“Home?” I ask, acid creeping into my tone. “This home? The one you threw me out of?”
She flinches like the words are a slap in her face, and I guess in some ways they are, but I won’t take them back.
“I deserve that,” she says, her voice flattened, but still puckered with hurt.
“It’s not about you deserving anything, Yas.” I drop my head back, staring at the closet ceiling. “I don’t want to make you feel bad, but it’s true. I left this house because you told me to. We divorced because you wanted that. I didn’t, but I’ve come to terms with it. Now that we’re sleeping together, you want to wave a magic wand that wipes all of that out because your uterus is twitching?”
“That’s not it.”
“Nah.” I shove my hands into my pockets. “Doesn’t work like that. You sent me away. It’s not as simple as me just coming home.”
Even as I say it, I can’t deny that I came straight here from the airport because I couldn’t wait to see her and the kids. How that word “home” beat though me like a pulse the whole ride here. How, if I’m honest, this is where I want to be more than anywhere else. It’s always been. A year ago, I would have sold my soul to hear her say these things. So what’s holding me back?
“Itcanbe that simple.” With a flurry of quick blinks, she swallows deeply, the muscles of her throat moving. “I think on some level, I knew it was a mistake as soon as you left. On some level, even though we were fighting all the time, I still wanted you here.”
“Yeah, right.”
She strides over to a row of drawers on the far wall of the closet and opens the bottom one, pulling out a pair of shoes. She throws them to the ground like a gauntlet.
“Are those my…” I squint, my brain catching up to the evidence of my eyes. The UNCs I searched months for. “You found them?”
“They were never lost. I kept them.”
“So you lied to me when I asked you about them?”
“Surely lying to you about a pair of sneakers is low on the list of things I did wrong.”
“Why lie about it? Why keep them in the first place?”
“I don’t even know.” She shrugs. “It was instinct. I just…did it. I think I needed to keep a part of you here with me.”
“A part of me?” A scoffing laugh booms from my chest. “Keep a part of me here?Allof me was here, Yas. My kids, the house we built, our life together. Mywife.”
I point through the walls in the direction of Byrd’s house.
“The man who lived two streets over? That was a shell. Everything that mattered was still here. You exiled me, so don’t talk about keeping parts of me. You had itall. You took custody of our whole life. And you toss a pair of shoes at me like it’s proof you still wanted me?”
“Do you think I need you to tell me again how badly I fucked things up? I’m well aware it’s my fault that we’re in this situation. My fault that Deja resents me. My fault that Seem’s in therapy.”
“You know his issues aren’t all about the divorce. He has a fear of death. Losing so much at a young age, I get that. It’s normal to feel those things. It’s only in therapy myself that I realized what’s not healthy is refusing to deal with them.”
I meet her eyes, remorse sifting into my anger and frustration.
“And I don’t blame you for everything that went wrong. I told you that. It was unhealthy the way I dealt with the shit that happened. And to make matters worse, when you asked me to go to therapy, I refused.”
We stare at each other, the hard-learned truth of my words lingering in the air.
“But what I didn’t do,” I say, setting my jaw, “was give up on us. You didn’t try to save us.”
“I did try,” she says, emotion clogging her voice. “I tried and tried, but I couldn’t save usandsave myself.”
“What does that even mean?”
“I was losing both battles, Si.” Tears trickle down her cheeks. “The fight for us and the fight for me. I didn’t even want to live.”
She clamps her hand over her mouth like the words barged out of her without permission. Her eyes are smudges of agony in her face. She alluded to this in Charlotte, but seeing her now, her misery, I realize I didn’t know how bad it was. Didn’t fully grasp how dark it got.
“The way we were with each other,” she says, looking tired and sitting on the ottoman. “The coldness, the fights, the pain—I was already fighting myself just tobehere, to stay here. I didn’t have the energy to do both. Losing our marriage hurt in a way I can’t even describe to you, but losing the other battle? For myself? That would have been fatal.”