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“And I know that I cut out on you at the end of things with us. I know I really stopped being there,” he said. “But I had all this stuff going on, and I couldn’t manage to talk to you. It was hard sometimes with you. I knew that you still wanted me there, but there was a disconnect between what you were feeling and what you showed you were feeling.”
I nodded because I did know. I did know that. I felt myself disconnect when I got scared. I felt myself, in the most important ways, and at the very worst times, disappear. Wasn’t that what my whole life was starting to become in a way? A great disappearing act? Even from myself?
“Matt,” I said. “I want to say something about that day in the motel room. I am sorry for how I left. I shouldn’t have done it like that, obviously. I guess that’s very obvious. But the thing was, I knew if I didn’t do it right then, literally, I wouldn’t be able to ever. I loved you so much still, and I could feel it. I could feel that you had stopped.”
He nodded. “I get that.”
“Really?”
“No.”
He smiled when he said it, but it was an angry smile. Then he shook his head, and looked down. He was staring at the branches on the water’s edge. I knew he wanted to pick one up so he could have something to do with his hands. It was that or he’d take another cigarette. I bent down and handed him a branch.
“What’s that?” he said. “A peace offering?”
I smiled. “If you’ll take it. And if you’ll tell me the truth.” I cleared my throat, bracing myself against it—what I was about to ask. What I hadn’t, just yet, given myself permission to ask. “Who was she?”
“Who was who?” he asked.
I took a deep breath. I had been too scared to ask then, too scared to even let myself know there was something to ask. But with everything that had been happening over the last couple of days, I didn’t feel so scared anymore.
“The woman you were involved with,” I said. “At the end of us, I mean. Was it Nathaniel’s mom?”
He didn’t say anything at first, but I could see in his eyes that he was thinking of what to say. I could see him trying to decide how to be most fair. He turned and looked out at the water, away from me, which was a dead giveaway that he didn’t have any idea.
I tried to
help. “It was someone else?” I said for him. “Besides her? Besides Lily, I mean?”
“It was someone else.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I didn’t think you knew about her,” he said. “Even when you left like that, I didn’t think you did.”
“I didn’t,” I said. Because even if in the back of mind it had been a possibility, I hadn’t seen it—hadn’t let myself see it—until right now, this very weekend, where all around me people were missing signals they weren’t ready for yet themselves.
He turned back to me. “I don’t know what to say to you about it now,” he said. “Without sounding like a self-help book.”
I smiled. “She wasn’t the cause of things between us, she was the result? I know all that.”
“Do you?”
I nodded. Because I did. Because someone else seemed to be the least of it, all this time later, if he still wanted to be sitting here with me. If he had been with someone or had almost been with someone—or I had left him, or almost left him—wasn’t the more important point that we came back to each other now? Wasn’t that at least as important as the rest?
“I don’t know how to tell you I want to try again. . . .”
“Slowly would be nice,” I said.
He smiled at me. “I still have the engagement ring, you know,” he said. “That you left behind. I’ve kept it at my parents’ this whole time.”
I’d always been superstitious about engagement rings in general, and that didn’t change when Matt gave me one. I couldn’t shake the feeling that instead of being a token of affection, engagement rings had turned into a twisted type of bragging rights, which was something I feared people were punished for. I knew how much I loved him, and hadn’t been worried—at the time—how he felt about me. I didn’t think we needed a ring to prove anything.
“I just figured you’d sell it back,” I said. “You knew I didn’t really want it in the first place.”
He threw the branch far out into the waterfall—the branch I had given him. It hit with a crisp, crisp. Then it disappeared.
“I know,” he said. “That’s why I kept it.”
