Page 61 of Coming Home

I sat behind the steering wheel, my face on fire, my mouth opening and closing around a witty comeback that flatly refused to form. I started the engine and drove exactly two blocks down the quiet, tree-lined avenue before Ralph told me to stop the car.

"Why? Did you forget something?" I slammed the transmission into park and cut the engine.

The truck plunged into a heavy, suffocating silence. Ralph shifted in his seat, looking at me, his eyes dark behind the black frames of his glasses.

"That was dangerous," he said. "What you did under the table."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"You know exactly what I'm talking about."

"I think you're imagining things."

"Your foot was on my⁠—"

"Prove it."

He looked at me. The car was quiet except for the engine ticking and the sound of both of us breathing a little too fast.

He proved it.

CHAPTER 20

Emma

Something was wrong with Ralph, and he had built a fortress around himself to keep me from finding out what.

With only two weeks left before the Olympics, his training regimen had devolved from intense into something downright masochistic. He was in the dark water by five every morning, leaving our bed cold before the alarm even had a chance to ring. When I arrived at the facility with his meticulously weighed meal prep and the stopwatch that had practically become an extension of my own hand, he'd already logged three brutal hours. He moved through the lanes like a man trying to outswim a ghost.

But his times were dropping. It wasn't a failure—just tenths of a second. Fractions of a heartbeat. To anyone else, it was negligible, but to a world-class athlete preparing for the definitive race of his career, it was everything. I saw the fractions on the digital scoreboard. I saw the tight, pale lines around Coach Vance's mouth. And worst of all, I saw it in the way Ralph surfaced after a sprint—gripping the lane rope, staring at the clock with terror in his eyes that shook me.

On Tuesday, the pressure boiled over. Coach Vance gave him a routine, minor note about his breathing pattern on a turn, and Ralph snapped. His voice went sharp. A snarl aimed at a woman he normally treated like a general.

Vance didn't argue. She simply lowered her clipboard, looked at him with an inscrutable expression for three long seconds, and walked back to her glass office.

Ralph stayed in the pool, his blond head pressed against the floating line, his broad shoulders heaving in a white-knuckled attempt to regain control.

I tried to reach him. Three separate times that week, I tried to gently wedge my way into his space, but every attempt hit a wall.

"Ralph, please look at me. Talk to me."

"I'm just tired, Emma. I'm fine."

The final time, as we drove home in the heavy evening traffic, I placed my hand over his knee. He didn't shake me off, but he slowly lifted his leg and shifted away, keeping his eyes glued to the asphalt.

The recognition was instant. The obsessive overtraining. The aggressive isolation. The fierce, delusional insistence that everything was fine while the body was silently screaming for mercy. I knew this exact blueprint. I had drawn it myself when the lupus was ravaging my system and I responded by doubling my miles and slashing my sleep, punishing myself into the dirt because admitting weakness felt like an execution. I recognized Ralph's self-destruction because I had invented it.

To make matters worse, Desmond had finally returned to work after his daughter's recovery, resuming his duties as Ralph's primary driver. Just like that, my morning window of closeness was gone. I no longer had those quiet thirty minutes in the car where his guard would occasionally slip enough for me to catch a glimpse of what lay beneath.

He still held me close at night, anchoring his body against mine as if I were his only safety line. He still kissed me every morning with a quiet, lingering heat. But the distance between us was growing by the hour.

On Thursday afternoon, my phone rang while I was standing at the kitchen counter, mindlessly eating cold pasta.

"Hey, Em. I need a favor," Theo said, his voice a frantic blur of rustling paper and typing.

"Name it."

"Ralph was supposed to courier over a financial summary for the Olympic committee and the sponsorship breakdown, but he forgot. Felix is heading to the house in an hour to grab it. Can you hunt it down? It should be in a bright blue folder on his desk or the shelf behind it. It's got the official committee letterhead."