Page 13 of Fox
“It’s the anniversary of the night we met.”
He recalibrates and takes my hand in his. “So it is, Luce. I’m so sorry I forgot.”
I pull my hand away from his and straighten like I’m preparing to leap off a diving board.
“I overheard what you said to Percy when I came by this afternoon.”
The silence that follows is a specific kind—not empty but very, very full.
I watch Fox go still like he’s deciding something, that characteristic composure that I have admired and envied and now, tonight, find I have no patience for.
“Luce—“
“Don’t.” My voice comes out steady, which surprises me. “Don’t do that thing where you figure out what to say before you say it. I’ve been doing that all day. I’m tired of it.”
He regards me thoughtfully, and his face shifts, rearranging itself into a resting stoicism. I know him, though. He’s preparing for what I’m going to say. I have unwittingly, over time, learned the difference between Fox’s real expressions and his managed ones, and this one ismanaged.
“How much did you hear?” he asks gently.
Which is, I realize, not the same as I’m sorry.
“Enough.” I set the napkin on the table.
He doesn’t look away, which I’ll give him credit for. Whatever Fox is—and I am in the process of revising that answer from the ground up—he is not a coward about being caught. He holds my gaze, nods—like a man receiving a verdict he already knew was coming.
“Okay.”
It’s the same word he used when I told him I was pregnant.
The same word he used when I told him I wanted to keep the baby.
The same word, I understand now, that Fox uses when he has decided to absorb a situation rather than respond to it—a word that sounds like an agreement but is actually management.
“Is it true?” I ask through a very tight throat. “What you said to Percy. Is it true?”
“You’ll have to be more specific, Luce.” He’s not being cavalier. He’s not prevaricating. He’s organizing.
“Why did you marry me?”
Fox looks at the table, at his wine glass, at some point slightly to the left of my face, and then he looks at me directly. “Because you were pregnant.”
“Would you have married me if I weren’t pregnant?”
“No.”
One word. Four walls of it, solid all the way around.
I knew it was coming—I have known it since the hallway, since I drove home with both hands on the wheel and very carefully did not cry—and it still lands like a bomb going off.
“You never loved me.”
“I never said I did,” he reminds me softly, kindly.
That’s true.
“But I know that you thought I did,” he adds carefully.
Oh, look at this man’s honesty! Now that he’s cornered, he’s spilling it all.
