“I was wrong about that one.”
She looked at me. The smile faded. “I have a question, and you don't have to answer it.”
“Okay.”
“Was there any point when you thought about letting me come back?”
I considered lying to protect us both from the conversation. The truth was complicated. There had been hundreds of points when I'd wanted her back: in the first two nights, after she left her voicemail, when she'd cried at the table, when I opened the Christmas decorations, when I woke from a dream in which none of this had happened. Wanting her back had never been the same as believing we could live together safely again.
“Yes,” I said. “Many times.”
Her eyes brightened with a hope I wished I hadn't caused. I continued before she could misunderstand. “I missed you. I still miss things about our life. But every time I imagined you moving back into our bedroom, I also imagined sitting at dinner with Ryan and wondering how long you could both look at me without telling the truth. I couldn't build another twelve years on that.”
She looked down. “I wouldn't have done it again.”
“I hope that's true.”
“You don't believe me?”
“Maybe you mean it now. But I can't make that promise for you, and I can't make myself trust it simply because I want to.”
She nodded slowly. “My therapist asked me what I expected you to do when I left. I told her I expected you to get angry and then come after me.”
“You told me I'd miss you by midnight.”
“I remember.”
“I did.”
She lifted her eyes to mine.
“I missed you that night,” I said. “And the next morning. And the next one. I just learned that missing you wasn't a reason to agree to something that hurt me.”
Natalie covered her mouth with one hand. She didn't cry loudly. Her eyes filled, and she nodded again as if accepting a truth that had taken months to arrive. Then she said, “I thought if I was unhappy enough, you would find a way to make it better. I didn't stop to ask whether what I was doing was destroying the only place I actually felt safe.”
I didn't know whether she had come to that understanding on her own, with her therapist, or because the life she expected had fallen apart. I didn't need to know. Her recognition mattered to her future more than it could change mine.
“I'm sorry, Daniel,” she said. “Not because you filed. Not because things didn't work out with Ryan. I'm sorry I made you feel like loving me was something you had to prove while I was free to do whatever I wanted. You didn't deserve that.”
I swallowed. It was the apology I'd longed to hear on the day she returned, offered now when I could no longer use it as an excuse to stop the divorce. “Thank you,” I said. “I hope you take care of yourself.”