“Couldn’t sleep,” I offer as a lame opening.
“Me neither,” he agrees.
He sits. Not next to me, but at a careful distance away. Which I notice. It tells me he’s been thinking about this eventual conversation too, and worrying about how much space to give me. Probably doing calculations about every which way it could go, knowing him. The water ripples around our feet when he puts his in.
We sit like that for a while, just the sound of the jets in the hot tub and the low hum of the heating system and the blue light shifting on the surface of the water between us.
“Kira said I should try talking to you,” I say.
“Oh yeah? Okay.” He nods. Just that. Giving me the room to find the door into a conversation.
The thing about being given room is that sometimes it makes you angrier than being crowded.
I have been in that bedroom for days, and he has been out here making grilled cheese sandwiches and reading Bruiser bedtime stories and going swimming with him. And pacing.
He hasn’t pushed, not once. He hasn’t knocked on my door, or slid notes under it, or done any of the ten thousand things Z would have done to press and make sure I understood how my withdrawal was hurtful to him.
Caleb just?—
Waited.
And somehow that is the thing that finally makes me furious.
“I need you to be angry at me,” I bite out.
He turns to look at me, clearly confused.
“I have been in that room for days waiting for you to be angry, and you keep making sandwiches and taking Bruiser swimming and just being?—”
My voice is getting high-pitched, and I wave my hand in a tight motion. “I just need you to say the things you’ve not been saying. Because I can hear younot sayingthem through the wall, Caleb, and the silence is so much worse than anything you could say would actually be.”
Something shifts in his face. His careful patience cracks—only very slightly—at the edges.
“You want me to be angry,” he says with an edge of disbelief.
“Yes.”
“Harper—”
“Say it.” My voice comes out harder than I meant it to. “Nine years. You lostnine yearswith him. You lost?—”
I have to stop and breathe. “You have a son you didn’t know about for nine years, and I knew for days and didn’t tell you.Goddamn it, Caleb, you’re always so fucking careful with me, and I can’t stand it!”
I turn in his direction even though I can’t look him in the eye. “I need you to be furious. I need you to throw it all at me so I can throw it back. Because I’msoangry and I have nowhere to put it. You’re the only person in this building who has the right to be as angry as I am!”
Caleb is quiet for a long moment.
Then, with a control that is clearly costing him, he says, “You knew in Dallas before we slept together.”
“Yes.”
“Did you think I wouldn’t want to know?” His control is fraying now and the words come faster and sharper. What a Goddamn relief to see some of his façade cracking too. “Did you think I’d what—what was the calculation, Harper? What were you waiting for?”
“I didn’t know how to say it.” My own voice rises to meet his. “I had no idea how to look at you and say—oh, by the way, you have a nine-year-old son, and it was all my fault that I was so fucking gullible. Z could?—”
“Z is a toxic psychopath.” He spits the words out. “Who you left me for. You left with him, pregnant with our?—”
“I didn’t know I was pregnant when I left,” I cry, glad he’s finally giving me the fight I was angling for.