Madly (New York 2)

It had been simple enough to find the words to apologize to his brother and to Cath. It was harder, still, to find the words to explain how he’d allowed himself to become the villain in his brother’s story.

He’d always believed that bad people did bad things. He’d gone through a run of reading biographies of criminals and dictators last year, looking for pain and its pathways, for other men who’d turned fear into rigidity and control and ultimately used it to hurt people.

It always seemed to begin with the people you loved.

He never wanted to hurt anyone he loved, or see them hurt, again.

“That’s huge.”

“It is.”

They sat in silence for a moment. Winston cleared his throat. Allie smiled, shoved her elbows closer to him across the table and said, “So that’s one horrible secret. What’s another one?”

The words came out, clear and completely unplanned. “Not long after the whole debacle, Rosemary stopped talking to me, and we stopped—” He looked, hard, into his tea.

“Nooo.”

“I thought we’d weather it. Those were the words, I remember, I would say to myself on the way to the office, or staring at the ceiling in the early morning when I couldn’t get back to sleep. That ‘we’d weather it.’?”

“But she didn’t want to weather it.”

He drank from his mug, the tea warming and loosening his throat. “She was braver than me. Is. Actually, she’s quite…When I met her, at university, she was the most interesting girl I’d ever met. Very clever, and willing to try things, always full of ideas. I think she simply got to a point in life where she knew she’d never be that girl again. With me.”

Allie leaned forward. The overlarge T-shirt she was wearing slid away from her collarbone. It made him yearn. He didn’t know…for what. It was the kind of yearning that felt awful and wonderful and was entirely nonspecific.

“Rosemary understood, I see now, how miserable we all were. She had never done anything in the entire time we were together but take care of us. Us. Bea and myself. We were enough that she couldn’t have had time to take care of herself. I think after I treated my own brother so abominably, a brother I loved, had always loved, some tension finally broke for her, made her fierce and kind. Because it was kind, the divorce. Even for Bea. We were…miserable.”

“You said.” Allie’s eyes were wet, and he had to look away. The last time he wept about all of this was when he’d been trying to explain to Bea, and Allie’s empathy—

It was too much.

“She took care of us. Gave us space, and a chance. Now she can take care of herself and, I imagine, try something that brings her back to who she is. Or something. I’m not sure. I try not to keep too close tabs on her, because it’s not for me, Rosemary’s life. Not anymore.”

Allie was staring at the kitchen cabinets. Her knuckles were white around the mug he’d given her.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t go on about it.”

“No, it’s not that. It would just be nice, I think. For someone to feel that way about you. I wish I had that.”

“In what way?”

“Like your life was just for yourself.”

“Isn’t it?”

“It wasn’t, like you said, for Rosemary. It isn’t, for me.”

He thought of the woman in the bar, in her costume, her eyes tethered to her mother. How Allie had come apart when her mother slipped out with Justice.

“Thank you for being my mailman, Allie.”

She reached across the breakfast bar and put her hand over his. Her palm was hot from her mug of tea. It was entirely lovely to be touched in s

uch a way, one sympathetic adult to another.

He felt awake.

Chapter 5