My Husband Chose His Ex I Became His Regret novel Chapter 82

Chapter 82

Chapter 82

Aidan

I am watching the door again.

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It’s a glass door. The villa opens entirely on the ocean side, floor-to-ceiling panels that fold away to let in the breeze, and on three other sides there are doors that lock with the particular precision of expensive hardware. I checked them at two a.m. I checked them at four. Now it’s morning and Lila is still asleep and I’m standing at the far window with my coffee going cold in my hand, and staring into space.

This is what I am. This is what I have built myself into over thirty-three years – a man whose brain will not accept the word safe because safe is always temporary, always the gap between one crisis and the next, and the only way to survive the next one is to see it coming. My father didn’t see it coming. He built twenty years of work and turned around one Tuesday morning to find the foundation rotted through, and I watched him understand, slowly, that the men at his dinner table had been the mechanism of that rot. I was twelve. I have not stopped watching dinner tables since.

I hear her before she reaches me.

She has a particular sound, not loud, but present in a way I’ve learned to feel before I hear it, the small movements of a woman who grew up being careful about the space she occupied and is still, slowly, learning to take up the right amount. I should turn around. I don’t. I keep watching the ocean.

“What are you looking at?” she says.

“Nothing.”

“Aidan.”

Just my name. That’s all. In the voice that means: I see you, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. She

has a gift for that, for the single word that opens a room I’d locked./

I turn it over for a moment. The lie is right there, polished, ready. I have told that lie in a hundred forms over the course of my life. It has never cost me anything.

“Old habit,” I say instead. “When things are good, I start looking for what’s about to go wrong.”

Silence behind me.

Then she crosses the room. I feel her before I see her, and then she’s standing beside me at the window, her shoulder almost touching mine. She doesn’t say you’re being ridiculous. She doesn’t say there’s nothing there. She doesn’t make me smaller for saying a true thing.

She stands beside me.

“Nothing is about to go wrong,” she says.

“You don’t know that.”

“No,” she agrees. “But I’m still here. And that’s today’s whole job.”

I look at her. At her profile in the morning light, the line of her jaw, the particular way she stands when

Chapter 82

she’s decided something, feet planted, shoulders level, entirely in the present tense. She is not afraid of what the future could bring, even though she has had a great deal to be afraid of

This woman slept through the night.

I sat up in the dark and listened to her breathe and felt something I don’t have a word for, some compound of gratitude and terror that are apparently the same thing when the stakes are high enough. Because this is what I haven’t said to anyone, what I wouldn’t know how to say: I am afraid for her. What it costs to be with me.

My mother left in November. Cold morning, I was nine, and she was simply gone by the time I came downstairs, and my father never explained it in terms I could use and I never asked in terms that required a real answer. I learned: people leave. The closer they are, the more damage the leaving does. The solution is obvious, and I applied it for twenty-five years with considerable success.

Don’t let anyone close enough to leave.

Lila got close anyway.

I have been trying to figure out exactly how she did that for the better part of this last year. I think it happened in the spaces I wasn’t watching, in the late evenings when she’d stay past the end of the workday and we’d talk about nothing, in the mornings when she put coffee on my desk before I asked for it, not because it was her job but because she’d noticed, which is not the same thing. I think she got close because she didn’t try. She was just herself, in all the messy, complicated, resilient reality of that, and I ran out of reasons to maintain the distance.

That was six months before I understood what it meant.

Now she’s my wife and we’re in the Maldives and I’ve spent part of every night monitoring the perimeter of a luxury resort villa.

“I grew up watching my father lose everything,” I say.

She doesn’t move.

“He’d built the company over twenty years. Raised me in it, almost. I spent weekends in his office, learned the business before I learned most other things. And then one year it was gone. Not in a crash. Slowly. Quietly. The men he trusted most were the ones who took it.” I pause. “I learned from that.”

“What did you learn?”

“That safe is a gap between disasters. And if you pay close enough attention, you can see the next one coming.”

She’s quiet for a long moment. Out on the water, something breaks the surface, a fish, probably, catching the morning light. Gone before I can name it.

“Does it help?” she asks. “The watching.”

The question sits there.

No. Not always. Not at two a.m. in a villa with no threats in it, watching a woman sleep who chose to be there, wondering when she’ll understand she made a mistake. No, the watching doesn’t help then. What

09:38 Sat, May 16

Chapter 82

97

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I count them. I stay deliberately, choosing it, because she is warm against my shoulder and the morning is what the morning is and there are forty-eight hours left of this and I am not…. I refuse to be the man who cuts even one of them short before he has to.

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