She tried again. “I guess I don’t get why you didn’t feel like you could. If not at first, then before you checked out. I admit I might not have reacted well, but anything would have been better than this. How can I ever trust you again?”
Finn was trembling. Shock must be setting in. “You don’t have to. We won’t be married anymore. And I’ll be … wherever they send me.” He said “they” as if he were talking about some all-encompassing hypothetical and not a very real federal agent who had been sitting at Violet’s kitchen table not forty-eight hours ago, telling her that her husband might as well have been a stranger. And yet, the most unexpected thing now, seeing him like this, was that he was not a stranger at all. He was still Finn. And for the moment, at least, she was still his wife.
“Last time I checked, you’re my son’s father. Tell me again why I don’t have to trust you?”
Finn looked properly chastened, but he didn’t backpedal. “For starters, I think Uncle Sam is going to have a big hand in my parenting moving forward.”
“I get the feeling Caitlin wants me to tell them this has all been a big misunderstanding.”
Finn stared at her, and she saw something there. Hope? Despondence? She couldn’t tell.
“Was it?” she asked. “A big misunderstanding?”
“Not really,” he said. Then, seeing her face fall, he added, “The Bear part, maybe.”
Violet’s attempt at empathy faded—she was running out of time—and the fury she’d been suppressing bubbled over.
“The Bear part, maybe?” she repeated, incredulous. “Why don’t you start with the part where you got me comfortable in a beach chair, stuck a drink in my hand, made me think everything was great, and then just disappeared? Do you know what I’ve been through? Do you know that I’ve spent hours being questioned by the FBI? Do you have the slightest idea what it’s been like for me, missing Bear with every bone in my body, so bad I could hardly stand it?”
Her tears threatened to spill over, and she blinked them back. She wouldn’t cry. Not yet. “Forget about what happened with Maribel, or what you decided not to tell me, or why. Why would you do that to me? How could you?”
To her surprise, Finn’s eyes filled with tears too. “Oh God, Vi, I didn’t mean to hurt you. I thought you’d be better off.”
“Better off? How could anyone be better off after that?” Her voice was louder than she intended, and Bear stirred on the couch. She pressed her lips closed tight and leveled her gaze at Finn.
“That day of the accident, the day I fell asleep at the wheel and killed Maribel”—Finn’s voice was barely above a whisper—“I talked her into that drive to see the ocean. And part of the reason was that I couldn’t picture the beach without picturing you there. I was going there with her to erase the image of you and replace it with her. And instead I erased her, forever.”
Finn pulled the blanket tighter around him, and Violet could see that the pool of blood on the floor was still expanding. He needed help. Soon.
“We had absolutely no business being on the road that day. It was the morning after our engagement party. We’d been completely whacked the night before. We’d hardly slept.”
“Her mother said you were trying to be romantic.”
Finn blinked at the mention of Mrs. Branson but then shook his head. “That’s the outside story, smoothed over by my inner PR guy, and by people who want to think the best of me. It’s a nicer story for her that her daughter loved me and it was a whirlwind romantic trip gone wrong. The truth is that our heading to the beach that day was just me being stubborn, feeling disturbed that I’d been reminded of you on the night of our engagement party and wanting to make sure Maribel was the only woman I thought of from that moment on. It seemed so ridiculously urgent. But it wasn’t. We had our whole lives…”
His voice trailed off, and when he spoke again, it shook. “And no matter how hard I try, I can’t get it to go away. The guilt. The pain. The feeling that nothing ended up as it was supposed to. And then all these years later I found myself there at the ocean again, with you, trying to live my life, even though I don’t deserve it, trying to be happy, even though I don’t deserve it, and I realized I still wanted to erase the picture of you and replace it with her.” She winced, and he did too, aware of the pain he was causing. But there was no point in holding back now.
“I couldn’t force myself not to feel that urge to rewrite things. Not even while we were standing there on the beach together that first day of our vacation, watching Bear see the ocean for the first time. It should have been this moment of complete joy, and it wasn’t—only I was the only one who knew that it wasn’t. And I couldn’t stop thinking how unfair that was to you. And what a horrible person I was for thinking that way about my own wife. And all of a sudden I swear to God it honestly seemed like the kind thing to do, to leave you there without me.”
Violet reeled. Intuitively knowing some things were worlds away from hearing them spoken aloud. She clenched her jaw and swallowed hard. “And it seemed kind to take my son with you?”
“Of course not. Hardly. God, Vi, I didn’t plan on it, I swear. I thought I could walk away, but when the moment came—” Finn’s eyes were agonizing pleas. “Bear’s was the only love I could think of that I hadn’t royally screwed up. I think I felt like…”
His words trailed off, and he sighed. “It doesn’t matter. The thought of being so alone again—and of the added agony of missing him—something in me snapped. I just didn’t want to let go.” He shook his head. “Bear deserves to be with you. I know that. Everyone knows that. But you don’t deserve to be with me.”
It did matter. It mattered to Violet what he had felt, and it mattered to her that she hadn’t been allowed to have a say in who deserved what. But it wouldn’t change the outcome now.
“So maybe I’m not your soul mate after all,” she said finally. “Maybe our whole story—how we ended up together but almost didn’t—maybe all of it’s bullshit. Maybe everyone’s story is bullshit. That doesn’t mean we couldn’t have had some kind of love, an understanding. That doesn’t mean we couldn’t still have been parents together to Bear.” Even to her own ears, the words sounded pathetic. A futile, desperate attempt at catching a ship that had already sailed.
“Look,” he said gently, “I found Maribel when I was looking for you. But I’ve spent every day with you looking for her, and I can’t seem to stop. It’s my penance for what I’ve done, and it’s not fair to any of us. I think maybe a part of me thought if it was just me and Bear, I could love somebody the right way, without all this … history, fate, weight. But I know that’s not right. That’s only punishing you both for my own mistakes.”
“You would never have married me if I hadn’t gotten pregnant,” Violet said. It wasn’t a question.
“I tried to do the right thing. I thought I could handle it.”