Kai woke happy and feeling loved, and she hadn’t in a long time. Contented, yes, she had managed that. Able to stand on her own two feet. Able to live alone, be alone, be strong—all those things, she had reached, slowly, starting maybe last spring, or maybe even the grieving process over the winter had been part of it.
But happy—loved—she had kind of forgotten she could feel that way. She knew she didn’t deserve to feel that way, and so now—to wake up warm on a couch, with a chest shifting under her face and an arm wrapped around her—it made tears fill her eyes. Warm tears, the tears she had tried so hard to freeze. Those tears blurred the snow still lazily, gently falling through the window as the sky lightened, as if the snow wasn’t quite ready to yield itself to sun just yet.
The tears spilled over, running silently down her cheeks and plopping onto his shirt. She hadn’t thought he was awake, but one hand came up to stroke her hair. He didn’t speak, and neither did she.
Finally she had to sniffle so badly that she pulled herself off the couch and went in search of a tissue. His hand fell away from her departing back reluctantly, but he didn’t try to catch hold of her. She stood in front of the bathroom sink staring at herself and that made her cry again, for this person in the mirror who used to have so much and who had destroyed all of it. She sat on the closed toilet with her head in her hands and cried and cried.
She had worked so hard to be done with tears like this. And yet their onslaught was almost comforting. Oh, there you are. I’ve missed you. I guess we’re not done with each other after all. She had had to learn how to do things like that, once the pregnancies started failing—learn how to cry inconsolably, learn how to be angry, learn how to recover. She had done a shit hell job of all of them, she supposed, and she was sorry, she was so sorry, but that, too, she had had to learn how to deal with—her guilt and regret and that great grief that was her marriage. That was him.
When she finally cleaned herself up—matter-of-factly, used to this—and came back downstairs, Kurt was asleep again, curled into the back of the couch with the blanket pulled over his head like a willful child, refusing to wake up. It surprised her. Kurt had always woken too easily, bordering on insomniac, as if he found it too troubling to lay his carefulness and control aside and had to pick them back up again as fast as possible. He had always been the first one out of bed in the morning.
She gazed at the long form under the blanket and finally shook her head and went into the kitchen. But there, instead of the Greek yogurt that she usually ate for breakfast these days, for efficient, palatable nourishment, she paused, and rolled her shoulders—and then she smiled suddenly, her whole heart lifting with pleasure at this morning, as she started to pull out ingredients.
As if the tears or maybe the touch of Kurt’s lips had washed away some ugly, jagged splinter blocking her heart.
She made waffles and sprinkled them with powdered sugar, blushing a little bit as she sifted it over the golden waffle. One of the strawberries she cut in half looked exactly like a heart, and she set it in the center of Kurt’s waffle, sifting a little more powdered sugar over it—and then blushed again and whisked the heart away, looking up to find him standing in the archway watching her. Behind him, the sun was starting to break through clouds and limned him in a softly diffused light.
“That smells really good,” he said, heartfelt, just as he had the night before, and she felt her face brighten into something it hadn’t felt in a long time—laughter.
“Poor man, has no one been feeding you?” she teased, and then caught herself, on the edge of the teasing, because there were so many parts to that which weren’t funny at all. She didn’t have the right to laugh with him anymore.
But his eyes snagged on her face for a long moment, and he came forward to the island so that the nimbus around him softened and she could see his smile. Not the smile he had when she made him laugh, but the smile he had always had when she just made him happy. When he was just glad to look at her. “No,” he said quietly.
Tears threatened again abruptly. How could he smile at her? It made her so sad to think of him going for a year and a half without anyone feeding him. Damn it, he deserved so much better than what he had gotten. And she just couldn’t give that better anymore.
She bent her head and stared at the golden waffle, under the weight of what she had done to that happiness. “I’m sorry,” she whispered to the spot in the middle of the waffle where the little strawberry heart had been.