Page 155 of Never Alone
He had picked the booth before he had walked in. Back to the wall. Eyes on the room. Me where he could see me.
He led me to the booth.
He ordered for us. The wine I used to drink. An appetizer I had liked at the steakhouse we had gone to the night he proposed. The server wrote it all down without looking at me.
He remembered the order. He remembered all of it. He had remembered every preference of mine for ten years and used each one to build the room I had lived inside.
When she was gone, he reached across the table.
He took my hand.
I let him take it.
His hand was warm. I had spent ten years feeling that hand on the back of my neck, on my elbow at parties, on my thigh in cars, and I knew the temperature of it the way an animal knew the temperature of a thing it had been kept by.
"I'm so glad you called," he said.
His thumb moved across the back of my hand. Once. The small private gesture he had used to claim me at parties for ten years.
I made my mouth do what mouths did.
"I am, too."
"I have been worried about you."
"I know." I meant it. He had been worried about me. He had been worried about me for ten years. The worry had been the apparatus.
"I've always been worried about you, Natalie. That hasn't changed. None of it has changed."
He meant it as comfort. He didn't know he was reciting his own indictment.
"I haven't been okay since I left."
"I know you haven't."
He smiled when he said it. The smile of a man who had been waiting eight months for a truth he had always known to find its way back.
"I was—I was scared. I made decisions that—I should have called you. I should have come back. I tried to do it alone, and I?—"
"Sweetheart. Stop."
He squeezed my hand.
The squeeze was a thing his hand did before his mouth had finished speaking. The body acting on the right it believed it had.
"You don't have to explain. I know you. I know how you get when you're scared."
"Yeah."
The wire was warm against my sternum. It lifted and settled with each breath.
"You make the wrong choices. You always have. That's not a criticism. It's just—that's why I always kept such close watch. I had to. You didn't have the judgment to keep yourself safe."
He had said one of them. The first sentence on Miranda's list. He had said it within four minutes of sitting down. Wilson was hearing it in a van across the street. Cole was hearing it in the same van. Cole was hearing my husband tell me, in measured lawyer cadence, that he had always kept close watch.
"I had to know where you were, Natalie. Always. That wasn't me being controlling. That was me being your husband. That was me taking care of you. The way you should have been taken care of."
"I know."
