“Why can’t you give that to me?”
“Because I don’t want to break you.”
“I’m not going to break.”
“Yes, you are,” he snaps, and the force of it startles both of us. “You don’t understand—”
“Then make me understand!”
My own voice rises to meet his, desperation breaking through every last bit of restraint I had left.
“Because I don’t know how to get through to you anymore, Elijah.”
The words ring in the room between us. His chest is rising too fast now. Mine is too.
He looks wrecked.
Not angry.
Not cold.
Wrecked.
And somehow that hurts even more.
“Please,” he says, and it is the first time I have heard that note in his voice, that bare, cracking edge of emotion he has been fighting so hard to hold down. “Please don’t push me with this. I can’t—”
He stops, swallows, tries again.
“I can’t lose you again. You died. You were gone. And the idea of that happening again…” His face tightens. “It will break me.”
The room goes very still. And there it is. The truth. Not just fear of hurting me. Fear of loving me the way he always has and losing me after giving himself back to it.
“I’m not going anywhere,” I whisper.
My own throat burns now.
“But I feel like I’m losing you.”
His eyes shut for a second, like the words physically hit him.
“There’s this chasm between us,” I say, and now the tears are there, hot and humiliating and impossible to stop, because it is all of it now, all at once, the ring on my finger and the way heput it there, the thumb over it, the moment that died, the weeks of distance, the way he has stood near me without letting himself be mine. “And I can’t live in it. I can’t. You say you don’t want to break me, but this is breaking me.”
He looks at me like he wants to move.
Like he wants to put his hands on me so badly it is physically costing him not to.
But he still doesn’t. And I understand, all at once, with a kind of terrible clarity, that he is not going to come to me.
Not unless I drag him there. So I stop crying, force myself to take a deep breath. Not because it stops hurting.
Because I make a decision. I step closer. Then lower myself slowly to my knees in front of him.
The sound he makes is quiet. Broken.
“What are you doing?” His voice is barely a whisper.
I look up at him from the floor, at the man I married, at the man who once told me exactly what this meant.
