“She’s a lot to deal with.” There’s something in his voice now that drops the act. This is the real deal. “You’ll figure that out. She’s needy. She overthinks, and she makes everything harder than it needs to be. I’ve put up with that for three years. You’vehad her for eight hours and you’re already locked in a hotel room with her, so good fucking luck.”
I say nothing.
“Enjoy her while you have her. She’s a little boring in the sack, but she’ll do you for the night.”
There it is.
I stand in the bathroom of a hotel in Opal Creek and let that sentence sit in the air for exactly one second.
Then something in me goes very, very quiet.
“I need you to listen carefully,” I start. “Because I’m only going to say this once.”
“Oh, here we go—”
“Speak about her like that again, to me, to anyone, to yourself in a room alone, and I will make it my personal business. I don’t say things I don’t mean.”
“Is that a threat?”
“No. It’s a fact. You’ve spent the last five minutes telling me she’s unstable, she can’t function on her own, she’s difficult to deal with, and now she’s boring to sleep with. That’s the woman you wanted to spend your life with?”
Silence is the only response I get.
“You don’t deserve to be in the same room as her. You definitely don’t deserve to be on the phone at—” I check my watch, “—one in the morning talking about her like she’s an inconvenience you’ve been tolerating.”
“You don’t know anything about our relationship.”
“I know she cried for an hour on a bathroom floor tonight. I know she scratched at her own arms because she couldn’t stand being in her skin. I know she still had good things to say about you while she was doing it. I know she asked me if she should call you because she was worried aboutyou.”
Nothing.
“Does she know you talk about her like this?” I ask. “Or does she only get the version you want her to see?”
Still nothing.
“Don’t call this number again,” I warn. “When she’s ready to talk to you, she will. That’s her choice.”
“She is my—”
“Not right now, she’s not.” I keep my voice level. “Goodnight.”
I hang up and stand in the bathroom for a moment. The adrenaline surges through me, and I breathe through it the way I’ve learned until the noise in my head calms down.
Then I think about what he said.
All of it.
She’s unstable. She doesn’t make it on her own. She’s difficult. She’s boring. She’s a lot to deal with.
Behind all of that is the career she paused, the dress she wore because she was told to, the fact that she spent three years shrinking herself into a shape that still apparently wasn’t good enough, and this is the man who was keeping score.
Has he been doing this the whole time?
If he’ll say all of that to me—Noah’s best friend, someone she knows, a person with a direct line back to her family—what does he say when there’s nobody to hear it?
What does he say to her face?
I turn off the bathroom light and step back into the room.
