The reasons hadn’t changed; that was the problem. They were just as true as they had been ten minutes ago. But they weren’t enough, and I didn’t know what to do with that.
Nineteen
I Would Survive This , Too -Libby
Imade it down the stairs, through the hallway, past the bathroom, and past the closed door where I could hear Lily and Fiona’s low voices, the sounds of their packing.
Reaching my bedroom door, the lock turned under my fingers.
My back hit the door, my legs gave out, and I slid to the floor.
The first sob was silent. The second wasn’t, and I pressed both hands over my face. Lily’s room shared a wall; she didn’t need to hear this.
I’d seen it on his face the second he stepped onto that roof, before he opened his mouth, before he sat down, before he stumbled through that careful, measured apology with his eyes directed anywhere but me. I’d known—with a terrible, piercing clarity—that I needed to prepare.
So I had.
And I’d smiled.
And I’d made it easy for him. I always did. I didn’t know anymore whether that was kindness or compulsion—whether Iwas generous or just terrified of what happened when I didn’t smooth things over, didn’t hand them the exit, didn’t hold the door.
It’s laughable, really.
My own words came back to me, and a fresh wave of tears burned down my cheeks. I tasted salt, the hint of cigarette still on my lips.
What had I expected? Honestly—what, exactly, had I been hoping for? A declaration? Some breathless confession of undying love from a thirty-year-old soldier who looked like that and had a way of listening—really listening—like whatever you said was the only thing in the room, like he was already deciding what to do about it? I was almost forty, with a daughter and a decade of bad decisions written into me. A man like Finn wouldn’t choose a woman like me. That wasn’t bitterness. That was just a fact.
I pressed my forehead against my knees and let the tears flow.
The humiliation burned worse than the rejection—and the worst part, the part that made the whole thing unbearable, was that he hadn’t even rejected me. Not cruelly. Not carelessly. He’d been gentle about it, soft-voiced and careful, and somehow that made it so much worse than cruelty would have. I knew what to do with cruelty. I’d built an entire life around surviving people who couldn’t be bothered with gentleness. Cruelty I could navigate.
But kindness? Kindness delivered with quiet eyes and,hey, it’s not anything against you, really—that undid something in me I hadn’t known was still even in me.
Because for one night—a few reckless, unguarded hours in the dark—I’d allowed myself to believe something different. His hands on my skin had rewritten a decade-old story: the one that said I’d aged out of being wanted in a way that trulymattered; that my body now existed for function rather than desire; that the stretch marks, the exhaustion, and the years of doing everything alone had made me the kind of woman a man like that could want in the dark and discard without a second thought in the morning. And I’d handed him that opportunity, walked right into it, because some part of me had apparently decided that half of something was better than nothing, as if I hadn’t known exactly what I was doing, as if I hadn’t known exactly how it would end.
Last night, in the dark, with his hands and mouth on my body, stopping himself had seemed to cost him something real.
Turns out, it came considerably easier in the morning light.
I dug my nails into my palms, hard. Hard enough to leave marks, enough to redirect the ache from somewhere unmanageable to somewhere I could control.
Stupid.
Stupid, stupid woman.
I’d let myself act like a girl. Like the twenty-two-year-old I’d been before Lily, before the marriage that had spent years teaching me, with patient and grinding thoroughness, exactly how little my own needs were permitted to matter. Before I’d learned—through repetition, through exhaustion, through the slow accumulation of every small and large disappointment, ground down until they were just sediment, just the floor I stood on—that wanting things for myself led, without exception, to this. To a bedroom floor and the taste of something too good dissolving into ash.
I breathed.
Just that. Just the one small thing.
I counted them the way I’d taught myself years ago, during a period when counting breaths had been the only reliable distance between me and a darkness I couldn’t afford to fall into—when Lily had been small enough to need me every hour ofevery day, and that need had been the single thread tethering me to this world.
In. Hold. Out.
In. Hold. Out.
Slowly, deliberately, I gathered every broken piece of the last hour and pressed them down. I folded them into the place where everything else lived that I couldn’t hold and still keep walking—a skill I’d developed young, younger than anyone should have to, back when the only place that remained fully mine existed entirely behind my own eyes. When everything else had been managed by hands that weren’t mine: what I wore, where I went, whether I’d been enough, smiled enough, tried hard enough. The only control I possessed lived in that quiet internal space where I could pack everything down tight, presenting a perfect exterior no one could ever see past.
