my scalp to my lips. “I know,” he says. “I am, too.”
Over his shoulder, through the window, I see a flash of light on the road. I imagine it is Wyatt, driving away.
—
WHENIOPENthe door, Meret is sitting on her bed with her laptop open. She sits up, yanking out her earbuds, freezing in place. I move gingerly, the way I would approach a wild animal, and sit down on the edge of the bed.
She throws herself at me.
I wrap my arms around her and bury my face in her hair. The reality of leaving her—leavingthis—feels like a blow to the head. I’m dizzy, sick with the thought that I may never have had the chance to see who she becomes. I know I am hugging her too fiercely, that she can barely breathe, but I can’t seem to relax my arms. I think of how, when she was a baby, I would lean down and nuzzle her neck, blow a raspberry, make her laugh.
