Chapter 13 - THE THINGS I CAME BACK FOR
Roland stared at the ring.
“You’ve already decided.”
“Yes.”
He pushed it back toward me.
“Don’t do this in a coffee shop.”
“Where would you prefer?”
“At home. With me.”
“That stopped being home when I couldn’t trust what happened inside it.”
His eyes filled.
Mine did too.
Leaving someone would have been easier if love vanished on schedule.
It didn’t.
It stayed around, touching old memories, asking whether I was sure.
I was sure.
That didn’t make it painless.
The following week, I returned to the house for my things.
Roland had agreed to be elsewhere.
Raymond drove. Faye met us there with empty boxes.
I hesitated on the porch.
The porch light was still broken.
I had asked Roland to fix it for two months.
Inside, the house smelled like the lemon cleaner I used on Sundays.
My slippers sat beside the couch.
The soup pot was clean on the drying rack.
A small, unreasonable part of me resented that he had washed it.
Like he had erased the last thing I’d been doing before everything changed.
Faye packed books while I went upstairs.
In the nursery, Wren’s name hung above the crib in painted wooden letters.
I sat in the rocking chair and pressed my hands against my knees.
I had imagined a thousand nights in that room.
None of them had included packing it into boxes.
Faye appeared in the doorway.
“We can take a minute.”
“I hate that I still love parts of this.”
“You’re allowed.”
A car door slammed outside.
We both looked toward the window.
Celeste.
She walked in without knocking.
“I knew you’d come back when he wasn’t here.”
Faye stepped into the hall.
“Mom. Leave.”
Celeste ignored her and looked at the boxes.
“So this is how you punish a man who made a mistake.”
“A mistake?” I asked.
“He panicked.”
“For months?”
“You had resources. You could have helped.”
“I could have made a choice if someone had told me the truth.”
She pointed toward the nursery.
“That baby deserves an intact family.”
“She deserves adults who don’t use her to win arguments.”
Celeste’s face hardened.
“You think you’re better than us because your father can afford this.”
“No. I think I would still deserve honesty if he couldn’t.”
She reached for a box containing Wren’s yellow blanket.
Faye caught the box first.
“Put it down, Mom.”
Celeste stared at her daughter.
“You’re choosing her?”
May you like
Faye pulled the box against her chest.
“I’m choosing what actually happened.”
