"I told him I was lonely. That's not the same thing, but he heard it the way he wanted to."
Reggie set his fork down. "And what did you hear from him?"
Sondra's throat worked. "That I was still interesting. That I wasn't just the person who kept the calendar and paid the electric bill and waited. It felt—God, Reggie, it felt like oxygen. And then it felt like dirt. Sometimes in the same hour."
"Why didn't you tell me you were lonely?"
"I did. In small ways. You were tired. I was tired of sounding like a complaint. I started protecting you from my needs because I thought that was love. Then I protected myself from the silence by finding someone who filled it. That part was selfish. I know."
He wanted to hate the neatness of her insight. He also recognized himself in it: the way he had protected her from his exhaustion by simply not coming home, calling it provision, calling it adulthood.
"I'm not going to hit him," Reggie said. "I'm not going to key his truck or call his job. That fantasy is for movies."
"I know."
"I'm also not going to sit here and let you turn this into a project we fix with worksheets."
"I know that too."
Scout shifted, rested his chin on Reggie's shoe. Reggie looked down at the dog and felt, absurdly, like crying for the first time since the doorway.
"I need a few days where we don't decide the whole future," he said. "I need to see if I can look at you without seeing him in the hallway every time."
Sondra wiped her face with the back of her hand. "I ended it. This morning. I called him. He already knew, after last night. He said he wouldn't contact me. I believe him. He isn't—he isn't a villain, Reggie. He's a man who walked into a gap. I made the gap."
Reggie exhaled through his nose. "What's he like when he isn't standing in my hallway?"
The question surprised her. "He's quiet. Divorced three years. Has a daughter in Ohio he sees in summers. He reads history paperbacks and underlines them like a student. He made me laugh about stupid things—bad coffee, the way the adult ed building smells like pencil shavings. He listened. That was the drug. Being listened to without checking a phone."
"I check my phone because Summit texts me alarms," Reggie said, then heard the defensiveness and hated it. "I hear myself. I'm not competing with his paperbacks."