I feel the first burst of anger. He knows? What the hell?
“How long is a while?” I grit my teeth.
“Ah…I don’t know, Luce. Probably a few days after we came home.”
I want to sit up, but he doesn’t let me. He crawls atop me, keeping me caged under him.
“H-how did you…how do you know?”
He’s known all along, and I’ve been thinking I did such a great job of pretending.
“You never asked the same question twice.”
I stare at him. “What?”
He shrugs. “You never asked a question twice—and that told me that you didn’t really forget anything, you were…testing me.”
My husband is a whole lot more perceptive than I give him credit for.
“You knew, and you didn’t say anything, and you just…”
“Kept going,” he repeats.
I push at him, and he rolls away. I sit up because I need to be vertical, to have distance, to think. “You kept going? What the…Fox?”
“I know.” He sits up and rests against the headboard.
“That’s two of us lying to each other…”
“I know.”
“For weeks!”
“Lucy.” He takes my hand in his and holds my gaze. “I knew. And I decided that what you needed to see was worth more than calling it out. If you needed to watch me—if you needed to see what I did when I had to earn you”—he kisses my hands—“then I was going to give you something worth watching.”
I stare at him, lost in his blue eyes. “That is the most manipulative thing I have ever heard.”
“True,” he agrees.
I wrench my hands away from him. “You are…” I press my hand to my eyes briefly. “You are the most…”
“Yes.” He comes closer to me. Smiles. “Yes, to all of it. I know what I am. I’m not going to pretend the last weeks were anything other than what they were. I had information, and I used it, and I would do it again, because what I was trying to do was make you—“ I look away, and he holds my chin to bring me back to a place where I see him—“understand that I know what I cost you. That I know what I did and what I didn’t do, and how long I didn’t do it. That I’m not that man anymore. That I don’t want to be that man anymore.”
I just feel way too many emotions. I can’t parse through them. I just…can’t.
“I need to move out. Back to Dina’s, likebefore.”
The look on his face is something that I don’t ever want to see again.
My strong Fox, breaking—it’s devastating to watch.
“Fuck no!” he explodes.
But I know what I need, what we need.
If we’re going to make this work, we need some time to process. I need time to process. We need to let this relationship breathe, be authentic, which it hasn’t been since we’ve both been lying to each other.
“I can’t keep living here, feeling this way, and not knowing what’s real. We were getting divorced, Fox. We had agreed. And then the accident happened, and we’ve been in this—this?—“
