Page 143 of Fault Lines
“I’m sorry,” he said finally, and the way he said it made it clear that this was about more than the mess, more than thedrinking, more than any of the thousands of things that had gone so suddenly wrong between us.
I nodded. “Me too.”
We both stood there, lost for words, each waiting for the other to say something that would make it okay. Eventually, I crossed the space between us and wrapped my arms around him, holding on tight even as his shoulders shook, just a little.
We didn’t talk about what had happened, or why. Not that day, or any day after. We just lived, in the soft, gray space that comes after all the storms have passed and you’re left with nothing but each other and the quiet. Sometimes that was enough.
Sometimes, it was everything.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Cam
I could never get used to the way the front door echoed through the empty house. There was a hollowness to it, a metallic note that bounced down the hallway and off the stairs, as if the walls were reminding me for the thousandth time that I was the only thing left in them. I let the door swing closed behind me, didn't bother to lock it. Nobody was coming for me. Not anymore.
I stepped into the foyer, the leather soles of my shoes slapping the hardwood in a rhythm that sounded desperate. The last time I'd come home to someone, there was laughter drifting down the stairs—Livi, hands covered in flour, calling me a monster for bringing work calls into the kitchen. I tried to remember what we'd been making that night. Bread, maybe. Cookies for her book club. I couldn't recall, but I could still hear the sweetness in her voice, a deliberate lightness she put on for my benefit. As if I wouldn't notice the tears in her eyes when she thought I wasn't looking.
I dropped my keys in the bowl by the door. The bowl was hers—handmade, lopsided, a glaze of navy blue that chipped off in little flakes every time it hit something else. I'd offered to buy a new one once, a sleeker, modern thing to match the entryway. She'd looked at me like I'd suggested murdering a pet, so the ugly bowl stayed.
Now, it was the only thing in the entry that wasn't from a showroom catalog.
I went through the motions: jacket on the hook, shoes off, sleeves rolled up. In the kitchen, I stared at the cold marble countertop and waited for the faintest sign of her—her lemon dish soap, a streak of lipstick on a mug, even a stray hair tangled on the faucet. Nothing. The cleaning crew had come last week, after the lawyer's visit. They did a thorough job, and I hated them for it.
I opened the fridge. Inside, nothing but three bottles of Pellegrino, a half jar of mustard, and a glass container of leftover chili that I'd made the night before, following one of Livi's handwritten recipes. She had this thing about recipe cards, how they needed to be bent and smeared and annotated to count as real. In her handwriting, every letter curled like a ribbon. I ran my thumb over the recipe on the magnet board, wishing for the muscle memory of her hands, how she used to taste everything with a finger, never a spoon, like she was secretly daring salmonella to do its worst.
The chili was congealed, the top layer waxy and pale. I spooned it into a bowl anyway and microwaved it, staring at the blue progress bar and ignoring the pale ghost of my reflection in the microwave door. When it dinged, the smell hit me, and I nearly cried. I forced the food down, a punishment I felt I deserved.
I went to the living room and sat on the edge of the couch. There were deep grooves in the cushions from where we'd watched whole seasons of bad reality shows, or just sat together, silent, with her feet tucked under my thigh. The TV remote still had the little sticker she'd put on it: a cartoon cat, faded to near-invisibility. I almost pressed Power, but the thought of the empty noise was worse than the silence, so I set it down and stared at my hands.
They didn't look like the hands of a destroyer. I flexed them, half-expecting blood to bead up from my knuckles, or for the tips of my fingers to crumble off like burnt toast. But they were just hands—clean, unremarkable, the nails trimmed and boring. Livi always liked to say that hands told the story of a man. She was wrong. Hands could lie, and so could everything else.
I thought about calling her. The urge hit at weird moments, like when I saw a recipe on the morning show she used to watch, or when a new book dropped in the top ten. I kept her number in my favorites. I told myself it was so I wouldn't drunk-dial her by accident, but really it was so I could see her name every time I scrolled past. Like a wound I kept reopening, just to make sure it hadn't healed behind my back.
I looked at the stack of papers on the kitchen counter—legal documents, a list of division of assets, a neat sheet of bullet points outlining the terms of our dissolution. It was all so sterile. There wasn't a single mention of pain, or regret, or the color of the sky on the day you decided to ruin the best thing you ever had.
I got up and wandered upstairs. The master bedroom was an icebox, the blackout curtains still drawn from the morning. Livi had insisted on them, said she couldn't sleep with any hint of light in the room. She said it was a holdover from her childhood, when she used to pretend the sun was a beast she could tame just by closing her eyes. I hadn't understood it at the time, but now I envied her power to shape reality with something as small as a curtain.
I lay down on the bed, fully clothed, and stared at the ceiling. There were two tiny cracks above the headboard, a branching line that looked like a child's drawing of a river. Livi used to trace them with her fingertip, inventing stories about the tiny people who lived in the cracks and what they did to pass the time. I wanted to believe she was happy, at least some of the time.
But I knew better. I always had.
I rolled over and buried my face in her pillow. I pressed down hard, hoping to wring out the last drops of her, but it was gone—the shampoo, the perfume, the secret scent that lived in the hollow behind her ear. The only thing left was the faint tang of clean cotton and the absence of anything else. I wanted to scream. Instead, I just breathed, long and shallow, until the pressure behind my eyes eased.
If I could do it all over, I'd make her keep the house. Let her keep the ugly bowl, and the lopsided couch, and the cracks in the ceiling. I'd keep nothing but the memory of the way she used to laugh, open-mouthed and unashamed, before I ruined her. But this was the price of wanting too much: you got to keep everything, except the only thing that mattered.
I stayed on the bed for hours, fighting sleep, fighting the urge to go downstairs and start the whole miserable routine over again. When I finally drifted off, I dreamed of her—always her—standing on the other side of the kitchen, bathed in impossible light, reaching for me with hands that could never lie.
When I woke, I was alone.
Still alone.
Always alone.
∞∞∞
There was a clock in the therapist’s waiting room that ticked with the enthusiasm of a dying metronome. I stared at it every week, watching the minute hand limp forward like it was being paid by the hour. I was always early. Maybe because I craved the pretense of control, or maybe because I didn’t trust myself not to bail if I cut it too close. That afternoon I sat in the same fake-leather chair, hands folded in my lap, and listened to the clock’s faint, persistent suicide.
She opened her door at exactly the scheduled time. “Cameron,” she said, giving me the barest of smiles. Dr. Stiles was good at her job. She didn’t offer bullshit affirmations or attempt to collapse the space between us with empathy I didn’t want. But she was gentle, in a way that made me hate her just a little. She always wore navy pantsuits and her hair in a bun so severe it looked like she was prepping for a courtroom cross-examination. She never took notes, which made everything she said in session feel both more and less official.
