I look at him. I try not to cry.
“I’m so angry. Just at everything. At you and at him and at myself. The way I told you . . .” he says, shaking his head. He looks away. He tries to calm down. “I told you that I didn’t need you to stop loving him. I told you that you could love us both. That I would never try to replace him. And I really thought that I meant what I said. But now, I mean, it’s like the minute I find out he’s back, everything’s changed. I’m so mad at myself for saying those things back then because . . .” He stops talking. He rests his back against the dishwasher, his arms over his knees. “Because I think I was kidding myself,” he says, looking at his hands as he picks at his nails.
“I think it was just this thing that I said because I knew it was theoretical. It wasn’t real. I wanted to give you the comfort of knowing that I wasn’t trying to replace him because I knew that I was replacing him. He wasn’t a threat because he was gone and he was never coming back. And he was never going to be able to take you away from me. He couldn’t give you what I could. So I said all of that stuff about how I didn’t expect you to stop loving him and how we could both fit into your life. But I only meant it in theory. Because ever since I heard he was back, I haven’t been happy for you. Or even really that happy for him. I’ve been heartsick. For me.”
He looks at me, finally, when he says this. And between the look on his face and the way his voice breaks when the words escape from his mouth, I know that he hates himself for feeling the way he does.
“Shhh,” I say to him, trying to calm him down, trying to hold him and comfort him. “I love you.”
I wish I didn’t say it so often. I wish that my love for Sam wasn’t so casual and pervasive—so that I could save that phrase for moments like this. But that’s not very realistic, is it? When you love someone, it seeps out of everything you do, it bleeds into everything you say, it becomes so ever-present, that eventually it becomes ordinary to hear, no matter how extraordinary it is to feel.
“I know you do,” he says. “But I’m not the only one you love. And you can only have one. And it might not be me.”
“Don’t say that,” I tell him. “I don’t want to leave you. I couldn’t do that. It’s not fair to you. It’s not right. With everything that we’ve been through and how much you’ve done for me, how you’ve stood by me, and how you’ve been there for me, I couldn’t . . .” I stop talking when I see that Sam is already shaking his head at me as if I don’t get it. “What?” I ask him.
“I don’t want your pity and I don’t want your loyalty. I want you to be with me because you want to be with me.”
“I do want to be with you.”
“You know what I mean.”
My gaze falls off of his eyes, down to his hands, and I watch him fiddle with the beds of his nails—his own version of wringing his hands.
“I think we should call off the wedding,” he says.
“Sam . . .”
“I’ve thought about it a lot for the past few days and I thought, for sure, you were going to pull the trigger. But you haven’t. So I’m doing it.”
“Sam, c’mon.”
He looks up at me, with just a little hint of anger. “Are you ready to commit to me?” Sam says. “Can you honestly say that no matter what happens from this moment on, we are ready to spend our lives together?”
I can’t bear to see the look in his eyes when I shake my head. So I look away as I do it. Like every coward in the history of the world.
“I have to let you go,” Sam says. “If we have any chance of surviving this and one day having a healthy, loving marriage.”
I look up at him when I realize what’s happening.
He’s leaving me. At least for now. Sam is leaving me.
“I have to let you go and I have to hope that you come back to me.”
“But how can—”
“I love you,” he says. “I love you so much. I love waking up with you on Sunday mornings when we don’t have any plans. And I love coming home to you at night, seeing you reading a book, bundled up in a sweater and huge socks even though you have the heat up to eighty-eight degrees. I want that for the rest of my life. I want you to be my wife. That’s what I want.”
I want to tell him that I want that, too. Ever since I met him I’ve wanted that, too. But now everything is different, everything has changed. And I’m not sure what I want at all.
“But I don’t want you to share those things with me because you have to, because you feel it’s right to honor a promise we made months ago. I want us to share all of that together because it’s what makes you happy, because you wake up every day glad that you’re with me, because you have the freedom to choose the life you want, and you choose our life together. That’s what I want. If I don’t give you the chance to leave right now, then I don’t know,” he says, shrugging. “I just don’t think I’ll ever feel comfortable again.”
“What are we saying here?” I ask him. “What exactly are you suggesting?”
“I’m saying that I’m calling off the wedding. For now, at least. And I think one of us should stay somewhere else.”
“Sam . . .”
“Then you’ll be free. To see if you love him the way you love me, to see what’s left between you. You should be free to do that. And you can’t do that if I’m with you or if I’m pleading for you to stay. Which I don’t trust myself not to do. If I’m with you, I will try to get you to choose me. I know that I will. And I don’t want to do that. So . . . go. Figure out what you want. I’m telling you it’s OK.”
My instinct is to grab on to him tightly, to never let go, to put my hand over his mouth in order to stop him from saying all of this.
But I know that even if I can stop the words from coming out of his mouth, that won’t make them any less true.
So I grab Sam by the neck and pull his head close to mine. I am, not for the first time, deeply grateful to be loved by him, to be loved the way he loves.
“I don’t deserve you,” I say. Our foreheads are pushed so close together neither of us can see the other. I am looking down at his knees. “How can you be so selfless? So good?”
Sam shakes his head slowly, without peeling away from me. “It’s not selfless,” he says. “I don’t want to be with a woman who wants to be with someone else.”
Sam cracks his knuckles, and when I hear the sound of it, I notice that my own hands feel tight and cramped. I open and close them, trying to stretch out my fingers.
“I want to be with someone who lives for me. I want to be with someone who considers me the love of her life. I deserve that.”
I get it. I get it now. Sam is pulling his heart out of his chest and handing it to me, saying, “If you’re going to break it, break it now.”
I want to tell him that I’ll never break his heart, that there is nothing to worry about.
But that’s not true, is it?
I pull away from him.
“I should be the one to go,” I say. I say it just as I can’t believe I’m saying it. “It’s not fair to make you leave. I can stay with my parents for a while.”
This is where everything starts to shift. This is where it feels like the room is getting darker and the world is getting scarier, even though nothing outside of our hearts has changed.
Sam considers and then nods, agreeing with me.
And just like that, we have transitioned from two people considering something to two people having made a decision.
“I guess I’ll pack up some stuff,” I say.
“OK,” he says.
I don’t move for a moment, still stunned that it’s happening. But then I realize that staying still doesn’t actually pause time, it’s still passing, life is still happening. You have to keep moving.
I stand up and head to my closet to gather my clothes. I make it to our bedroom before I start crying.
I should be thinking of outfits to pack, things to wear to work. I should be calling my parents to tell them I’m going to be sleeping at their house. But instead, I just start throwing things into a duffel bag, with little attention paid to whether the clothes match or what I might need.