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“My point is, I didn’t expect any of it. So, when my phone rang at two in the morning on a Thursday night, I didn’t even check the screen. I was expecting the sound of her voice on the other end, letting me know that the final show of that run had gone well and that their wrap-up party was over, that she’d be home soon. I wasn’t expecting a fucking police officer to tell me she’d been in an accident.”
His gaze drifted behind me briefly before snapping back to mine. A muscle ticked in his jaw, his mouth opening and closing as he tried to find the right words. It took everything in me to not just hug him, but if Lucas was somewhere at the windows behind me, I didn’t want to add anything to the confusion that would already come from this trip.
“The man that was with her in the car was in the cast for the show, too, so I didn’t think anything of it then. I was a fucking wreck, yes, but I didn’t doubt her for a second,” he explained. The warble in his voice cracked a fucking hole in my chest. “I was grieving. I was explaining to a six-year-old over and over that his mother wasn’t coming home. It wasn’t until days later, when the police finally handed over her phone and the rest of her belongings, that I put the pieces together. So, I had to grieveagain—not just for the loss of my wife, but for the woman I thought she was, for the breakdown of a relationship that I didn’t get an ounce of closure from.”
He pushed his hair back with one hand, his gaze breaking from mine.
“It’s not that I think Lucas wouldn’t benefit from seeing me happy and in love,” he rasped. “I don’t think I’mableto anymore. And I need to be honest with myself about that, and honest with whoever I’m with about it. Lucas already knows. He understands, as much as an eight-year-old can. I genuinely hope that he can learn to navigate those waters on his own when he’s older, but I just…I don’t think I can give him that, as much as it kills me.”
His words felt like cement in the pit of my stomach. I shouldn’t have pressed him on this, shouldn’t have judged him for it when he’d made it clear he was comfortable before. I felt like a fucking monster for pushing him to give me answers up on the forty-fourth floor of the Darkwater building. “I’m sorry,” I offered again, glancing over my shoulder to check the windows for any sign of Lucas.
“You don’t need to?—”
Closing the distance in two steps, I wrapped my arms around his neck and pulled him down into a hug. He froze. “I do,” I insisted. “I shouldn’t have pushed you on this. We’ll find you someone, under your terms. No questions asked.”
His reluctance to accept my hug shook me a little until his arms snaked around my back, pulling me in just a little too close, a little too intimately. His cold fingertips brushed against the sliver of exposed skin on my lower back, and I nearly lost my breath.
Calm the fuck down, Ava.
“Thank you.”
“I will still need to ask you questions about other things,” I clarified, loosening my arms as a signal that he could let me go. He didn’t. “So maybe not,no questions asked.Some questions asked?”
He laughed against the shell of my ear, his arms squeezing me just a tad. “I can live withsome questions asked.”
————
The early afternoon sun had heated the day enough that we could relax on the lawn without worrying about keeping warm. Grace was still unwell, and Adrian had given her the rest of the day off. Lucas drove around on the grass in his electric go-kart, leaving tire marks in a circle over and over as he did donuts. Adrian sat in the lounger beside me, one leg on either side of the long footrest and his laptop positioned between his thighs.
I tried to focus on the words in Jane Austen’sPersuasion, tried to get the letters to make the right shapes in my mind so I could absorb it. But I found my mind drifting over and over again, off into daydreams or memories or the words Adrian had said to me earlier, and I had to keep rereading paragraphs or entire pages after realizing that I’d skimmed over the words without understanding them. I’d read one singular line over and over and over again, devouring it, savoring it.You pierce my soul. I am half agony, half hope.But it eluded me now, and it wasn’t hitting like it used to.
The crunch of feet on the grass behind me easily pulled me back out of the book easily, and I looked over my shoulder in search of the sound. Mrs. Henderson approached with a platter of food in one hand, a bottle of wine and two glasses in her other, and a blanket tucked up under her arm.
She left us to it, and after a quick back and forth with Lucas to get him to abandon the go-kart for lunch, we settled quietly into an impromptu picnic.
“We could head over to the lighthouse in Montauk tomorrow,” Adrian suggested, passing Lucas his plate of sliced meat and cheese and the cup of juice Mrs. Henderson had so easily balanced on the tray of food. There was even a backup ham and cheese sandwich for him.
“Yes! I can race Ava up the stairs,” Lucas beamed.
Adrian poured out a glass of wine for me and handed it over, his face deadly serious. I didn’t bother checking the label—I didn’t want to know how much it cost this time. “He will absolutely beat you. It’s not worth it.”
I didn’t doubt that for a second.
“Dad, don’ttellher that,” Lucas groaned, taking a bite of the backup sandwich before tucking into a slice of what looked like chorizo. “That ruins the fun.”
“A lie is still a lie if it’s by omission,” Adrian said, barely containing his chuckle as he took a sip of wine. “Would you be up for heading over there and losing in a stair-climbing race, Ava?”
“You know what? I think I’d quite enjoy losing a race to him,” I laughed, leaning over toward Lucas and ruffling his hair.
He leaned into it, his body swaying back and forth like a dog, in a fit of infectious giggles?—
And his juice spilled all over my top and lap.
“Shit—Wait, sorry, I shouldn’t say that in front of you,” I stammered, lifting myself up onto my knees and pressing a handful of napkins that Lucas handed me into my shirt. The red splotch spread across the white fabric, deepening,staining.
“Dad saysshitall the time.”
“Lucas,” Adrian groaned. “You know better than to say that.”
