“You say you’re completely certain, but yesterday morning, if I’d asked you if you had any interest in women whatsoever, you’d have denied it up and down. Correct?”
Reluctantly, Anne nodded.
“Two days ago, if I’d asked you what you wanted from our relationship, you wouldn’t have been able to tell me. Would you?”
“No,” Anne conceded, “but—”
“You couldn’t even get out the word ‘lesbian’ in the car yesterday. It terrifies you, doesn’t it? And knowing you, I’m sure you haven’t begun to think about why.”
For fuck’s sake, Anne wasn’t terrified! Hadn’t she just spent last night and the early morning wrapped in joy and need, marveling at how she wasn’t one bit distressed? “I’m not scared,” she snapped. “Or I wouldn’t be, if you weren’t scaring me right now.”
“You still can’t say it, can you?”
“This is ridiculous!” She wouldn’t indulge Sadie’s train of thought. It wouldn’t get them anywhere. “We can’t live without each other. We want each other. That’s all that matters. Not—words. Or anything else.”
Sadie looked at her for a moment, eyes searching, then smiled, soft and sad. “I don’t know that that’s true, beloved. It isn’t for me, at any rate.”
Anne clenched her hands behind her back. For decades, she’d locked herself in a room she’d decorated so beautifully that she’d never seen the barred windows, the sealed doors. Was there such a thing as moving too fast when every instinct inside you was shriekingrun? “It’s not the same for you as it is for me,” she said haltingly. “You had twenty-five years with someone you loved. Someone you found attractive. I’veneverhad—” Her voice splintered. “The way you kissed me, touched me, I never knew—”
She bit her lip savagely to stop herself from sayingYou can’t take this away from me; I will starve without it.
“You didn’t know,” Sadie said gently. “That’s exactly right. And you want to marry me, a person who, one day ago, also had no idea you carried any of this.” Her placid expression cracked, anguish breaking through. “What else don’t I know about you? If I throw myself into this, only to realize later that we built our relationship on a facade, it will break me permanently. I mean that. It will break me in places I didn’t even know existed four years ago.”
Had Anne’s fear somehow damaged her ears? She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “Sadie, how can you think for even asecondthat you don’t know me? You know me better than anyone ever has. You know that my mother cheated on my father when I was a child. You know that I did the exact same thing to James at the beginning of our marriage.”
“That’s not—”
“You know that I hated quitting my job when I got pregnant with Claire, and you know that it took me months after she was born to feel any real connection to her.” Anne ran one unsteady hand through her rumpled hair. “You know that I think the exact right time to show up at a party is fifteen minutes after the official start, no more and no fewer. You know I prefer Amy to Jo inLittle Women. You know that dogs frighten me because one jumped on me when I was a toddler and I’ve never gotten over it. You’re the only one I let see me while I was healing from my facelift. For God’s sake, I’m not a diamond. With you, I’m glass.”
“What if you don’t knowmeas well as you think you do?” Not a challenge. A plea for reassurance.
Anne didn’t hesitate. “It takes thirty seconds for you to look at a museum painting before you get bored, evenThree Lovers. You wanted at least two more children after Hal, but you were diagnosed with secondary infertility. You wrote your first poemon the back of a cereal box when you were six years old. In your early twenties, you made it two whole weeks as a go-go dancer at a nightclub in Miles City, Montana. Your left pinky’s still crooked from when you broke it falling over a laundry basket, but you tell everyone it happened while skydiving in Key West. Should I keep going?”
“Please,” Sadie said quietly.
Anne looked at her again. Tears were glinting in Sadie’s eyes, the kitchen light making them sparkle.
“You’ve always wanted to write a novel, but you’re still stuck on getting the first line just right. Your Spanish is flawless, even though no one realizes it at first because your nonexistent accent makes you sound like Mayor Gringo from Gringoland. All of your plants are named after fabric patterns, but you’re savingQuatrefoilfor when you finally track down a Philodendron White Princess. You love crossing the creek when it’s low because you can pretend you’re Huck Finn. You adore everyone and everything with a generosity I never knew was possible.” Anne swallowed. “Including me.”
Sadie gave her a little smile of gratitude. The panic had receded from her face, at least for the time being. Then, she said, “I’ve never told you why Fred left.”
It wasn’t a question. “No, you haven’t.”
“We’d moved down from Oakland to be near Hal after he got into USC for his master’s degree—you know that part. Bought Hedge Nettle. Fred had been acting strangely for a while. Quiet even for him. But it got worse when we moved in. I finally forced him to tell me what was wrong.”
Another woman? A secret addiction? Anne had no idea.
“He said—” Sadie looked down at the kitchen floor. “Fred said I was just too much for him. That I’d been too much for him for a very long time. Years. He just hadn’t known how to tell me. Too loud, too energetic, too communicative, too close, toodemanding, too”—her hands moved briefly in the air—“much. I remember it so clearly. He said to me, ‘I don’t understand why you can’t ever tone it down. Aren’t you exhausted?’ Meaning, of course, that I exhausted him.”
The pain rutting Sadie’s voice spread into Anne’s stomach. What a cruel, cruel thing to say. All the crueler because Fred should’ve known how much that would hurt Sadie to hear.
You had her,Fred,she thought with a bolt of bitterness.You had this woman in your life, in your bed. You woke up every single morning for twenty-five years, and she was right there, choosing you.How could you ever want her to be any different than she is?
“Oh, Sadie,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
Sadie laughed, a sharp and derisive sound. “I hadn’t gotten my ADHD diagnosis yet. So I thought I could change myself, if I put enough effort into it. I spent a few months doing everything I could to tone it down. With every fiber of my being, I tried to be quieter. I tried to practice ‘serenity.’” She put air quotes around the words. “I even went on a week-long silent retreat that summer to build up my tolerance. That’s how badly I wanted to make him happy. I would’ve done anything for him.”
“You tried to be someone else, you mean.” Anne couldn’t imagine a quieter Sadie, would never tell a tree to stop rustling in the wind. Her vivaciousness, her whirlwind delight, her inability to slow down, ever—all of it was integral to who Sadie was.