"Me too."
The quiet settles.
"Goodnight, Ty," she says eventually.
"Goodnight, Red."
I lie on my back, stare at the ceiling, and think about what Emma said.
Let yourself have something good.
And for the first time, I think I might actually be able to.
23
NORA
The Hartford trip wasn't supposed to happen.
It's an away game, Tyler's got team travel, and normally Harper and I would stay home. But when Emma heard the Falcons were playing the Wolves, she called me with a plan.
"Surprise him," she said. "There’s a Hartford game next Friday. You and Harper take the train up Friday morning and stay with us for the weekend. Tyler will have no idea you’re coming.”
"I don't know if that's a good idea?—"
"It's a great idea. Trust me. He'll love it."
So here we are a week later—Harper and I on a train to Hartford while Tyler thinks we’re back home in Ridgeport. He texted me this morning around seven.
Tyler: This team breakfast is boring. Wish you were here.
Me: I hope you have a good game today.
Tyler: Harder without you and Harper there. Hotel rooms suck.
My chest tightens, and I'm still thinking about it as the train rocks through fields and small towns I don't know the names of. Harper's asleep in the carrier on my lap. The train is quiet, mostly empty, with mid-morning travelers and one man at the far end of it, typing on a laptop.
I think about Thanksgiving night.
I shouldn't have been listening. I wasn't meaning to. I'd been asleep—trying to be asleep anyway—the day having been long in the specific way that days with everyone you love and don't quite know how to be around are. I woke up to voices through the kitchen wall. Emma's, then Tyler's, low and serious in a way that pulled me out of sleep before I'd decided to pay attention. I caught most of what they said before I realized what I was hearing, and by then it was too late to unhear it.
I heard him cry.
I heard Emma sayWhatever she feels for you, it isn't going anywhere.
And I lay there in my sleeping bag in the dark living room trying to work out what I was supposed to do with any of it.
I don't know what he did before this. I only have pieces. I have the shape of it from the night on the nursery floor when he told me about Pinewood, about people he'd hurt, about being forgiven, and not knowing what to do with it. I now know there are names attached to that shape. Emma. Chase. Jackson. Maya.
The people he hurt, all of them,choosinghim. Loving him.
I should be hurt by it. He's been letting me fall for him without giving me the full picture, which is—by certain measures—not fair. I have a right to be angry—maybe, and to tell him I'd heard everything and ask him why he hadn't trusted me with it.
But I kept thinking about his voice when he saidI'm not sure I'm a good man, Em. I kept thinking about how long he must have been carrying that before he could even say it out loud, and how much it cost him to say it then, and how he said it to her because she was the only person in the world he could say it to.
He's not ready. That was the truth of it. He wasn't ready totell me, and Emma was telling him to do it before he was ready, but that wasn't going to make it land any softer when it came.
So I made a decision, lying there in the dark with him a few feet away in the other sleeping bag, neither of us asleep.