Page 65 of Where Vows Collapse
"And?"
"And I told him it may have been a mistake, and I left."
"Was it?"
"I don't know."
"Do you love him?"
"Yes."
"Does he know?"
“I think so.”
"Does he love you?"
"He says he does."
"Is he lying?"
"No," Noelle said. "He isn't lying. That's the part that scares me."
Her mother nodded. "I spent my marriage being afraid of your father," her mother said, after a pause. "Not afraid the way women are afraid of men who hit them — nothing like that. Afraid of the distance. Afraid that if I ever stopped performing the version of myself he'd married, he'd notice I wasn't who he'd thought I was, and the noticing would be the end of it. So I performed. And the performing became the marriage, and the marriage became my life, and by the time I realized I'd spent thirty years being afraid of a thing that had already happened — he'd already stopped looking at me. He’d stopped looking at me years before I stopped performing. By that time there was nothing left to be afraid of. The fear had eaten the thing it was afraid of losing."
Her mother looked at her.
"You're afraid that if you go back to him and he hurts you again, it'll destroy you."
"Yes."
"It might. I'm not going to lie to you. Going back to a man who's hurt you is a risk. Pretending the risk isn't real is the thing I did for thirty years and I'm not going to sit in this kitchen and tell my daughter to do it too." She paused. "But I'm also not going to sit in this kitchen and watch my daughter turn into me."
Noelle didn't speak.
"I spent my life protecting myself from a man I'd already lost. You're sitting in my kitchen protecting yourself from a man who loves you. Those aren't the same thing."
Her mother reached across the table and put her hand over Noelle’s. The hand of a woman who'd trained her daughter to hold everything and was now, in a kitchen at night, telling her daughter to consider letting something go.
"You built a bookshop," her mother said. "You didn't ask anyone's permission. The woman who built that bookshop is not the woman I trained. The woman who built that bookshop is someone I didn't know how to raise, and she raised herself, and she is — " Her mother's voice thinned at the edges. “I don’t think she’s going to be destroyed by a man. Not even a man she loves. Not even if it goes wrong."
"You don't know that."
"No. I don't. But I know her better than I knew myself at her age, and I know that the worst thing she could do — the thing that would actually destroy her — isn't going back. It's spending the rest of her life being safe."
CHAPTER 26
ELIAS
Elias hadn't movedfrom the bedroom. He'd sat on the edge of the mattress with the sheet pooled at his waist, his hands on his knees, his eyes on the doorway she'd walked through.
This may have been a mistake.
He sat with the words. He sat with them the way he'd been learning to sit with things — without composing a counter-sentence, without reaching for the phone or the pen or any of the mechanisms his hands had spent a lifetime reaching for when his hands needed something to do. His hands sat on his knees. They were steady.
He was so tired of his hands being steady.
He got up eventually. He dressed and let himself out.
