The Couple Most Likely To

“Don’t you think this is the best time?” He stepped closer, because he didn’t want people to hear this. “When seeing each other again has brought our emotions so close to the surface?”

“Why do we have to talk at all? We haven’t, for seventeen years, and we’ve done okay.”

“Have we? Have we really done okay? I think it’s all still there, underneath. I think it’s still affecting us.”

“Well, of course.” Her voice dropped low. “There’s still barely a day goes by that I don’t think about Anna….”

There it was. The sad sound of her name that he’d needed to hear, and that reproached him every single time. In his mind, he could see her, the tiny, tiny form, the black silky hair, the paper-thin translucent skin, those brief, fluttering movements she’d made before—

Stop.

Just stop.

“…especially since I had the twins,” Stacey was saying.

“Not just Anna,” he forced himself to argue. “The choices we made afterward. The things we turned our backs on.”

“You turned your back on.”

“You, just as much.”

“I don’t see it that way.” She sounded very stubborn, with a good bit of bravado in the mix.

“No?” he challenged her. “We always talked about seeing the world, and yet you’re still here in Portland with a failed marriage, stuck in a dreary suburban rut….”

She flinched, and he wished he’d chosen his words better.

Then she lifted her chin and returned the attack, which shouldn’t have surprised him. “So making a family means being in a rut, does it, Jake? What about you? Some people wouldn’t call what you’ve done with your life widening your horizons, they’d call it running away.”

“They’d be wrong. I like my life very much.”

“Good for you.” She blinked back sudden tears. “And I like mine. There. We’ve talked. We’ve told each other we’re happy. We’ve defended our choices. That’s enough, isn’t it?”

“Stacey…”

“It’s enough,” she repeated. “Thank you for this.” She waved vaguely at the gathering, which was still going strong after two or three hours. “I like your family. I’ve had a good time. I’m glad Jillian invited me. But I’m going home.”

He didn’t try to argue, but only because he’d already decided to tackle their talk a different way.

The worst part about Stacey’s rare evenings out when the twins were away was that she had to come back to an empty house. She’d left the heating turned up and a couple of lights on in strategic places, so the space was cozy enough. Her garage opened directly into a mudroom off the kitchen, which meant there was no interval of cold and vulnerability as she walked between the car and the house, but still it felt lonely and wrong.

So much in her life was right. Her children, her job, her house, her friends.

This part of it wasn’t.

She’d never planned for a life in which she had to come home at night alone. She liked the warmth of people around her, and found it nourishing. As a poor substitute for actual human contact, she checked the answer machine and found a message from her sister, Giselle, which was unusual. Stacey was the elder by five years and they’d never been all that close. Giselle had only been thirteen when she and Mom and Dad had moved to San Diego.

On the machine, she sounded perky and busy. “Hi-i, Stacey! Just calling. No reason. Talk to you soon. Bye-ee!”

No other messages.

Which was good, because it meant that everything must be running smoothly for John with the twins.

Stacey looked at the clock on the microwave—9:42. “What?” she complained to the green numbers. “You leave me with an hour between now and bed, and no suggestions about what I should do? You couldn’t have made it 10:25?”

No reply from the clock.

She made herself some hot chocolate, lit the gas fire—more for the companionship of its cheerful blue and orange flames than for its warmth—and put on a DVD.

About twenty minutes later, she’d gotten comfortable when her doorbell rang, which spooked her a little at this time of night—until she looked through the peephole.

She should have known.

Jake.

Heart sinking, she opened the door for him, with a brief, “Hi,” then stood back in silence for him to walk past her into the house. Clearly, he’d meant what he said about needing to talk. Even outside of rush hour, his place was a solid twenty-minute drive from here. He must have left his guests with Jillian to act as hostess. What kind of excuse had he made?

He didn’t intend to waste any time getting to the point, it seemed. She offered several beverage options, hot and cold, but he waved them all away. She ushered him toward the fire, but he ignored her and paced up and down the patterned Persian rug instead.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have said what I did about you being in a rut. It wasn’t exactly the best start I could have made.”

“Start to what?”

“We have to say this stuff, Stacey! We’re going to keep seeing each other around the hospital. Nancy and Jillian both think of you as a friend, and I’m working on thinking of them as family. The connections are there, and ongoing. We ended in such a mess seventeen years ago. We’re a lot older now. You know I loved you—”

“Did you? You loved me? You’d claim that?”

“Do you doubt it?”

“You pushed me away! You picked fights. I was the one who finally said It’s over, yes, but you made me say it, Jake. You didn’t rest until you’d goaded me into it!”

He stopped pacing in the middle of the rug, pinned by her words. They’d hit home. She could see it.

“You manipulated me into saying it,” she went on, “as the punch line to a massive fight, and you left me with the guilt when I did. We conceived Anna together, and we lost her, and then you manipulated the relationship so that I was the one who couldn’t let the loss bring us closer. It took me a long time to see all of that, but I know it’s the way it was. The only thing I don’t understand is why. If you’re telling me you did love me…”

“Of course I did.”

“But you stopped loving me after Anna died? Because you wanted to be free?”

“After Anna died, I was never going to be free,” he muttered, so low that she wasn’t convinced she’d heard him right.

“Well, it’s the only reason I can come up with.” She turned toward the gas fire, needing to look at those leaping flames, instead of Jake’s frowning face.

“Is it?” he said.

“The evidence is there in the life you’ve lived since, Jake.” She didn’t turn to face him again, but felt him move closer. “I’ve seen your résumé. No wife. No kids. You don’t stay in one place for longer than two or three years. You’ve worked all over the world. Clearly that need for newness and change and movement runs deep. And it angers me that you couldn’t be honest about it. You wanted your freedom, but you couldn’t say so. You had to turn me into the bad guy, instead.” She shook her head. “I had the same thing from my mother my whole life, growing up. I was the disappointing daughter, the one who messed up, while Giselle was perfect. I can fall into the role of bad guy sooo easily, Jake. Very convenient for you. And yet—you didn’t put me there on purpose? If you did—” she shook her head again “—then we really have nothing to say.”

“You weren’t this angry yesterday, or earlier tonight.”