Head down, he nods. “What else happened? What was it like?”
I’m starting to feel tired, so I gesture toward my room. “Let’s go back. I need to lie down. Then I’ll tell you the rest.”
He escorts me down the hall and helps me into bed, tucks the thin blanket around me, and pulls a chair close.
“Did you see Jacob?” he asks.
I’m not surprised by the question because my husband of many years knows all the depths of my soul. Nothing, not even our recent differences, can erase that. “Yes.”
He nods with understanding, but I sense a fear in him.
I tip my head back on the pillow and stare up at the ceiling, and all at once, I’m back there in my imagination, in Jacob’s kitchen. I hear his voice in my head.
We definitely would have had disagreements ... No one is perfect. Some of us get banged up pretty badly in life, and it’s not easy to recover ... It’s how we learn and grow. But growth is in the healing. That’s the whole point of living—to learn how to forgive each other for our trespasses, and how to be kind, and find joy together, even through our differences.
“It was nice to see him,” I admit. “But it made me realize that my life with you has been so much more than a brief spark of first love. You’ve loved me for two decades, and you’ve given me children. We bought a house together and built two businesses. Our life has been full of highs and lows, but you’ve always been there, in for the long haul. So now, I want you to know that if I ever made you feel like I was comparing you to Jacob, or if you felt like you couldn’t compete with a ghost, I’m sorry. I never wanted you to think you weren’t good enough or that you didn’t measure up to some impossible standard. You got enough of that from your father.”
Nate sits forward and rests his elbows on his knees. “I did sometimes feel like you were holding on to him, that you thought he could do no wrong.”
“He couldn’t,” I reply. “Because he didn’t live long enough to make any mistakes. But he would have made plenty, I’m sure, if he’d survived.”
I glance at the sky outside the large window. The sun is just moving into view. It’s going to be blinding in the next few minutes.
“Something else I’ve learned from this,” I say, meeting Nate’s gaze, “is how trauma can push you off your path and take away your faith in good outcomes. I think I was always waiting for the other shoe todrop with you, and when you got busy with the restaurant, I latched on to that as the beginning of the end. I imagined us falling off a cliff.”
Nate steeples his fingers and presses them to his forehead. “Funny. When you first mentioned trauma, I thought you were referring to me and my relationship with my father—how that planted an expectation of failure in me. But you’re talking about your fall from Cape Split.”
“Yes, but it’s no different from what you went through as a child. Trauma put fear in both of us, I think. And on the day you missed my father’s funeral, for me, it felt like the beginning of the earth collapsing.”
Nate hangs his head low. “I’m so sorry. If it helps you to know, I’ve always regretted that. I should have been there.”
Another alarm goes off in the room across the hall. No one comes to answer it, and we sit uneasily, listening and watching, until it finally stops chiming.
Nate says something out of the blue. “I think I should see a therapist.”
“Really?”
“Yes,” he replies. “I think I might actuallyenjoytrash-talking my dad with someone who’s willing to listen for a full hour.”
I laugh. “I’d be more than willing to listen to you trash-talk your dad. You wouldn’t even have to pay me.”
He smiles. “Yes, but you’ve already heard it all. I think I need fresh ears.”
I nod approvingly. “Then let’s look into that.”
His phone chimes, and he pulls it out of his back pocket. “It’s Connor. Oh, wow.”
“What is it?”
Nate reads, taps, and scrolls. “The video of you getting swept off the rocks is everywhere. It’s on CBC, Fox, and CNN. Even the BBC.” He swipes and scrolls some more, then rises from the chair to show me his screen.
We watch and listen to a panel of experts on one of the news channels. They’re discussing how social media groups can becomepitchfork mobs. They refer to Nate’s arrest and show photos of the Oblique website and Nate in his chef’s uniform, leaning confidently over the stainless steel worktable in the kitchen.
“Babe, you’ve gone global.”
Nate shakes his head in disbelief. “But they’re showing my perp walk. God, I’m in handcuffs. This is terrible.”
“But justice prevailed,” I remind him.
