CHAPTER 7
CORA
“I told Muirthe relationship isn’t real,” Rex says.
I set my mug down.
“When?” I say.
“Last night.”
“Last night.” I look at the lake. I look at it carefully, the way you look at something when you are deciding what to feel about a piece of news. The lake looks back at me with its usual expression: patient and noncommittal and entirely unhelpful. “You told him. Without asking me.”
“Yes.”
“Rex.”
“Cora.”
“I specifically—we had a plan. The plan was—the whole point was that—” I stop. I pick up my mug. I put it down again. “Why?”
Rex turns his coffee cup slowly in his hands, choosing words. “Because even when he thought you’d moved on, that you were happy, that you were with someone.” A pause. “He stayed in town anyway. He took the job anyway.”
I am quiet.
“And then,” Rex says, still in that even, careful register, “I watched him work for two weeks, and I watched him not say anything about it, not push anything, not use any of it. And I thought—” He stops. Starts again. “And I know it costs you something to work beside him and pretend you don’t love him. To pretend his presence isn’t physically hurting you.”
The fury arrives right on schedule. It is clean and satisfying; it has a clear target and a reasonable basis and comes with its own momentum. I am grateful for it because fury is something I know how to do.
“You had no right,” I say, and my voice is level, which is the version of anger I use when I mean it most. “That was my information to manage. My situation. You didn’t?—”
“I know,” he says. Not defensive. Just acknowledging the fact of it.
“I put you in this position because I trusted you to?—”
“I know.”
“And now he knows, which means the whole—the structure of the thing is?—”
“I know,” Rex says again, quietly, and the quality of the repetition makes me stop. He is not flinching and he is not arguing and he is not explaining himself further.
He is just sitting with what he did and giving me the full space of my reaction, which is either the most infuriating thing or the most decent thing about him and right now I cannot tell which.
“For what it’s worth,” Rex says, picking up his coffee, “I threatened to tear him apart and sleep soundly afterward if he hurt you again.”
I stare at him. Then I laugh—a real laugh, sharp and surprised—before I catch myself and remember I’m supposed to still be angry.
“That’s not helping your case,” I say, but there’s no heat in it.
“Wasn’t trying to help my case,” Rex says mildly. “Just wanted you to know the threat was comprehensive.”
I stand up. I walk to the porch railing. I put both hands on it and look at the lake.
The fury is real. And underneath it, in the small honest space below every defense I have constructed over four years of not thinking about this, is something else.
It lasts approximately six seconds before I recognize it for what it is, and another four seconds after that before I hate myself for recognizing it, and approximately zero seconds before I understand that Rex knows exactly what I am feeling right now, because Rex always knows, and has been sitting quietly on my porch waiting for me to get here.
Relief.