I said, “I didn’t buy it.”
She said, “Maddox bought it. You asked him to. That is the same thing.”
I said, “It is not the same thing. Maddox asked me why I was stopping sleeping. Maddox asked me what was wrong. I told him that a woman was going to lose her diner. And he said let me fix it. And I said thank you.”
She said, “And you lied to me.”
I said, “I did not lie to you. I just did not tell you a truth that was not mine to tell.”
She said, “And you knew. For two weeks. You let me sleep next to you. You held me. You let me think I was going to lose everything, and you held me anyway.”
I said, “I was waiting for the right moment.”
She said, “There is no right moment. You cannot go back to a moment and suddenly tell someone that you have been keeping a secret. The secret is already there. The secret is already between us. You just keep adding lies on top of it, telling yourself that eventually it will be the right time, and it is never the right time, it is only the time when I find out.”
I did not say anything.
There was nothing to say. The woman was correct. I had been lying by omission, which was still lying, which was still a failure, which was still the thing that was going to end them if I could not find a way to explain it.
She said, “Why did you do it.”
I said, “Because I could not stand watching you disappear.”
She said, “That is not an answer. That is an excuse.”
I said, “You are correct. I did it because Maddox asked if I knew. I said I did. He asked what it would cost. I said too much. He said he would pay it. I said I would owe him a debt that I would never be able to repay. He said I was already paying it. He said I was paying it every time I chose you over sleep, every time I bought you hardware that you did not ask for, every time I looked at you like you were the reason the sun came up in the morning.”
She closed her eyes.
I said, “Maddox said if you knew, you would think it was pity. He said you would think I was saving you because I felt sorry for you. And I could not stand the idea of you thinking that my love was pity. So I told him not to tell you. And I told myself not to tell you. And I waited for the right moment that was never going to come.”
She said, “Go home, Knox.”
I said, “Maple?—”
She said, “Go home.”
She closed the door.
I heard the deadbolt turn.
I stood on the porch for four minutes and fifty-three seconds. I counted. I stood in the February cold and I understood that I had ruined the thing I had been trying to protect, had made myself into the villain of a story where I was supposed to be the hero, had proven exactly what I had been afraid of proving—that I was not good enough to hold something this fragile.
I went back to my truck.
I drove to the apartment.
I sat on the couch in the dark and I did not turn on the lights. The apartment was cold. The heater was running but the cold was the kind that came from inside, the kind that no amount of propane was going to fix. I looked at Caleb’s photograph on the nightstand. I looked at the wooden box that held my brother’s medals and my brother’s rosary and my brother’s absence. I thought about the fact that I had been carrying my brother’s death for thirteen years and I had added Maple’s potential loss to the weight and I had decided that the only way to manage that weight was to lie to the woman I loved about how much I was carrying.
The apartment was fifty feet from her house.
She was sleeping in her grandmother’s bedroom while I sat on a thrift-store couch in the dark, understanding that I had made a choice and the choice had consequences and the consequences were that she was going to wake up in the morning and the first thought was not going to be that she loved me, it was going to be that I had betrayed her.
I thought about the 60-day grace period that Maddox had given her. I thought about the fact that they were now on Day 28, which meant she had thirty-two days left, and I did not know if that was thirty-two days that they were going to spend together or thirty-two days that she was going to spend alone, understanding that the man she had let into her life was not the man she thought I was.
I picked up my phone.
I called Maddox.
