“That’s great. Good for you. Animals.” A pause that sounded like sincerity, practiced and polished. “Listen, I know things ended badly with us. I’ve had a lot of time to think since Catherine and I split.”
I pressed my back against the feed room wall and closed my eyes. I should hang up. But if I did, that would just make him more determined to say whatever he had to say.
“And the people I thought were in my corner, you’d be surprised how fast they disappear when things fall apart. Friends I’ve had for twenty years won’t return my calls. The guys I played golf with every Saturday for a decade, gone. People I helped, people I loaned money to, people who sat at our table at Christmas.”
He paused, and the pause was loaded with the expectation that I’d feel something about thatour. “I’m practically a ghost in my own life, Eleanor. I come home to an empty house every night, and I sit there and I think about how I got here, and I just…” He let the sentence trail off. “I’m not looking for sympathy. I’m just telling you where I am.”
There it was. Carter Hollis, center of his own universe, expecting me and everyone else to orbit around him. Two marriages destroyed and somehowhewas the one suffering. Somehow the story was abouthispain,hisloneliness, the friends who’d abandonedhim.
“I don’t know what you want me to say to that.”
“I want you to talk to me, Eleanor. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.” His voice dropped, quieter. Wounded. “I just don’t understand what I did that was so terrible you can’t even have a conversation with me.”
My jaw locked. For three full seconds, I pressed my fingernails into my palm and let the sting of it keep me from saying something I couldn’t take back.
“Come home for a weekend,” he said, and his voice shifted into the generous register, the one that came with open hands and closed fists behind them. “Let me send you a ticket. First class. No strings, no agenda. I just want to see your face.”
“I’m not coming to New York, Carter.”
“I’m not asking you to forgive me. I’m just asking for a conversation. Is that so unreasonable?” His voice carried the careful hurt of a man who’d rehearsed this. “I don’t think wanting to talk to someone you were married to for three years is some kind of crime. Yet here you are, shutting me out completely. I have to be honest with you, that feels pretty selfish, Eleanor. I’m reaching out. I’m trying. And you can’t even give me ten minutes.”
There it was. My fault. Always someone else’s fault. The silence was an invitation I refused to fill.
“All right,” he finally said, words clipped. Another pause, and when he spoke again, his voice had shifted, become lighter. “I can hear you don’t want to talk. I’ll respect that. I just hope whoever’s keeping you company out there deserves you.”
I gritted my teeth until my jaw ached.
Deserves you.As if he still got to fucking decide anything about my life.
“Lose this number,” I said and hung up.
I lowered the phone. My hand was shaking, but it wasn’t the trembling I’d felt in the overhang or the bank parking lot. This started in my chest and radiated outward into my arms, my wrists, my jaw, and it was hot.
I paced the feed room. I wanted to throw something. I wanted to scream until the walls shook. But of course, I didn’t. A Monroe didn’t do that sort of thing.
I’d spent my entire adult life burying this feeling, performing past it, because anger was what got you hurt in Carter’s house and what got you exiled in my parents’.
I just needed to bury it now too.
“Lark?”
Logan stood in the feed room doorway, one hand on the frame. He took one look at my face.
“What happened?”
“Nothing. I’m fine.” It came out like a blade, sharp and aimed at him because he was the only target in the room and the real target of my rage was on the other side of the country. “Can you just—I need a minute. I need you to not be standing there asking me questions right now.”
He didn’t flinch. Didn’t step back. He looked at me for three full seconds, and then he turned and walked out of the barn.
“Seriously?” I was after him before I knew I was moving, my boots hitting the gravel hard. “That’s your move? I say I need a minute, and you just walk away?”
Even I could recognize the absurdity of what I was saying, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself.
He kept walking. Past the house, around the side.
“Great. Perfect. That’s exactly what I needed right now, Logan, one more person deciding they don’t want to deal with me.”
I hated the words as they left my mouth. I hated that I was aiming them at a man who’d done nothing wrong because I couldn’t hit my real target. But the anger was a living thing inside me and it needed somewhere to land, and Logan was here and Carter wasn’t.
