Page 89 of Wreckage and Rain

"I'm told she'll be arrested. Drug charge. Felony."

"Good."

Silence. The wind. The lake. Two people standing in the ruins of something they built.

"I'm not ready to forgive you."

"I'm not here for that."

"I don't know if I'll ever be."

"Then I'll have earned that too."

"I still love you Colt but I'm not ready. You fucking destroyed me. Annihilated our relationship and everything that we had. You gaslit me every time that I raised my concerns. You made me feel unsafe in spaces that should have been sacred. I started to question my own thoughts and beliefs about what I saw and knew to be true."

I watch him register the sentence. His jaw goes tight at the corner. He keeps his face still. He is doing the visible work of not reacting, and I see the work, and I respect it.

"I want to show you Summer. I want to show you how sorry I am. Show you how much I love you. I was so fucking stupid. Stupid to have fallen for Sonny's bullshit. I was so eager for his attention and approval that I lost myself in the process. I lost the most important person in my life for an ounce of validation from someone who needed my compliance at any cost."

I look at him. Really look. The man standing in front of me isn't the man who forgot my birthday. He's thinner and sadder and more broken than I've ever seen him. But there's something in his face that wasn't there before. Accountability. The look of aman who has stopped telling himself stories and started telling the truth.

"I don't know how to forgive you, Colt. I don't know how to stop being angry at you. I don't know how to trust you again. If I can trust you again."

"Will you ask Patrick to pause the proceedings?" His voice is careful. "I haven't filed a response. I've been letting the clock run out on purpose. I'm not asking you to stop it. I'm asking you not to finish it yet."

The wind takes my hair and I push it back. He hasn't moved. He is looking at me with an expression I haven't seen on him in years, the one that lives underneath all of his other expressions and almost never gets used.

"I can do that."

He exhales. His shoulders come down. "Thank you."

"I love you, Summer."

The volume of the sentence is wrong for the lake and the wind. He says it quietly. The quiet is louder than any other volume those three words could have come in. He isn't asking me to say it back. He is putting it down on the bench between us so it can be there.

"I love you so completely it is the only thing in me anymore that I am sure of. I betrayed you. I betrayed our vows. I betrayed the man I was when I married you, and I am ashamed of what I let him turn into. I know what I am tearing down. Sonny. The firm. The man who chose his father's approval over you. That work is mine to do. I am not asking you to hold me through it. I am not asking for forgiveness today. I am not asking for it next month. I am asking you to let me try to earn it. One piece at a time. For the rest of my life if that is what it takes."

He swallows. His voice is wrecked.

"I am not going anywhere. Not because I am stubborn. Because there is no version of my life that doesn't include me workingevery day to deserve you again. If you take a year, I am here. If you take five, I am here. If you tell me to leave Chicago tomorrow, I will go and I will write you letters and I will keep doing the work, and I will be the man you can come back to, if you come back. And if you don't come back, I will be that man anyway, because I owe you that man. I should have already been him."

I turn and walk away. I don't look back. Not cruelty. Survival. Because if I look back and see him standing in the wind with his hands in his pockets and his heart on his face, the part of me that loved him for eight years will want to close the distance.

I'm not ready.

I walk home. Put the sunflowers in water.

I sit on my kitchen floor and I cry. I can't tell what it is, only that it isn't grief and it isn't rage, and it doesn't stop for a long time.

Chapter 25: The Campaign

Colt

Three weeks in, I trade the hotel for an apartment in Logan Square. The hotel had started to feel like a punishment. The new place is close enough to be present. Far enough to not be stalking. It's small, functional and nothing like home. No yellow legal pad on the counter with three crossed-out sentences and an arrow drawn through them. No rugby shirt thrown over the back of a chair where she stripped it off the night before. Walls and a bed and a kitchen I barely use and a view of a brick wall that I stare at every morning while I plan how to earn back a woman who has every reason to tell me to go to hell.

I'm in therapy.

I tell Summer this directly. Third coffee date. Neutral ground. She sets the boundaries. I respect them like they're holy text.