Page 80 of Season of Gifts

Jay dipped his head.“Have you told Henry?”

“Not yet.”Squeezing her eyes shut turned headlights from the other direction into floating orbs in the darkness.She stared through the afterimages speckling Jay’s face.“I didn’t tell him I was going, either.I wasn’t sure if I would even get out of the car.And I thought…”

Now probably wasn’t the moment for a dissertation on all the baggage she’d heaped into their marriage.But she’d already proven her judgment was for shit.And fuck, she would have to talk to Ollie before her sister called home to chat with Mom and found out by accident.She’d been so certain that confronting Dad would be empowering.Freeing.Maybe part of it was.But it also felt exhausting, like trying to pull up a runaway horse before he stepped in a gopher hole and threw her.

“That you were doing the right thing?”Jay held no judgment in him; his earnest desire to understand, to help her or make this easier for her, bled right through his eyes and her screen.

Nausea rolled in her stomach.She’d been trying to do the “right” thing for two weeks, and she’d pretty much succeeded in hurting all of the people she loved.“I told myself I was protecting you from having to deal with my stress while you both have so much of your own.But that never seems to work out, does it?Kinda just makes things worse.”

“Well, and then you beat yourself up about making the choice to do the thing, because if you’d talked about it first, maybe you’d’ve been ready for the worst.”He slouched down—was that brick behind him?The fireplace.He resettled the phone, maybe propping his elbows on his knees.The angle made him smaller, younger.“But if you’d talked about it first, maybe you wouldn’t have done it.And you felt like you had to do it.Like if you didn’t do it, you wouldn’t be able to breathe.”

He might’ve just meant visiting the farm in the fall.But he didn’t.She couldn’t even pretend to believe he did.“That’s how—” Her voice shook.She’d hurt him.Hadn’t meant to, but she had.“That’s how you feel about going to Maine, right?Every time Henry and I say no, not yet, it’s like you’re suffocating.”

He turned away from the phone.The glow from the Christmas tree illuminated the side of his face, the shifting of his jaw, the drying tear tracks.“I couldn’t do today’s card.So I, so I opened tomorrow’s.Before dinner.I thought that would make it better.”

If he’d asked Henry’s permission, he wouldn’t be falling apart.Which meant he’d gotten so desperate for their company, for a new directive from his dominants, that he’d chosen to break Henry’s rules for the game.She asked the question knowing the answer.“Did it help?”

His head swung in a slow arc.“We were supposed to be together.Here.”He slapped the bricks behind him and flinched.“In front of the fire, you and me and Henry.Like he promised.”

Their first time with the fire’s cozy glow.Bare skin and tongues like flame.Six months they’d been waiting for that moment together.

“I’m sure we’ll…” She couldn’t promise him that.She wasn’t sure of a damn thing.She barely knew what tomorrow would look like, let alone next week or the week after that.Everything depended on Henry and what his mother needed.“I’m sorry, sweetheart.”

“It’s really lonely here without you.”

He gazed into the phone, looking up at her, shaggy hair framing his face, his eyes impossibly dark.

A flash of memory sprinted past, his bitchy sisters still complaining decades later about what a nuisance their baby brother had been.How it took forever for him to stop crying when they shut him in his room.

He had, though.He’d learned to stop because no one was coming.

She and Henry had shut him up in the house and told him to hold the fort.Just for a few days, like that made a difference.That Jay could even admit to being lonely spoke volumes about how much he’d absorbed in therapy.This separation had been awful for him.For two weeks he’d been trying to tell them, in ways big and small, that he needed to be at Henry’s side.And they’d pushed his pleas aside, not recognizing them for what they were.

“I’m trying, but…” Shrugging his shoulders practically to his ears, he breathed out hard.“I’m just not there yet.I’m not on-my-own Jay yet, and it’s like frustrating and embarrassing and—”

“Human.”If she could only find the right words to fix one fucked-up relationship today, let it be this one.“I thought I was always on-my-own Alice, and I was fucking fantastic at it, but that’s not right either.You know, Ollie told me something right before the wedding about strong bonds.”She didn’t need to teach a whole lesson on chemistry.Taking refuge in science wouldn’t get her closer to Jay.“I think sometimes you and I, we’re at these opposite poles of neediness and independence.And we don’t fix anything if we just swap positions.We have to let go and allow the magnetism at the center to pull us in.And our center needs all three of us together to stay spinning in the right orbit.”

That was it, the only truth that mattered.Being together was always the answer for them.She’d wrapped herself in teen-Alice armor and stopped thinking critically about what actually worked for them.Henry had been wearing a Keep Out sign since he’d gotten the call, pulling the same shit Jay had done at his parents’ house, and she hadn’t even asked why.She’d taken his busy-with-medical-stuff distraction at face value because that’s the way Mom had been.But Henry wasn’t anything like her mother.If he’d been thinking straight, ifshe’dbeen thinking straight, Jay would have driven him up the very first night.Been by his side through everything.

Jay rocked side to side, the image swaying with him.“Are you okay?You look angry.”

“Not at you.”She could fix all of this tomorrow with a little arranging.“I’ll be home in less than twenty-four hours.And then we’re fucking going to Maine.We’re not waiting any longer.”

The sudden shift in his body would break her.Tension slid off him.He scrambled up a bit, maybe in waiting pose; the phone grew too tight on his face to tell.But his wide eyes, his upturned mouth: hope lifted him with angelic grace.“Really?”

“Absolutely.”

Whether Henry wanted them there or not.

Chapter forty-two

Henry

Thepaperrefusedtoproduce a satisfactory result regardless of how Henry sketched his opening strokes.The quiet rasp of Mother’s pencils beside him compounded the atypical frustration that jabbed at him like unwanted needle play.

At her request, he’d arranged their soiled dinner dishes in a heap and positioned the tray at the foot of the bed to provide a subject for after-dinner amusement, but thus far he’d merely ghosted in a handful of guidelines.The activity ought to have been soothing.He’d been finding comfort in the practice for thirty-two years.Alas, not tonight.

Dessert had proved less of a battle.An enormous gift basket, arriving as Robert departed, bore an assortment of books and mixed nuts and other heart-healthy snacks.The muffins he and Mother had sampled after dinner would make an excellent accompaniment to breakfast tomorrow as well.

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