Page 46 of Wreckage and Rain
Colt
I don't sleep.
I sit on the couch in the living room where Summer just took my life apart and I stare at the wall and I try to make the pieces fit back together in a way that doesn't make me the villain.
She's right about the birthday. There's no spin on that. I forgot my wife's birthday. The whole day, not just the dinner. The actual date she was born. And the fact that I don't know how it happened doesn't change the result. The chair was empty. Her family saw it. She smiled through it. And I texted herdon't wait uplike she was a roommate I was being polite to.
That part I can own. That part I hate myself for.
The rest, though.
Cheyenne's hand on my arm. The table at The Butcher Block. The midnight phone call. The dinner party seating chart. Summer recited the evidence like a prosecutor and each piece, individually, has a reasonable explanation. The dinner at The Butcher Block was a working dinner. Cheyenne touching my arm is how she talks. She does it with everyone. The phone call was about the pitch. The seating chart was my mother's doing.
Each piece is defensible.
Summer isn't reading the pieces. She's reading the pattern. It's what she does for a living, taking a pile of unrelated details and finding the line that runs through all of them, the one that was there the whole time. And the line she's drawn through this one leads to a man replacing his wife.
That's not what I'm doing.
I'm not.
I press my palms against my eyes. What I keep coming back to is the birthday. Specifically, that I didn't know. Not that I forgotthe dinner. That I didn't see the text message. That I didn't know the date. That my own brain skipped over the fact that Summer was born twenty-four years ago today, and the skip wasn't conscious, and I can't figure out how that happened.
I'm losing her. I know I am. And I don't know how to stop it.
I don't want Cheyenne. That's the part I keep coming back to under everything else. I don't want her. I have never wanted her. I want my wife. The girl from the diner. The woman writing a book at our kitchen island in my old rugby shirt. The one who is asleep right now twenty feet from me in a room she had to escape to because she couldn't lie next to me anymore.
I love her, I want her, but I am losing her and I don't know what I have been doing for so long that has built that into the truth.
***
The next three days, I try.
Sunflowers, because that's the only language I have. A reservation at The Butcher Block for Saturday night, because reclaiming the restaurant feels like the kind of gesture that matters even though I don't fully understand why she needs gestures when I'm standing right here telling her I love her.
I come home on time. Two nights in a row. Six thirty. Six fifteen. I walk through the door and Summer is in the kitchen and I say, "What's for dinner?" and she says, "I made chicken," and we eat together at the table like a normal married couple. The conversation is functional and polite and completely hollow.
She's watching me. I can feel it. Not the way she used to, warm, easy and full of affection. She watches me now like a subject she's researching, studying what I do when I think no one's looking.
Saturday night, I take her to The Butcher Block.
The hostess seats us at a table near the window. I think about ordering wine and reading the menu and asking Summer how the writing is going.
Summer is in a black dress. Simple. Understated. Beautiful. I tell her so.
"Thank you."
Two words. No volley. No banter.
We order. We talk. I ask about her book. She tells me. I listen like I should have been listening all year, with my phone in my pocket and my eyes on her face.
She sees me trying. I know she does.
But the trying has a quality she doesn't trust. I can feel her assessing it. Weighing it. Deciding whether the man across the table is real or a performance. Everything feels so off, where is the comfortable ease we used to have?
I'm real. I am. I'm trying. I'm here. I just need her to give me a chance.
Dinner ends. The drive home is quiet.
