“I know.”
Dina is quiet for a moment. She is, I have always known, significantly smarter than she is given credit for, and she is currently applying that intelligence to me in a way that is not comfortable.
“She should come home with me,” she states. “When they discharge her. She knows my place. She’ll be comfortable, she won’t be confused?—“
“No.”
Her eyes narrow. “Fox?—“
“She needs continuity. The doctors said—routine, familiar environment, and low stress. Our home is her home. Her things are there. Her garden. Her kitchen.” I keep my voice level. I keep it reasonable. I am, and I am aware of this, performing reasonableness the way I have always performed things that are in fact something else entirely. “Taking her somewhere new, somewhere she has no memory of?—“
“She has no memory of your house either.”
“She has no memory ofanythingfrom the last two years. At least in our home she can—“ I pause because my throat is closing up again. For a man who hasn’t cried since I was a child, I’m having no trouble producing tears. “She can start building them again. In an environment that’s actually hers.”
Dina looks at me for a long time. TheI-blame-you layeris doing significant work.
“Her things are at my place,” she tries again, but not with as much gusto as before. “She was staying with me. She moved out.”
Like I need to be reminded!
“I know.” I hold her gaze and make a note to text my assistant to get Lucy’s stuff back to our home from Dina’s ASAP. It’ll be like she never moved out. Like that shit never happened.
“So—”
“When she gets her memory back,” I cut her off again with barely restrained frustration, “if she decides she wants to leave, I won’t stop her. But right now she is fragile, and she is healing, and she needs—” I stop. I let something through, just enough, just the part that is real and not strategy, though I’m not entirely certain where one ends and the other begins anymore. “She needs her husband.”
And I need her.
Dina gives me a measured look and does me the favor of not saying that I was the one who had decided the marriage was over, that I didn’t want to be her husband.
The corridor hums. Somewhere, a cart wheels past. The fluorescent light does its indifferent fluorescent thing.
“If she’s unhappy”—Dina steps in front of me, goes on tiptoe, and still, her forehead only comes up to my chest, but she makes the most of it with her glare—“if she’s stressed or asking to leave?—“
“She goes wherever she wants. Immediately. No discussion.”
“I’m going to be there every day,” she warns.
“I would expect nothing less.”
She unfolds her arms. Refolds them. Looks past me at the ICU door.
“You’d better be good to her, Fox.” Her voice has dropped past the layered expression to her truth, and there is such sadness in her voice that it touches me in a way I never imagined such things could. “She’s the best person I know. You understand that? The actual best. And she has had—“ She stops as her eyes fill with emotion. “Just be good to her.”
“I will love her every day for the rest of my life.” It is the most unqualified thing I have ever said.
12
UNTIL NOW
LUCY
Iremember the conference room with its door slightly ajar.
Percy’s voice and then Fox’s—patient and certain—explaining me like I was a problem he’d been managing.
“I don’t love her. I don’t think I ever have.”
