Page 39 of When We Had Forever
My eyes are still open, pointed at the ceiling, and I turn my head. I’d thought he was asleep already. “Of course,” I whisper back. “Anything.”
“Would you still love me, without all this? The car, the condo, the job? The money? What if I was nobody? What if I had nothing?”
My brows knit. The question surprises me, but Ididjust ask him to torpedo his entire life for me.
“Let me make something clear.” I nestle close, pressing a kiss to his smooth chest. “You could get fired, go broke, gain a hundred pounds, shave off all that gorgeous hair, and move into a cardboard box, and I wouldn’t love you any less than I do right now.”
He chuckles, low and warm and rough, which somehow wields enough power to make my stomach clench with desire.
“You’re lying,” he says, but pulls me closer. “The part about the hair’s a dead giveaway.”
I ponder that, wondering whether he has something to tell me. But by the time I decide to ask, he’s already asleep.
AFTER
I stand amid the cold silence of Michael’s office, staring at the unfamiliar folder at the back of the cabinet. Its jammed-in angle disrupts the order of the entire row, as if my husband stuffed it there in a fit of emotion. Except Michael didn’t do fits of emotion.
I pull the thing out. I haven’t checked the filing cabinet in months. I’ve barely even set foot in this room, because of all the places in our home, this one belonged most thoroughly to him. Somehow, the idea of dismantling it has felt like a permanent admission of defeat.
The folder has no label, but it weighs a ton. When I crack the cover, glossy clippings cascade out.
Shock punches all the air from my chest. Michael’s face sears my eyes, only it isn’t Michael. No,thisman has a scar bisecting one eyebrow, visible even through the crystalline snow clinging to his stubbled cheeks and abundant lashes.
It’s Grayson. My husband’s identical twin. The man I didn’t even knowwasan identical twin until I encountered this picture in the grocery store three years ago.
My breath shortens. Grayson stares out from the cover ofNational Geographic, his gaze as penetrating as it is tormented. He’s clearly only just escaped the avalanche that buried him alive, and his golden brows crook together. And there’s this...thingin his face. This horrible sort of longing, like he’s just glimpsed death and hasn’t decided yet whether to go chasing after it. His full lips are parted, frozen in the moment right before speaking, and I wonder, as I have a thousand times before, what he’s about to say. What critical message he feels compelled to impart after having stood on—and been hauled back from—the brink of oblivion.
I toss the magazine to the floor as if it’s burned me, but that still leaves a stack in my hands. There’s a clipping from some gossip magazine. Then another, and another. Which makes no sense. Michael eternally avoided the subject of Grayson after the last time they saw each other in Seattle. He wouldn’t have followed his brother’s every step, even from afar.
Yet my fingers flip through picture after picture. Here’s the man who looks so much like my husband, wearing a leather jacket Michael never would’ve been caught dead in. Here’s Grayson on the deck of a yacht, glaring across the water at whoever’s photographing him, one hand splayed over a bare chest so glorious it makes me hate myself for noticing. Inky lines feather out from beneath his fingers, but the photographer hasn’t captured what he’s hiding, and for all that I’ve avoided these awful articles, I know that will be the case for every photo here. No one has ever caught this particular tattoo on camera. Despite the speculation, only the women he’s loved and inevitably left truly know what it is.
The images scorch themselves into my brain. Grayson, one arm draped over the handlebars of a motorcycle while he flips the camera the bird. Him in a nightclub, turning away from a woman who probably models for Victoria’s Secret.
The photos abruptly end, and I find myself holding a stack of pages cut with exacting care fromNational Geographicitself.
Grayson’s work.
My hands tremble, but try as I might, I can’t stop flipping through. An African tribesman in traditional dress holds a cell phone aloft, searching for a signal beneath a full moon. An underground lake reflects the lush greenery of the jungle above. A school of a million silver fish bursts apart as a hungry seabird dive-bombs the water, its red beak gaping.
The pictures are like visual poetry, and I fling the pages away. They scatter to the floor.
My chest heaves. Amid the mess, a bundle of printer paper lies face down, and I bend to pick it up. For a moment, I can’t understand what I’m looking at, because shouldn’t these still be in the manila folder beneath my bed?
Except these aren’t the divorce papers I hid away last year.Thosehad blurry splotches from where my wet hair had dripped onto the still-warm ink.
Theseare pristine. Crisply aligned and stapled together. And they’re signed.
By Michael. In handwriting I know as intimately as my own voice.
My heart dies inside my chest. Just sputters out between one beat and the next, leaving me with a numb, lifeless lump beneath my ribs. What little spark remained has just been extinguished.
I hurl the divorce papers at the wall and walk out.
Downstairs, I find my cell phone. I have no idea what I intend to do with it until my disembodied fingers tap on my mother’s name.
Normally I would never call in August, which she clearly knows, because she answers on the first ring. “Mina? Honey? What’s wrong?”
I blink furiously. To my amazement, the force of habit proves even mightier than the jagged crack ravaging my soul. “Nothing, Mom. I’m fine. Hi.”
