Predictable, apparently, was another word for knowing someone well enough to love them carefully.
“And what did you say?”
Nick stared at the floor.
“I laughed.”
I nodded slowly.
At least that part was honest.
“Then later,” he continued, “Evan said you weren’t going anywhere anyway.”
My eyes moved back to him.
“What?”
Nick’s voice lowered.
“He said you’d be mad for a few days, but you’d get over it.
He said you always do.”
Something inside me settled.
Not broke.
Settled.
For two weeks I’d wondered whether I had overreacted.
Whether the sentence in our kitchen had been clumsy rather than cruel.
Whether I was throwing away years of marriage because Evan had repeated one stupid comment from men who drank too much and mistook arrogance for confidence.
Now I understood the part that mattered.
The cruelty wasn’t only that Evan had told me his friends thought he could do better.
It was that he had felt safe saying it.
He believed my love had made me permanent.
He believed I would absorb humiliation because I had absorbed disappointments before.
He thought forgiveness was something he owned.
Nick sank back into the chair.
“Tonight we were giving him a hard time because he kept checking his phone.”
“For what?”
“You.”
I said nothing.
“He said you’d barely spoken to him.
He was angry about it.
Then he admitted you’d stopped making plans and asking where he was going.”
Nick gave a bitter little laugh.
“I told him maybe you weren’t getting over it.”
That explained Evan’s face in the doorway.
That’s it?
He hadn’t been irritated that I didn’t care where he was going.
He’d been frightened by it.
The treatment doors opened.
A nurse called my name.
Nick stood, but I turned to him.
“I’m going in alone.”
He nodded immediately.
Evan looked smaller in the hospital bed than he ever had in our apartment.
A bruise was darkening along one side of his face.
There was a bandage near his hairline.
Monitors glowed beside him, their sounds steady and controlled.
He looked exhausted, embarrassed, and painfully relieved when he saw me.
“Lauren.”
I stopped beside the bed.
His hand moved toward mine.
For years, I would have taken it without thinking.
I didn’t.
His hand paused in the air before falling back onto the blanket.
“You came.”
“Nick called me.”
