Page 62 of Chasing the Other Woman

“I mean it,” she says. “Don’t start fixing things because you think enough apologies or big gestures will make me come home.”

"I know that."

“Do you?”

I reach into my pocket and close my fingers around her ring. I don’t take it out. I don’t offer it. I don’t make her look at it.

“I have to make it right because I’m the one who damaged it,” I say. “If you never give me another chance, I still owe you that.”

Her eyes move over my face for a long moment.

“I still love you,” I say quietly. “You'll always be the love of my life. And I still want my wife back more than I know what to do with. But that can’t be the reason anymore.”

She wipes at her cheek again. “Then what is?”

“Giving back what I took,” I say. “Fixing what I can. Leaving the rest up to you.”

Sam looks toward the hallway.

Every part of me reaches for her.

My hands stay still.

“I need air,” she says.

I step back from the door.

She walks past me close enough that I catch the scent of rain in her hair and soap on her skin. Close enough that my body remembers every old right I no longer have.

At the threshold, she pauses.

I wait.

She doesn’t turn around.

Then she walks down the hall and back into the noise of The Funnel Cloud.

I stay in Petra’s cramped office with my hand closed around her ring, and this time, I let her go.

Fifteen

SAM

When I woke up this morning, I hadn’t expected to be staring down the county commissioner, giving him what for over faulty sirens.

“The problem wasn’t only the siren,” he says. “You said yourself the sirens went off here.”

“Yes, they went off here. But they didn’t go off in the places that actually needed them. Namely, the trailer park near the county line.”

I watch him, daring him to say something that dismisses that park or the people who live there.

God bless him, he doesn’t.

“How do you know for sure they didn’t go off out there?”

“Deputy Wilkes!” I call out.

The mustachioed man looks like he’d rather fight a grizzly bear, but he doesn’t pretend not to hear me. How could he, after all? I’m practically yelling.