He’s probably thinking, “Her heart is already broken, what’s a few more hits?”
“So, after I lost the baby, why?—”
“Luce,” he cuts me off, and I see pain flash across his face. It’s the first genuinely unmanaged emotion I have seen from him tonight. “I’m sorry about the baby and?—”
“You married me because I was pregnant, but you stayed married to me, why?” My voice stays level. I am impressedby myself—distantly—the way you are by a stranger doing something difficult.
He doesn’t answer right away.
The silence stretches, and in it I hear our whole marriage—eighteen months of mornings and dinners and small kindnesses that I understood as love, and he understood as doing the right thing, and the difference between those two is the distance between where I thought I was and where I actually am.
“Was it guilt?” I prompt because I can’t stand the tension any longer.
“Yes.” A flicker of compassion crosses his face. “That’s accurate.”
I stand up because I can’t sit any longer. I want to run as fast as I can, away, away, away from here, from everything.
But I’m a grown-up, and as hard as it is to be an adult, you can’t just escape a situation. You have to deal with it.
I pick up my wine glass and walk to the café windows that overlook the large balcony, where I have planted a kitchen garden in boxes.
Tomatoes. Chili. Herbs.
I planted a fig tree. I always wanted a fig tree.
And peonies. Not roses. But simple peonies. His mother said it was gauche. Fox told her it wasn’t her terrace and therefore none of her business. I had felt so safe with him then.
I stare at the fig tree. These are words I can’t say if I look at him. “We should end this marriage.”
Behind me, Fox is quiet for a long while, and then he finally says, “I know. But sweetheart, let’s talk about?—”
“Don’t.” I turn around to look at his beautiful face. “Don’t manage this. Don’t make it tidy. You told your best friend you don’t love me, and you’ve been staying with me out of guilt when I came to surprise you with cassoulet on the anniversary of thenight we met.” My voice cracks, a hairline fracture that I seal immediately.
Fox looks at me from across the table, his composure intact. Mine is hard won. His, I realize now, probably comes easily because he’s getting what he wants—his freedom from me.
He opens his mouth and closes it, and for once since I’ve known him, Archibald “Fox” Bennett does not seem to know what to say.
“I’ll go to Dina’s for tonight,” I tell him.
“This is your home, too, Lucy,” he murmurs. “You don’t have to leave.”
I look around and shake my head. “We can—lawyers, or whatever. I don’t know how it works.”
I pick up my plate and take it to the sink because I am still my mother’s daughter and my mother’s daughter clears the table, regardless. “I assume you know all about the legalities of dissolving a marriage.”
I don’t look at him when I say it.
I hear him exhale.
“I’ll talk to the Bennett lawyer.”
A rough laugh escapes me as I stare at the marble sink. “The same one who wrote the prenuptial agreement?”
“The same one.”
I nod and lick my lips. “Give me an hour to pack up.”
I hear him move and then feel him at my back, his heat, his smell. “Sweetheart?—”
