Page 168 of Fault Lines
I shrugged. “I’m still considering it.”
He smiled, the old Cam smile that made you feel like you were the punchline and the hero all at once. “I hope you don’t.”
We looped back to the house, breathing hard, sweat cooling on our necks. He held the front door for me, like it was our first date all over again. Inside, he made us grilled cheese and tomatosoup, the way he used to in the beginning, before everything got so complicated.
“You want to watch something?” he asked after dinner, already queuing up the TV.
“Not the news,” I said. “Or anything with lawyers.”
He laughed. “Deal. How about that terrible dating show you hate?”
I considered it. “Only if we can mock them mercilessly.”
“Is there any other way?”
We settled on the couch, blanket over both our laps. At some point, Cam reached for my hand, and I let him. It was that simple, and that impossible.
The next few days passed in the same strange, suspended rhythm. Cam did his work, I read or napped or did the crossword, and we met in the kitchen for coffee or snacks or the next installment of our new favorite show (“How are these people real?”). There was a comfort in it, a return to the before-times. Only now, the stakes were lower, the fighting spent, both of us too tired to build new walls.
One night, just before bed, Cam lingered in the hallway like he was waiting for permission to knock. I silently wondered if he was about to ask for his bedroom back. The guest room was nice, but not as convenient without its own bathroom.
“Livi?” he said, voice softer than the light spilling in from the kitchen.
“Yeah?”
He leaned against the doorframe; arms crossed over his chest. “Can I ask you something, and you promise not to make it weird?”
I sat up, pulling the comforter to my chin like armor. “That’s a big promise.”
He smiled, then let it fade. “Did you ever send in your divorce papers?”
I blinked. “I… what?”
He shrugged, as if embarrassed to ask. “It’s just, my lawyer keeps emailing me for the final version. I told him you probably had other things on your mind, but—” he trailed off, leaving the rest unsaid.
I stared at the wall, trying to remember. The memory flickered, a stuttered reel of hospital rooms and Nate’s apartment. “I think I left them at Nate’s place,” I admitted. “In a drawer, or maybe under the bed. I never got around to mailing them.”
Cam nodded, a little too quickly. “No worries. I can get you another set. If you want. Or I can come with you, if you want to dig through the wreckage for the originals since Nate’s at a halfway house.”
I shook my head. “No rush.”
He looked at me, really looked, and I knew he’d been waiting to hear me say that. “Okay,” he said. “No rush.”
He lingered a second longer, then crossed the room and knelt by the bed. His hand brushed my cheek, a feather-light touch that could have been accidental if not for the way he lingered.
“Goodnight, Livi,” he whispered.
I closed my eyes and let him go, letting the comforter swallow me whole.
That night, I dreamed of nothing. When I woke, the sun was already up, Cam’s side of the bed empty, the whole house filled with the smell of coffee and possibility.
For the first time in months, I wasn’t afraid of what came next.
∞∞∞
I was pouring my second cup of coffee when my phone rang—a number I didn’t recognize, the prefix local but the rest a cipher. I nearly let it go to voicemail, but something in me—the same part that rubbernecks at car crashes and re-reads old texts—picked up, pressing the screen with a jittery thumb.
“Hello?”
