In my effort to control my life, to manage every aspect of it, I thought I could make emotions and feelings do what I wanted.
Like hell!
I fell in love with Lucy.
I don’t know when.
Might have been that first night, or the second, or the time she said she was pregnant.
I mean, a blind man could see I didn’t have to marry her because she was pregnant, but I did, and there was a reason for that.
I know, I know—I was doing the honorable thing. But look at me. I’m not an honorable man. So what I did was because I was in love. I just didn’t want to admit it, because all my life I’ve been told love—emotions like that—aren’t just useless, they’re a weakness.
Well, no mistaking shit now.
And I might lose her…not because she moved out, but because she fucking died. And I don’t know how to go on from either of those things right now.
“I love her,” I say softly. It’s a revelation to say the words out loud.
I love my wife. No truth I’ve held is truer.
Percy pats my shoulder. “I know.”
I turn to look at him. He isn’t even remotely surprised. He’s known all along, which is why he didn’t want me to divorce her.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You wouldn’t have believed me.”
I nod wearily. He’s right about that, too.
“How the fuck do you know so much about relationships?” I snap.
He smiles sadly at me. “Easier to see someone’s life from the outside.”
I close my eyes and take a deep breath, let the fear of losing her, the pain of her lying in an ICU bed, wash over me. I let it suffuse into each cell of my body.
I promise myself that I’ll never again manage my fucking feelings because that’s how I lost Lucy.
“Wake up, sweetheart,” I used to say to coax her awake when her alarm went off, and she snuggled further into the comforter.
I’m telling her again. Begging. Pleading. Imploring.
“Wake up, sweetheart.”
10
WHO ARE YOU?
FOX
The hours flow into each other.
Percy, Dina, her parents, and her brother come by, take turns sitting in the uncomfortable chairs with me, and make me promise them a hundred times that I’ll call them as soon as anything changes.
They don’t know that she left me. So they’re not shooting daggers at me the way Dina does, who obviously knows.
“I fucked up,” I tell her.
