Chapter 14
“You’re awake,” I said.
He looked at the clock.
“It’s after eleven.”
“I know.”
“You didn’t answer my text.”
I checked my phone.
There it was.
Are you coming home soon?
Sent forty-six minutes earlier.
“I didn’t see it.”
Daniel stared at me.
I could almost hear the echo of every Saturday night I had once spent staring at unanswered messages.
He said, “I was worried.”
“I’m fine.”
I started upstairs.
“Claire.”
I stopped.
He looked smaller somehow.
Not physically.
Certain kinds of confidence disappear when a person realizes the rules they relied on no longer exist.
“This is what it felt like, isn’t it?”
I knew what he meant.
Waiting.
Not knowing.
Wondering whether the person you loved cared enough to answer.
“Yes.”
Daniel looked at the floor.
“I hated it.”
“I know.”
“I’m sorry.”
I nodded.
Then I went upstairs.
That should have felt triumphant.
It didn’t.
I did not want Daniel punished.
I had wanted him present.
There is a cruelty in getting someone’s understanding only after you no longer need it.
Two weeks later, he ended things with Rachel.
He told me on a Sunday.
Of course he did.
Emma was not there.
I was drinking coffee on the porch when Daniel came outside.
He sat across from me.
“I told Rachel it was over.”
I looked at him.
“All right.”
“That’s it?”
“What do you want me to say?”
“I don’t know.”
He laughed bitterly.
“Maybe that it matters.”
“It matters to you.”
“Doesn’t it matter to you?”
I searched myself.
That was the strange part.
I expected jealousy.
Relief.
Vindication.
Something.
Instead I felt mostly tired.
“Not in the way you want it to.”
Daniel leaned back.
“I ended it because I want us.”
I looked at him.
“You had us.”
He closed his eyes.
“I know.”
“No. I don’t think you do.”
“Then explain it.”
So I did.
Not angrily.
That was important.
“You think the affair is the thing I need removed. Like Rachel is standing between us, and if she disappears, we go back to normal.”
Daniel said nothing.
“But Rachel wasn’t in our kitchen when you lied to me. She wasn’t holding your phone when you ignored my calls. She didn’t make you tell me I was paranoid. She wasn’t the one who watched me cry and decided my distress was less important than protecting whatever you were doing.”
His eyes reddened.