I'm Fine and Neither Are You

He paused. “Honestly? I’ve been debating it.”

The sky was nearly charcoal, and the rain was now making it hard to see more than a car’s length in front of us; the semitrailer ahead was visible mostly by its taillights. I held my breath as it fishtailed while trying to merge from the center lane into the right lane. “Maybe we should pull over until the rain slows a little,” I said to Sanjay.

I expected him to say he was fine. Instead, he guided us onto a wide right shoulder beside a field. Then he put the car in park and turned toward me. We stared at each other, wordlessly asking the same question: Now what?

“Okay,” he finally said. “I’ll tell you.”

I had to stop myself from shuddering—it never did get easier, finding out how you were coming up short.

“I need you to stop worrying I’m going to leave you.”

“I don’t think that,” I said quickly.

He shook his head. “You do. I think that’s why you haven’t been more critical of me all these years, and I’m sorry I took advantage of that and coasted. Our life has been way harder than it needed to be and that’s on me. I knew I wasn’t bringing in enough money and that you felt trapped.”

“I didn’t feel trapped,” I heard myself lying. “Trapped is a strong word. Stuck, maybe.”

“Exactly. You gave up so much to care for our family while I played ostrich. Is it any surprise you didn’t really want to sleep with me? Hell, I wouldn’t have wanted to sleep with myself.”

“Still, I could have done more. As you yourself pointed out, marriage is hard work, and I was buying the lie that it should have come easy.”

“We both could have done more. But I need you to know that I’m not going anywhere, Penny—not unless you want me to. That’s not going to change just because you tell me you need more from me.”

“Oh,” I said quietly. “Is that why you sailed through my list? You’ve been acing one request after another.”

He nodded. “I hate to bring up Christina, but that scared me, Penny. That, plus Jenny’s death—I knew something needed to change.”

“But why didn’t you give me all three items sooner? Why the mystery?”

“No mystery,” he said, shaking his head. “It seemed like you and I both needed to tackle a lot of other issues before we came to that . . .”

“My fear of being abandoned.”

“Yes,” he said without hesitation. “And I wanted to give you more time to heal after Jenny’s death. To be honest, I wasn’t sure I’d ever bring it up. But after your conversation with your dad, I felt like maybe you were ready.”

I had turned to the windshield. Outside, the world was such a blur that it took me a moment to realize my eyes were filled with tears. “You could change your mind,” I said quietly. “It happens all the time.”

“Penelope.” He put his finger under my chin and gently turned my face toward him. “You left me all those years ago, remember? You were afraid of the same thing then, and you wanted to beat me to the punch. I don’t fault you for it—I can’t begin to imagine how hard it was to have lost your mother the way you did. But in spite of your fear, you came back to me.”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“You were probably still terrified when we started dating again. But you did it anyway, and you married me, and we started a life and a family together. Why was that?”

The storm was so strong that I could no longer see through the glass. I unbuckled my seatbelt and crawled onto his lap.

“Because love was worth the risk,” I whispered.

“It was.” He pulled back so he could look at me. “I want us to be us again, Penny. Don’t you?”

“More than anything.”

“Good,” he said. Then he pressed his mouth to mine and kissed me tenderly, the way he used to.

The way he did now.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Matt called me the night after Sanjay and I returned from New York. “Hi,” he said stiffly.

“Hi,” I said. I was so relieved I could have fainted. “I’m sorry about our last conversation.”

“I am, too.”

“How’s Cecily?”

“She’s good. I took her to Maine, like you suggested. It . . . it was a really good trip.”

“Oh.” That he had taken my advice almost made up for the heartbreak of thinking he was going to keep Cecily from me for the foreseeable future. “I’m so glad to hear that.”

“Would you like to see her?”

“You know I would.”

“Great,” he said. He sounded tired. “Do you think you might come over soon—say, tomorrow night?”

“I’d be happy to.”

“When you do, could you spare an extra fifteen minutes?”

“Sure. Why?”

“I was hoping you could put up the post we talked about. I could send you the link and the log-in info, but I thought it might be easier if I just logged you onto the site on Jenny’s computer when you’re here.”

