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Somehow they’d ended up here, screaming at each other on opposite sides of their bed.
“I’m not the one running away from my family and my future!” Hannah spat. She was so angry she was shaking, and terrified. How had he done all of this planning and applying for jobs, without even asking her?
Had he been so miserable here, with her, that he couldn’t even talk to her about it?
“I’m not running away!” he shouted. “I was fucking born here. I’ve lived in these goddamned walls all my life. I’m finding a future. I’m MAKING a future. You’re locking yourself up in here like it’s fuckingGrey Gardens. I will die here. I will wither away and become nothing. I. Can’t. Have. A. Future. Here.”
“It’s almost Rosh Hashanah! You want me to leave right before the holidays?” She was incredulous.
“And then it will be Yom Kippur, then Sukkot, and then it will be Hanukkah and Tu B’Shuvat. It will always be almost another holiday, and we’ll waste our lives here!”
“I’mnotwasting my life. You knew what I wanted, what my plans were. Why did you marry me knowing you were going to leave?” He had to know she couldn’t leave Carrigan’s right now. She knew he’d always wanted to live somewhere else, see the world, but he’d asked her to marry him.
She’d thought that meant they were settling down.Here.
“I thought you would go with me! Hannah, it’s been us all our lives. We’ve always had each other’s backs, us against the world. I thoughtyouknew me well enough to know I could never stay here,” he shot back.
How dare he accuse her of not knowing him? It was like he’d never even met her!
“We’ll be a team. We can dream up where we’ll go, research together. I can learn from chefs and work in kitchens all over the world. I’ll be able to learn things I could never learn here, or anywhere in the States.” He was getting more and more excited as he talked, his anger fading.
“What do you envision I will be doing while you’re cooking in all these kitchens?” Hannah asked him, stunned. How could he possibly be this selfish?
“Play tourist, see the world, I don’t know!”
He had his hands shoved in his pockets, his tell that he knew he was wrong and didn’t want to admit it. Hehadn’tactually thought about what she would be doing when he was imagining all of this. He kept saying he loved her more than anything, but all he loved was the idea of them.
All he could envision was himself.
“Ihatetravel, Blue. I’ve already seen the world, and I’m done. I’m a hotel manager. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do, it’s what I got a degree in, it’s what I’ve always worked toward. I can’t be a hotel manager on a ship. You don’t even see me. How can you ask me to travel?”
“Of course I see you. You’re the only thing I see!”
She threw a pillow at him. “You see yourself at the center of an epic love story. It wouldn’t matter if it were me next to you, or a cardboard cutout, as long as you got to be Fated for Something Special.”
“That’s bullshit.” He caught the pillow and threw it back at her. “I know you. I know you hate to travelwith your parents. Where you had no agency and no consistency. Where you were getting uprooted every time you got comfortable, never choosing where you wanted to go, never free to see whatever interested you. This would be different. It would beus,” he pleaded.
“I thought you knew,” she cried. “I thought you knew me well enough to knowthisis my dream.” Damn him. He’d never cared about her dreams, only his own. “I’ve never wanted anything but being with you and taking over Carrigan’s.”
“Well, it seems you want one of those things more than the other,” he said bitterly, crossing his arms. “I should have known you would always choose Cass. I should have known you would never choose a whole life when you could be safe in your little princess tower in this molding hellhole where you get to make all the plans and everything always goes exactly the way you say it will.”
In that moment, she hated him.
“Get out, Blue. Get out of here, and don’t come back.” She flung open the door to their room and gestured out into the hall. “You don’t deserve Carrigan’s. You don’t deserve me, or Cass, or the future we planned. Get out and go ‘find yourself’ or ‘be free’ or whatever the fuck you think you need.”
“You’re the one who sees our love as a trap!” he yelled, slamming the door she’d opened into the wall and wheeling on her. “I have never felt caged by us.”
“Just by everything I love and everything that matters to me,” she accused.
“I have a right to have my own feelings about the place I was born, Hannah! You don’t get to own how people feel about Carrigan’s.”
How fucking dare he.
“Get. Out. You’re done here. We’re done.” She turned away so she wouldn’t have to look at his face while she said it.
She heard him grab his jacket off the coat rack by the door. “We can’t be done, Nan. We’ll never be done.”
“Don’t call me,” she choked out. “Don’t write. I never, ever want to see you again.”
