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“I should have done it years ago.” He pulls back, looks at me steady. “I’m not going to make that mistake again. With either of my daughters.”
“You okay?” Theo asks, once we’re in the car.
“Yeah.” I lean my head against his shoulder, exhausted in the specific way that comes after finally putting down something you’ve carried for years. “I said it. I actually said it.”
“You did.” He kisses the top of my head. “I’m proud of you.”
“I’m proud of me too.” I close my eyes, letting the adrenaline finally start to drain out of me now that the hardest part is actually over.
We don’t catch a flight home that night, though.
I’d booked us return tickets for the next morning on purpose, some instinct telling me weeks ago that I wouldn’t want to rush straight from that house back onto a plane, and sitting in the car outside it now, drained and shaking slightly with the adrenaline finally leaving my system, I’m grateful past words that I listened to that instinct.
“Hotel,” I tell Theo. “I can’t get on a plane right now. I need actual food and an actual bed and about six hours where nobody’s watching my face for a reaction.”
“Already on it.” He’s got his phone out before I finish the sentence, and twenty minutes later we’re checking into a small boutique place a few blocks off the water, nothing extravagant, just clean and quiet and entirely ours for the night.
We order room service not long after we settle in, eating it sitting cross-legged on the bed, still mostly in the clothes we wore to the house, both of us too wrung out to bother changing first.
“That was a lot,” Theo says, eventually, working through a plate of pasta with the specific focus of someone whose body needed food an hour ago and is only now catching up to the fact.
“That was a lot,” I agree. “I didn’t expect you to — “ I stop, search for the right word. “I’ve never seen you like that. Not once, this whole year.”
“I surprised myself a little too.” He sets his fork down, quiet for a second. “I don’t lose my temper. I’ve spent my whole life making sure I don’t, because I watched what happens to a family when somebody does and doesn’t know how to stop. But watching her stand there and twist everything you’ve been carrying into something ugly about you — “ He shakes his head. “I couldn’t just sit there. I’m sorry if it made things harder.”
“It didn’t make things harder.” I reach for his hand. “It was the first time in my life somebody actually got angry on my behalf, out loud, in that house, instead of just quietly agreeing to disagree so nobody’s uncomfortable. I didn’t know how much I needed to see that until you did it.”
“I’d do it again.” He laces our fingers together. “I’ll always do it again, if it’s ever you standing in a room getting torn into for being honest.”
I don’t say anything for a moment. I just lean into him, exhausted and hollowed out and lighter than I’ve felt in years, all at the same time.
“Thank you,” I tell him. “For today. For all of it.”
“You don’t have to thank me.” He presses a kiss into my hair. “That’s just what showing up looks like.”
We sleep hard that night, the specific dreamless exhaustion that comes after a day too big to fully process while it’s happening, and I wake the next morning to Theo already awake beside me, watching me with the particular softness he saves for quiet mornings.
“Hey,” he says.
“Hey.” I stretch, feeling the day’s worth of tension still sitting in my shoulders, lighter than yesterday but not entirely gone. “What time’s our flight?”
“Not for a few hours. I already checked.” He pulls me closer. “We’ve got time. No rush this morning.”
We take our time getting ready, stopping for coffee at a small place near the hotel before heading to the airport, and somewhere in the ordinary rhythm of a slow Charleston morning — coffee, a walk along the water, Theo’s hand in mine the whole way — I feel something settle that didn’t have room to settle the night before, still too close to the confrontation itself.
The flight home, once we’re finally on it, is easier than the flight down.
“You okay?” Theo asks, somewhere over Virginia again, the same stretch of sky that held all his nervous energy on the way there.
“Yeah.” I lean my head against his shoulder, exhausted in the specific way that comes after finally putting down something you’ve carried for years. “I said it. I actually said it. And I got a whole night to actually feel it instead of rushing straight back into normal life before I’d caught up to what happened.”
“Good.” He kisses the top of my head. “I’m proud of you.”
“I’m proud of me too.” I close my eyes, the rest of the flight stretching out ahead of us, carrying us back toward the life we’re actually building instead of the one I spent years performing for people who were never going to choose me the way they should have. “Let’s go home.”
Chapter 36
Theo
