Page 74 of The Thinnest Air
“You need to make this right,” he says, as if the solution to our problem lies solely in my hands. His tone is ugly. Just like that my tears cease, and our eyes lock. His lips almost draw into a hint of a snarl. I see now that I disgust him. “I’ve worshipped the fucking ground you walked on since the moment we met. But you? You’re the one who couldn’t keep your clothes on the second some jackass with a badge paid you a little attention. Really, Meredith? Are you that insecure? Whoareyou? Because you’re sure as hell not the woman I married.”
He’s right.
He’s absolutely right.
And I don’t even have an answer for him, though I wish I did.
I’d be lying if I said there weren’t days I avoided my reflection in the mirror after returning from Ronan. The first few times, the girl staring back was ripe with shame and guilt and shameless sex hair, and I hardly recognized her.
“And do you have any idea what this would do to my reputation if this got around?” he asks. “People entrust me with managing their money, their millions. Do you know how incompetent and clueless this would make me look? My beautiful wife running around on me? Finding pleasure in the arms of some blue-collar Cub Scout? I’ll be damned if my marriage to you turns me into gossip fodder.”
“What do you want me to do?” I ask, falling to my knees in a last-ditch effort to physically show him I am willing to do what it takes to earn that look in his eyes again—the one he had the first time he told me he loved me. This may be melodramatic—it’s a desperate gesture—but I have to show him how sorry I am. “How can I make it up to you?”
“I don’t know if you can.” He removes himself from my presence, his footsteps heavy.
“So that’s it? You’re just going to walk off? End of discussion?” My voice is raised, broken.
“I need some space,” he says from the stairs. “The fact that that fucking detective had the nerve to show up atmyhouse and look me in the eyes after fuckingmygoddamned wife ... has got me a little on edge.”
Andrew leaves out the back door, marching toward the guesthouse, and I give him the distance he needs.
Everything makes sense now.
The hot and cold. The rough sex. The extremes our relationship has endured. He was hurt. He was in pain. AndIdid that to him.
All this time, heknew.
All this time, he still loved me.
All this time, never once did he want to let me go.
Harris was wrong. Andrew genuinely loves me. And if I’m lucky, our marriage can survive this.
Ican survive this.
CHAPTER 32
GREER
Day Nine
I try Harris’s phone for the fiftieth time, each attempt more in vain than the one before, and I hang up the second his greeting starts. The voice that once brought me comfort, made me feel loved and worthy, now makes me sick to my stomach.
Sitting in the middle of his noiseless living room, I rifle through my contacts, trying to determine if anyone else might possibly know where to find him.
I stop scrolling when I find his mother’s number. I haven’t seen or spoken with her in years, but I always kept her in my phone just in case. A retired professor, she lives in northern California now, and as far as I know, the two of them still speak on the phone at least once a day.
Harris is a total mama’s boy—a quality I’d always found endearing over the years, ignoring the fact that she was oddly possessive of her only son and viewed his relationship with me as some kind of threat for the first several years. At some point, she came to accept the fact that I wasn’t going anywhere, and things were cordial after that.
Pressing her name, I lift the phone to my ear, my heartbeat whooshing as it rings.
“Hello?” Her familiar lilt answers. “Deborah Collier speaking.”
She must have deleted my number after Harris and I called it quits.
“Deborah, it’s Greer,” I say.
I’m met with momentary silence before she clears her throat. “Oh, yes. Greer. Hi. It’s been a long time.”
