"I know you," I say. "I know exactly who you are. I chose you. But you have to let me in. Not just into the outcomes—into the decisions. I need to be consulted. Not steered."
Nicholas is quiet.
The garden light is shifting, the gold going amber, the shadows longer. I don't know what this evening becomes from here. I know what I want it to become. I've known since I stood in the study doorway and heard my husband tell a twenty-six-year-old woman the truth he'd never told me.
"I know," Nicholas says.
Two words. Quiet and plain.
It costs him. I can see it—not the admission itself but the full weight of it, the accumulated thing he's been doing to the people around him that he's been calling love and protection when it was also, in part, control. He's not arguing. He's not looking for the angle that leaves him something to defend.
He just sits with it.
I reach across the desk and put my hand over his. He turns his hand over and holds mine.
We stay there in the amber study light with everything that was just said between us, neither of us trying to make it cleaner than it is.
Nothing is resolved. That's not what this was for. I just wanted to be heard and I think he heard me this time.
I squeeze his hand once and he squeezes back.
33
JADE
My phone rings on a Thursday afternoon while I'm in the middle of a sentence.
I've been writing for three hours straight, the good kind where the words come faster than I can type them. I'm two pages from the end. My tea is cold. I haven't eaten since this morning. The cursor is blinking mid-sentence when the phone lights up on the table beside me.
James Dupree.
I stare at it for a full five seconds. Three rings. My hand doesn't move.
On the fifth ring I pick up.
"Hi," he says.
"Hi."
That's all either of us says for a moment. I get up from the table and walk to the kitchen counter and lean against it, my back to the manuscript, looking at the window above the sink. Outside the afternoon is clear and bright, the kind of California day that makes Boston feel like another life.
"I got your letter," he says.
"I figured."
"I thought about writing back." A pause. "I kept starting and stopping. Couldn't get it right on paper."
"So, you called?”
"Yes" Another pause. It’s shorter this time. "Is that okay?"
I look at the window. The light outside. A bird lands on the sill for a second and takes off again.
"Yes," I say.
We feelour way through it carefully, both of us. He doesn't explain himself again. He did that in the garden and we both know it and neither of us wants to go back there today. I don't tell him I forgive him because I don't, not fully, not yet, and he's not asking me to.
He asks about the manuscript instead.
