Page 47 of Unbreakable
Her jaw feathered. “I might be depressed, but you can’t deny your role in all this. And if you knew I was depressed, why didn’t you say anything? Why did you steamroll me and pretend everything was fine? Do you even see me?”
I spread my thumb and forefinger across my brows. “Jeannie, baby, I see you. You work so hard with the kids and you always take such good care of me.” I crossed to stand next to her barstool, almost tripping over her bag. I reached for her wrists. “Jeannie, you are so loved.”
She set her jaw and grabbed her keys, putting her finger through the keyring and bunching the keys in her fist. Her eyes rose to mine slowly. “Then maybe you should show it.”
“Baby, I do. I know what I’ve said to you lately has been bad, but I’ve been trying to make it up to you,” I argued. “I ate your pussy the other day. Because I wanted to.” I searched through my memories to find more examples showing I cared. “On Halloween, I did the Ghost Daddy thing.”
Her brows knit. “Sex doesn’t fix everything, Dylan. You can’t just treat me like an afterthought and yell at me for accidents, then expect a few encounters fix patterns of behavior.”
“Patterns? What patterns?”
She scoffed, crossing her arms. “How are you any different from your mom? When you yelled at me the other day, you said I was whiny. Or sorry, I believe it wasstop fucking whining.”
I rubbed the heel of my hand into my eye socket. “I never should have said that, Jeanine?—”
“You believed it to be true, though. Doesn’t really matter if you said it, does it? You think I’m just whining about life not being good right now. I’m doing my fucking best, Dylan, and it’s not good enough for you.”
“Jeanine—”
She held up a hand, rolling on, “You mentioned things were bad for you on the team, something you’d truly never brought up until that moment. When I showed interest in your problem, you flipped it back on me, saying I only whine about myself.”
“I fucked up,” I pleaded.
She flicked a look at her watch. “Dylan, I should get going to the airport. My flight leaves in three hours.”
My eyes flooded, my lungs searching for air. Jeanine was actually going to leave me this time. “No. No. Jeannie. Please don’t go. You . . . you can’t.”
“Why not? You wouldn’t have anyone to take care of every little thing?” She stifled a cry. “You wouldn’t have anyone to cook your mother Thanksgiving dinner, and host her, and entertain her, and keep my smile on when I’d really rather be with my family or with our friends? But no, I have to be here to put on the perfect daughter-in-law show for my husband’s family,” she said it with shocking vitriol, “when he doesn’t even think of me as anything but the ass he taps and folds his laundry and makes his snacks. When he sees me struggling and ignores it until it goes away. Good news, I’m going away. My feelings won’t be inconvenient for you anymore.”
My mouth dropped open, heartbroken. “Jeannie, that’s not how I feel at all. Do you even want to hear my side?”
“I just can’t do it, Dylan,” her voice wobbled, tears starting to drip down her cheeks. “I can’t keep putting on the show and doing everything when I wish you’d just fucking see me for once.Carrying on like I don’t wish you’d acknowledge how this move has been the worst thing that’s ever happened to us.”
“J, I know it’s been hard?—”
“Wow. Now you admit it,” she threw out a hand. “Too little too late.”
I grasped for another reason for her to stay and give me a chance to make it right. “The kids’ Christmas stuff at school, Jeannie. You’re just going to let them down?”
Rage bloomed in her eyes, her voice lowering to a snarl. “You don’t get to do that. I am the one who doeseverything. Every skinned knee. Every bully problem. Every parent-teacher conference. Every practice. With no breaks. No days off.”
“J, my mom’s coming to help. You’ll get time to yourself.”
“You know how I feel about that, Dylan,” she snapped. “And if you don’t, then things are a lot worse than I thought.”
I put my hands on her shoulders. “J, look at me.”
Her upper lip curled, nostrils flaring. “You’ve lost the right to tell me what to do. I’m not going to be your perfect little pristine hockey wife, the receptacle for your babies, the one who vacuums and dresses everyone and runs around just doing the things to put on this life you built foryou. You tried to flip it back on me, Dylan, but you have to know that you started this fire, and only you can put it out.”
My breath caught. I lowered to my knees, putting my hands on top of her thighs where she sat back on the stool. “Jeannie. J. I’ll do anything. I-I don’t think you understand. I never wanted this. I’ll do whatever you want. Whatever. You’re everything, Jeanine. Just please, please don’t go.”
“No,” she said, turning her chin up and raising her eyebrows. “Hockey is everything. You couldn’t just retire like any sensible person would have so we could stay in L.A.”
“Jeannie, you agreed that was the best choice!”
“The best choiceifyou had to keep playing hockey! You chose what was best for you, not what was best for our family.”
“The kids are fine,” I said. “You mean I just didn’t do what you wanted. You wanted to stay in L.A. because it’s what you liked.”
