Page 49
His laugh was cold. “I let you decide, didn’t I? I asked if you wanted me to restore your phone, and you said, ‘maybe later,’ then never brought it up again. That was your decision.”
“You offered to restore most of it. Did you forget that part? So I’m not really sure how much that gesture was worth.”
“If I’d told you from the beginning that we were trying to get pregnant, would you have stayed with me? When you saw me as someone you couldn’t stand and thought you belonged with Simon? After I ruined any chance of earning your trust by admitting what I did to your phone? And then you literally told me I couldn’t convince you to be my wife again, so what was I supposed to do?”
“What? When did I say that?”
“When I tried making pizza. You couldn’t get away from me fast enough.” His lip curled ever so slightly at the memory.
“You mean my second day home from the hospital? I was so overwhelmed! I needed way more time than that to adjust.”
“How was I supposed to bring it up later, then? After we’d finally made progress but so much time had passed? It would have turned into this.” He motioned between them. “But it turned into this anyway,” he admitted, hanging his head, a hand pressing against his temple.
His voice was barely a whisper when he spoke again. “How long until you left? Or until you told me to go?”
Molly didn’t know how to respond. They were fair questions, and she didn’t have all the answers. But hadn’t she deserved the truth? Unequivocally, yes. And she meant to tell him that, she did. But he was breathing heavily, still holding on to that birdbath for what looked like dear life.
“You would have left,” he said in a broken tone she’d never heard before.
“You don’t know that! I don’t even know that.”
“The risk was enough.” His gaze searched her, a sneer and something else pinning her under his evaluation. “I was being selfish, I admit it. It was the one concession I made for myself. Everything else I did for you.”
She scoffed. “Is that difficult for you, Bishop? Doing something for someone other than yourself?”
“Back to Bishop, and you’re being intentionally nasty? Good to see there’s still some fight in you,” he shot back.
“Oh, you can fuck right off.”
He staggered, a single step, nearly swallowed by a wall of freshly blooming honeysuckle. His face was ghostly pale again, reminding her of his spectral form at the hospital. “How much do you mean that? Do you want me to leave?”
“No, that’s not—”
“Because I would,” he said, not quite looking at her. “If you really wanted me to, needed me to, I would. Because it’s not difficult, doing anything for you.”
“Then I want my phone restored. All of it.” She let out a shaky breath, tension rattling her rib cage. “And you know what? I want that spare room in my own goddamn apartment unlocked. Get all that relationship paraphernalia back out in the open. I’m not afraid of some vacation photos and novelty artwork or whatever other hallmarks of our life are stashed in there. I don’t want to hide from my own history anymore.”
“Mols, I—please, I need you to trust me.”
“No,” she insisted. “No pet names, no scared puppy dog eyes. No excuses. Either it is or it isn’t difficult to do this for me.”
He dragged a hand through his hair again, eyes wide and wild as his focus flitted from flower to flower, practically begging the garden to grant him strength. Some of Molly’s fight drained out of her. It was like beating a wounded creature, like he expected her to make him do all the things he so thoroughly believed would harm her.
“Why didn’t you have me restore it in the beginning?” he finally asked.
“I—” she started, not expecting that question. “You looked . . . so scared.” And she’d decided to trust that, despite what felt like many logical reasons to the contrary.
He nodded. “And how do I look now?”
Acknowledging it almost felt like having the wind knocked out of her. “Petrified.”
“I’ll restore your phone. Everything on it, I promise. But the room, the stuff in it. I—Molly, I miss you. I miss my wife, my best friend, my—” He broke off, swallowing hard. “I can’t risk scaring you away—or hurting you more. I haven’t forgotten what your doctors said about overwhelming you. I need a little more time. Because truly, genuinely, I’m just trying to keep you safe. I don’t know how to convince you to trust that.” He looked utterly lost, ragged.
“Bishop—” His eyes squeezed shut when she said his name, that name. “Aster,” she tried again, softer. The thought of being so terribly missed while she was standing right there nearly cracked Molly in two. “Fine. Restore my phone. We’ll talk about the room later.”
His eyes snapped back open and, before Molly could wrangle whatever else she might have said, he was in front of her, even closer than they’d been that morning. Close enough that she could count the tiny smile lines at the corners of his eyes. She could make out the tinge of pinkness on his skin from their day spent outside. She could see the carefully kept companion that was his fear, held just out of reach behind the furrow of his brow and the angle of his shoulders. His smell, spice and citrus—now with a hint of honeysuckle—still so distinct even at the end of a long day, blanketed her.
He lifted a hand, not quite touching the side of her face, the only hint of contact coming from the way he twisted her braid around his finger.
