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Adam walks in and his scent floats by me as he passes. I close my eyes and inhale, a feeling of safety falls over me. Maybe I shouldn’t trust that feeling though, like Dr. Lipstein said.
He sits on the edge of my mom’s bed. “I heard you ran into Cora.”
I nod, stepping around him to sit on my bed. I’m sure he doesn’t want me on the same bed as him, although it’s where my body yearns to go.
“She has a baby,” I say as if he doesn’t know that.
“Brody. Yeah. He’s a cool kid.”
“They were going to story time.” I hate that talking to him feels awkward. I don’t know what to say.
“Do you remember that she’s married to Toby?” He glances at me, his forearms resting on his thighs and his fingers weaved together.
“She told me.”
“So you don’t remember their wedding?”
I shake my head.
“They got married after us. What’s your last memory?” he asks.
I sit up straighter on the bed, crossing my legs. “Little things have been coming back. I remember your thirteenth birthday party, and homecoming when we went as Frenchy and Doody. I don’t remember our wedding, but I know you’re my husband. Is that weird? It is.”
He shrugs. “I’m not a doctor.”
“I just talked to him about my mom and what she was doing. I should apologize.”
“For her? Please. You don’t have to apologize for your mom. At least not to me.”
I nod, unsure what he wants, why he’s here.
He rises from the bed and paces. “I’m going to help you, but I want to make a few things clear.”
“Help me?” My forehead wrinkles.
He stops and stares at me. “When you left, I moved into the house with my brothers and started renting out our place, but I made arrangements for the renters who were coming Saturday to stay somewhere else and I’ve canceled the rest of the renters for the season. That way you can move in.”
“Move into our home?” I’ve been dying to go there, but I never thought he’d allow me to stay there.
“It’s where our life was. And I can take you to the places that were important to you.”
“You know them?”
His face scrunches up and he rolls his eyes. “You were my wife. You were my fucking world since I was thirteen. Yeah, I know them.”
“Oh… okay.”
“But I have a girlfriend now, so I want to make it clear nothing is gonna happen between us.” He pulls some papers out of his back pocket and tosses them on the bed. “We’re not a couple. And you need to sign these.”
I pick up what I see now are divorce papers and sob inside. Our names written on the left-hand side with vs. between them. I never thought I’d see anything but an ampersand between our names. This makes it look like we’re enemies and I’ve always seen us as a united front.
I toss them on the other bed. “I don’t want these.”
“It’s not really your choice.” He runs a hand through his dark hair.
A flash of a memory of us on a couch, his head in my lap, flashes through my mind. My fingers mindlessly ran through his hair while he told me a story about a bear. I laughed and his arm stretched up and pulled my head down for a kiss.
I shake my head. “I’m not signing them. Not until I know why.”
