“This what?”
“I don’t know what to call it,” I confess. “I don’t have a word for it. It’s not the marriage we had, and it’s not—I don’t know what it is. And I need—“ I press my hands together in my lap, a thing I do when I need to keep them still. “I need to be somewhere that’s mine, where I can think, where I’m not—“ I look out the window, at the garden in the dark. “Where I’m not surrounded by things I planted and a man I…”
“A man you what?” he urges.
I don’t answer.
“Lucy, why did you make love to me tonight?”
I close my eyes.
“Lucy, open your fucking eyes and answer my question.” There’s no heat in his voice. He’s just being him. Persistent.
“Because I can’t keep my hands off of you.”
He smirks.
“Oh, stop!”
“Lucy, why do you want to move out?” He’s serious now.
My shoulders slump with the weight of it all. “I…I really think we need time to be honest with one another. I did you wrong…but damn it, Fox, you said you loved me in the hospital, and Ididn’t know if it was guilt talking or…. Why the hell were you lying when you’d just told me three days earlier you’d never love me?”
“I made a mistake.”
“What if it’s guilt…again?” I demand.
His eyes fill with emotion, and I feel like a horrible, horrible person for doing this. But I want us to be honest with each other, and we haven’t been, not from the start.
“The reason I lied to you—as in made you think that we were happily married and desperately in love when you said you’d forgotten us, sweetheart, was because that is the truth.”
I groan. “You’re making no sense.”
“You love me, Luce. You always have. And I found out after you left that I love you, too. And the accident. Fuck!” He stops talking for a moment as if trying to contain his feelings. “I…I can’t tell you how scared I was. I’ve never ever been scared. So, I can assure you this isn’t guilt. It’s love.”
I shake my head. “You made me feel like I wasn’t enough.”
“You were and are always enough.”
“You told your best friend you didn’t love me.” This time, I take his hands in mine, hold them. “You told me the same thing. You said it calmly and with complete certainty. Then there was the accident.” My voice fractures. “I know that you’re trying and…you want us to have a marriage, a future. I’m not an idiot, and I’m not blind, and I have spent these weeks watching you be”—I squeeze his hands—“the most amazing husband a woman could want. But I felt it before, too. I wassure, I was completely sure, and then I heard what you said to Percy, and everything I was sure of turned out to be…”
“I was wrong.”
“I know you believe that.”
“I love you.”
“Fox, I?—“
“I love you,” he cuts me off and repeats the words. “My commitment to you is not a response to the accident. Not because I almost lost you, though that is its own reckoning. But because you are the person I want to be in a room with. Because you make everything better than it needs to be and you say the true thing even when it costs you, and you plant peonies in spite of my mother, and you water the fig tree because it needs it, and you—” He stops. Resets. “Because I was in love with you while I was telling myself I wasn’t, and I was too scared and too scarred and too convinced by a story I’d been telling myself about what I deserved to see what was right in front of me.”
I feel like crying. I let go of his hands.
“I can’t believe you yet.”
“I know.”
“I want to,” I tell him, and this is the most honest thing I have said in weeks. “I want to believe you. But wanting to believe something and being able to are…. I don’t know how to get from one to the other.”
