I stayed in the doorway, not because I didn’t want to go to him, but because it felt bizarre, looking at him in my childhood bedroom. This room, more than any place since, felt like my home.
“What are you smiling about?” he said.
I shook my head. “Can’t answer that, at the moment.”
He smiled. “I’m just glad you’re smiling,” he said. “Is she okay?”
I tilted my head. “Don’t you mean he?”
“No, I mean she. Your mother. I knew your dad was going to be okay. He’s the toughest bird I’ve ever met.”
“They’re both fine. They’re going to be fine.”
“Good. Then come here, already.”
I sat down on the edge of the bed, and Ben put his arm on the small of my back.
“Maddie went to the hotel with Michelle,” he said. “But she asked when she could come back. She asked if she could have pancakes with us in the morning. Isn’t that cute?”
“That’s nice.”
“I told her we are working on keeping the vineyard, which she was thrilled about, but maybe because it’s close to the pancakes. Fine by me if that’s the reason. I feel good with her happy being in Sebastopol.”
I smiled. Then I looked at him, really looked at him, trying to figure out how to say it. “You can’t stay here, Ben.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You can’t stay here with me. Even temporarily. You need to go and start your life in London.”
He looked at me, taking in those words. “And you’re not coming?”
I shook my head, definitive. “I can’t.”
He paused as if considering how to fight this. “I thought we made a new plan.”
“It doesn’t work. You need to be with your kid. Down the street. To take her to soccer. To pick her up from school.”
“She hates soccer.”
I shrugged. “That’s who you are.”
He sat up. “You’re who I am too . . .”
I leaned down toward him, tried to figure out how to explain it. “It isn’t about Maddie. It’s about the part of you that didn’t tell me about Maddie when you could have fit us together.”
He shook his head. “We’re back to this?”
“That’s why you kept them a secret from me, Ben. You didn’t want me to see what I see when I look at you now.”
“And what is that?” he said.
“That part of you wants to work things out with Michelle.”
He was quiet, looking down at the pillow, trying to control his anger. He shook his head.
“Except I decided on us. Isn’t that the important part?”
“Part of you wanted to go the other way. That doesn’t seem like a problem?”
“That seems like reality.” He paused. “We are presented with options and we either take them, or we remember why it isn’t worth it to take them. Why what we’re giving up is too much.”
I nodded, knowing he believed that, and knowing he was wrong. Ben hadn’t picked one option, which was why I sensed the intimacy between Michelle and Ben: They had been living a life together in which that intimacy was all there was.
Ben sighed. “I don’t want to be with Michelle.”
“No, but she is your have-to-have.”
“Michelle isn’t my have-to-have and what does that even mean?”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have to. He realized that I wasn’t talking about Michelle. I was talking about Maddie.
He nodded, not arguing with that. It was the truth, after all. From the minute Maddie had walked into Ben’s life, she was the only thing he could see, as she deserved to be. The rest—me, Michelle—was secondary. As we deserved to be. The problem was that if we were fighting for second place—and who wanted to fight for second place?—the tiebreaker was still to be determined, wedding or no wedding, London or no London. And maybe that was the bigger thing. Suddenly, I understood our life together—so far from my family, with someone who didn’t feel like my family in the way he needed to—was my second place too.
Ben looked at me. He couldn’t argue, so he said something else, which he knew to be true. “And you need to be here?”
I didn’t answer.
“You need to be here,” he said. No question attached. “And not temporarily.”
He always got there, though this time I was there before him. I needed to be in Sonoma.
“What are you going to do?”
“I don’t have a vineyard. I don’t have a family intent on staying. They’re working it out. My parents. My brothers.” I shrugged. “I guess the reasons I want to stay are more complicated than I think they are.”
“Or maybe they’re simpler.”
I pushed his hair out of his face. “I’m not trying to punish you. I’m not mad.”
“I know,” Ben said. “That makes it worse.”
He reached for my hand, laying me down beside him.
“This still feels, in this moment, like where we belong. How do you account for that?”
Ben’s face was so close to mine. He smiled at me, that smile I loved. Those lips, soft and sweet. And I agreed with him. There was a world in which we moved back toward each other, but I couldn’t help but have another image locked in my mind. Another moment. Not tomorrow, but one day. Ben walking down the street with his daughter and her mother. His wife, his hand on her back. An image like the one I had seen in Silver Lake.
But this time I’d be walking toward them. Michelle in town for work, Ben and Maddie tagging along. He’d complain that he still wasn’t used to the cameras, to the scrutiny around their lives, and how much Michelle cared about those things. But he would complain in the way that showed that he was also amused by it, the way we got to be amused by the things we did for love. It would be good to see them. Hearing how Maddie was doing, how they all were doing together. Ben smiling, the charge gone, something kinder there. Something like friendship.
We lay back on the bed, hand in hand. My wedding dress was hanging on the door, still ready to be worn.
“Why do I feel like you’re trying to do the right thing?” he said.
“Because I am,” I said.
Ben turned toward me. “Who says there is a right thing?”
Synchronization. Everything lines up like a sign of where you are supposed to be. But what do you give up? Because you give something up. As simple—and complicated—as the other line, the other way your life could have been if you had taken a different path. If you had gotten into the right car. If you hadn’t gotten out of the wrong one.
“Do not close your eyes. If we fall asleep, I won’t be able to convince you,” he said.
Then he did.
Everything Worth Doing It was 9 A.M., so I went back to the hospital to see my father. He was sitting up in bed, his color back. He looked like himself, which was an enormous relief, the tears rushing to my eyes.
He stopped me with his arm, with a quick wave of it. My father had never liked tears and he didn’t want to watch mine now, not on his watch, not when he didn’t have the energy to stop them.
“I hate it in here,” he said.
This instead of hello.
“I really hate it,” he said.