Page 2 of Her Ex-Husband's Brother

At least that’s what I always thought.

Except…

Except I’ve seen these particular tears before.

Five years ago, in a different living room, I said I needed to leave him. I had the same everything’s-closing-in-on-me feeling I’ve been having lately, like I just needed to run and never stop running.

But he teared up then, too, and I thought:he never cries. Look what you’ve done to him. What kind of woman leaves a man who loves her this much?

So I stayed.

And four years before that, when I was eighteen and had worked up the nerve to tell him I wasn’t sure about the wedding—we were so young, weren’t we?—the tears came then too, soft and devastating.

He told me I was being emotional, and of course we were right for each other, and I thought:he never cries. You must mean everything to him.

So I married him.

I look at the tears in his eyes now, and the thing in me that always immediately softened at the sight of them just...

I wish I could say it doesn’t soften me this time.

But I’m still the sucker I always was, and my chest caves in at the thought of hurting him.

Still, even a sucker can recognize patterns.

If I keep making the same choices, are we going to keep going around the same merry-go-round for another five years? Ten years?

Am I going to be looking down the barrel of my 20th anniversary, knowing something’s not right deep in my bones, but staying anyway? Because his tears every time I say I want to leave hold me where the script of some child’s nursery rhyme, the church, and societal expectations tell me I’m supposed to be?

Meanwhile, I’m just going through the motions, a side character in somebody else’s story.

So I stay where I am, palms against my temples, migraine pounding, and I wait.

“Lennon.” His voice is broken and careful. “You’re my best friend. You’re my person. Think about everything we’ve built.”

“I have,” I say. “I’ve been thinking about it for years.”

“Then why—” He moves toward me, and I pull back slightly, just a few inches, and he stops. “If something’s wrong, we fix it. We could try for a baby again. I know the house has felt empty lately?—”

“I don’t want a baby.” The words come out sharp, and he flinches. I feel the familiar flood of guilt and the even more familiar, exhausted anger underneath it— “I’m sorry. I don’t want to hurt you. I know this is— I know this is coming out of nowhere for you.”

“Then don’t do it,” he says simply. “Don’t do this.”

“Jake.”

“Sleep on it. Call Brianna. We could call my mom?—”

“I’m not calling your mother about this.”

“Why do you always have to be so—” He stops himself. Breathes. “Why do you have to make this so hard? Why do you always have to?—”

His hand drops to his side, and he does that slight downward gesture he’ll do sometimes in public that means he’s embarrassed—lower your voiceorsettle downor,for God’s sake, just be normal.

I know everything that comes next if I stay in this room. The way his tears will work on me the same way they always have. The apologies I’ll make. The trial separation that becomes another year together, and another.

The decade anniversary.

After it, the silver, then the gold. All the while, I shrivel up inside like a body in a coffin, except I’m not dead yet.