“Sure—that sounds great.”

“Thanks, Penny,” he said. “We’ll see you soon.”

When I walked into the Sweets’ house, Cecily came flying at me and I hugged her tight. When I was sure I wouldn’t cry, I held her out to look at her. Her hair was a bird’s nest, and her outfit was filthy, but she was smiling. In fact, there was a buoyancy to her that hadn’t been there the last time I saw her.

“How was Maine?” I asked.

“Good.” She grinned up at me. “I ate a whole lobster.”

“A big one, too,” said Matt. I could tell he was trying to act normal—but then again, so was I. “She surprises me sometimes.”

“I’ll say. Cess, anything you want to do tonight? We could go out to dinner.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“No problem,” I said. “How about a puzzle? Or coloring?”

She shook her head.

I eyed her. “What do you say about writing a book?”

“Us?”

“Why not?”

“Okay!” she said.

We decamped to the craft station Jenny had set up in Cecily’s playroom. After I had spread out paper and handed Cecily a box full of markers and colored pencils, I said, “So. Where should we start?”

She gave me a funny look. “At the beginning.”

I laughed. “Right.”

We decided we would write a book about a little girl who accidentally finds herself in a magical forest and has to learn to speak to animals to survive. One page became three. Then five, then ten. As we worked—Cecily dictating as I wrote at the bottom, occasionally making suggestions, then handing her the page so she could illustrate it—I felt like a young girl myself, escaping troubles real and imagined as I slipped into another world.

“What do you think?” I asked as I stapled our finished pages together.

“Good. I’m going to show my mommy.” She looked up at me with embarrassment as she realized what she had just said, then quickly glanced down at the book.

“It’s okay, Cess,” I said. “Happens to me all the time.”

“What do you do?” she said quietly. “When that happens?”

“Well . . . sometimes I’m just sad. But sometimes I send your mama a little message. Sort of like a prayer. Sometimes she even talks back to me.”

Her lower lip quivered. “I’m going to tell her I might write a book about her one day.”

I smiled. “I think she’d really like that. I’ve always wanted to write books one day, too. Your mommy knew that about me.”

“Really?”

“Yep. I wrote lots of stories before Stevie was born.”

“You don’t anymore?”

I shook my head.

“Why not?” she asked.

It was a damn good question, and my usual excuse-filled answers weren’t going to fly with her. “Well, sweetie, sometimes I tell myself I don’t have the time or I’m too tired, but now that I’m thinking about it, the truth is that I haven’t made it a priority.”

She ran a finger over the cover page. With her dark bob and rosebud of a mouth, she looked so much like Jenny that I could have cried. I found myself hoping to God she would have all of her mother’s strengths and none of her struggles. “You still can, right?” Her eyes were lit up, and she was regarding me with the kind of hope that spreads on contact.

I laughed and gave her a squeeze. “I still can,” I said. “And I’m not about to take that for granted.”

Matt turned on a television show for Cecily, then led me upstairs. I hesitated before walking through the door of Jenny’s office; I had not set foot there since finding her in her armchair. I was relieved to see Matt had removed the chair. But the rest of the room was exactly as it had been before that day, and a chill went up my spine.

“I got Jenny’s log-in info from Tiana, and she walked me through how to post on the site,” said Matt, opening the laptop on the clear Lucite desk where Jenny had worked. “You said you emailed yourself what you wanted to write?”

“Yes,” I said. “Did you want to read it first?”

“No, I trust you,” he said.

Did he? I couldn’t read him.

“Once you copy it, you can paste it into this area,” he said, pointing to the blog dashboard he had just pulled up. He glanced at me quickly. “I’ll give you some space.”

Despite my mixed feelings about Matt, I didn’t want to be left alone in Jenny’s office. But he was already gone. I would just have to work quickly.

I had just pasted my post when a folder on the left side of the screen caught my eye.

Drafts (1)

I shouldn’t, I told myself, but my hand was already moving the mouse to the folder. I hovered the cursor over it for a second, then clicked.