Page 80 of The Husband I Left

He walks to the door, and I have a sudden, irrational fear that if he leaves now, this fragile thing between us will vanish. But before I can say anything, he stops and turns back.

“I never fully answered your question from the other night,” he says. “The one about why I’m doing all this.”

I set my fork down. “Okay.”

He takes a breath. “I’m doing this because I can’t stop thinking about her. The waitress. The one who trusted me with her heart, and I crushed it.”

I don’t say anything. I can’t say anything.

“I couldn’t stop thinking about her after she left,” he continues, clearly choosing each word with care. “And I can’t stop now. I had a treasure, Genny, and I lost it because I was a bastard. A selfish, shortsighted bastard.”

He takes a step toward me, then stops, as if remembering some invisible line between us.

“Now I’m never going to stop trying to become the man I should have been. The man who might be worthy of that waitress and her heart.” He meets my eyes directly. “Whether she ever gives me another chance or not.”

I don’t know what to say to that. My throat feels tight, and my eyes are burning. Every response I can think of feels either too small or too much. Thank you feels inadequate. I forgive you feels premature. I’m still angry feels true but incomplete. So I don’t say anything.

Oliver himself doesn’t seem to expect an answer. He just reaches for the handle and opens the door. “If you ever want to wind down with a cup of hot chocolate and a talk,” he says, not looking at me, “my door is always open.”

He turns and leaves, closing the door softly behind him.

Chapter 29

Oliver

Joe — as Mr. Hill now insists I call him — slides his bishop across the board and takes my knight without the slightest bit of hesitation. He sets the captured piece down beside his coffee cup with the rest of my fallen army and settles back in his chair, giving me a smug smile.

“You walked right into that,” he says.

“I know.”

“You knew three moves ago and did it, anyway.”

“I know, Joe.”

He grunts and picks up his coffee. The chessboard between us is older than I am. The black squares have gone gray at the corners from decades of fingers, and the white queen has a chip in her crown from the time, Joe tells me, that his nephew threw her at the radiator in 1987. I learned the moves as a boy, but I never actually learned to play. Joe is fixing that, one slaughter at a time. I move a pawn. It’s not a good move. I can’t seem to make myself concentrate on chess tonight.

Joe doesn’t take his turn. He just looks at me over the rim of his coffee cup.

“You’re quiet tonight, kid.”

“I’m concentrating.”

“On what? Because it sure as hell isn’t chess.” He sets the cup down. “You’ve been somewhere else since you walked in. Didn’t even complain about my pork chops being dry.”

“They weren’t dry.”

“They were a little dry. Janice would’ve said something, God love her.” He folds his arms over his cardigan and waits.

I clear my throat and look down at the board. I’m not sure why I’m so reluctant. He already knows everything . I didn’t tell him it all at once. But at some point, in between the cooking lessons and the meals together and the chess games and the talks, I told him what I’d done. The reason I married Genny. The reason I lost her. Knowing how much he loved his wife, I half expected him to throw me out and tell me not to come back when I’d told him the worst of it. But he just gave me a look and then made me practice dicing onions until my knife work stopped offending him.

“Genny came to my door last week,” I explain. “Middle of the night. She’d been out with friends, had a few drinks, and she…” I turn my captured knight over in my fingers. “She had things to say. About our marriage. About me.”

“I imagine they weren’t good things.”

“No, they weren’t. But they were things I deserved to hear.” I set the knight down. “She cried Joe. She cried in my arms and told me I’d been, in her own words, really mean. I can’t stop thinking about it. That she spent months thinking she was doing something wrong while I was off congratulating myself on finally making Victoria pay for something that didn’t even matter anymore.”

Joe says nothing. From the living room comes the sound of the audience of the game show that’s on his TV applauding.