Page 80 of We Are Just Us

“So I’m supposed to be okay with it?”

“I’m saying maybe the size of your reaction doesn’t match the size of the thing.”

Kieran stood up from the porch chair. Some reflex, the need to be moving. “You weren’t there. You didn’t hear him.”

“You’re right, I wasn’t.”

“So maybe don’t tell me how big my reaction should be.”

“Kieran—”

“He stood in my driveway and told me about identifying his wife’s body. About planning her funeral. About drinking himself into the ground.” He was pacing now. “And he told me all of that like it was my fault for asking. Like I was the asshole for wanting to know who I’m with.”

“Or,” Emory said, “like a man whose worst memory got ripped out of him in the middle of a fight and he didn’t have a clean way to say it.”

Kieran stopped pacing.

“You’re defending him.”

“I’m not defending him.”

“It sounds like you’re defending him.”

“It sounds like you called me wanting me to say you’re right, and you’re pissed because I won’t.”

The line went quiet. Kieran could hear his own breathing, too fast, too shallow.

“You don’t understand,” he said. “You’ve never had to—”

He stopped.

He’d been about to say you’ve never had to start over. Which wasn’t true. Emory had left a marriage at twenty-eight. Had moved cities. Had rebuilt from scratch. He knew this. He’d helped her do it.

“Never had to what?” Emory said. Her voice was flat.

“Nothing. That wasn’t fair.”

“No. It wasn’t.”

They sat in the silence. The conversation building—Kieran was tilting, the anger losing its footing.

“You emailed an Airbnb the same night,” Emory said. Not accusatory. Just the fact of it. “San Francisco.”

“I know.”

“What does that tell you?”

“Don’t do that. Don’t therapist me. I already pay Jim for that.”

“I’m not therapisting you. I’m asking a question.”

“It tells me I have options,” Kieran said. “It tells me I’m not stuck here.”

The words came out fast, like he’d rehearsed it at three in the morning. And for about half a second they sounded right.

Then he heard them.

The way he’d hear his own voice on a recording and think, That’s not what I sound like. Except it was. That was exactly what he sounded like. A man at a party who was already looking for the door.