“Yes.” His voice is low.
“I can’t—“ I step back—one step, which is all I need to find the edge of myself again. “I can’t do more than that. Not yet.”
He drops his hand. There is no disappointment in his eyes—or if there is, it is under something larger, something that looks like he thinks this is fair, like he has no standing to want more than what he’s been given.
“Okay.”
“It’s not that I don’t—“ I stop.
“You don’t have to explain, Luce.”
“I’m scared of....”
Of what, Lucy?
Of everything. Of giving myself to Fox and having him say he doesn’t love me or that he made a mistake, that this time, too, it’s just guilt like before.
Fox looks at me for a long moment. “Sweetheart, I know. I’m not going to hurt you. I’m not going to let you get hurt.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do,” he says with such confidence that it should be funny, but it isn’t. It feels safe. “But I know you can’t trust it.” He drops a kiss on my nose. “But I’m going to show you every day that you can until it becomes a habit, like breathing.”
Fox is a force of nature. That’s what I always thought. Powerful, strong, and when he makes up his mind about something, there is no turning that around. Now, it seems like he’s made up his mind about saving our marriage, and I have conflicting feelings about it.
A part of me is giddy with delight that my husband wants me this much. Another is scared that it’s all just an act, guilt, not real, like last time.
That night, in bed, after his breathing tells me he’s asleep, I stay awake, guilt clawing at me.
I need to tell him.
I need to confess that I’ve been lying to him as completely as he lied to me, and that we are having this conversation on a foundation of compounded dishonesty, and that whatever is growing between us—if something is and I’m not imagining it—cannot survive in this soil.
I need to tell him.
Tomorrow.
Or the day after.
Definitely by next weekend.
Damn it!
21
I KNOW WHAT SHE KNOWS
FOX
Eleven days after our Bells Bend sojourn, I know.
We have settled into something—a careful, provisional something that neither of us has named, that exists in the space between where we were and where we are going, and that feels like a room with the furniture rearranged in a way that is better than before but still unfamiliar enough that you move through it slowly, checking the corners.
I have been watching her.
Not obviously—I am not a man who is obvious when it matters—but consistently, the way I watched the foxes in the clearing when I was seven, with complete attention because I understand that stillness is the prerequisite for seeing anything true.
I have been watching her face when she thinks I’m not looking.
