The Savior’s Trap

Chapter Eight – The Long Way Home

The kitchen looked like a showroom—white marble island, brass fixtures, a fruit bowl that never seemed to lose a single glossy apple. Richard stood at the sink staring through the window at the square of backyard his new wife had turned into an i********: set: string lights, two teak chairs, an ornamental lemon tree that would never know winter. He turned the tap off and on again as if his hands needed a task. The faucet hissed obediently.

“Did you call the roofer?” Tessa asked, not looking up from her phone. She wore an oversized sweatshirt that swallowed her hips, bare legs, toenails the color of diluted cherries. Twenty-five, maybe twenty-six. Fifteen years felt like an entire suburb between them.

“I emailed him,” Richard said. “He didn’t reply.”

“Email isn’t calling,” she said, thumbs still moving, a tiny click with every acrylic nail. “The bedroom still smells like damp after the rain.”

He clenched his jaw. “It rained last night. We’re not melting.”

Tessa raised her eyes, all innocence polished to a high shine. “Babe, mold is dangerous. Do you want us to get sick?”

He wanted to say we’ve been sick, but he didn’t. He wiped the sink as if the steel itself needed comfort. “I’ll call tomorrow.”

She set the phone face down and leaned on the island. “The mortgage is due next week,” she said, a sentence that always came out of her mouth like a dare.

“It’s on autopay,” he said, too quickly.

“Is there money in there?”

Richard exhaled a laugh that had no humor in it. The old house had been paid down to a friendly hum; this one roared every month, as if the walls charged a fee for their right angles. “Yes.”

“You said that last month and then there was a ‘temporary hold’ and I thought we were going to get a letter.” She made air quotes with delicate fingers. “I don’t like letters.”

He rubbed his temples. “There’s money.”

Tessa tilted her head like she was listening to a song only she could hear. “You’ve been… tense.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re not.” She walked around the island and opened the fridge, peered in, closed it like it had answered rudely. “We need oat milk. And lemons for the tree’s aesthetic. Also—” she tapped the counter with a nail, counting— “you promised we’d go to Sonoma next month and stay at the place with the soaking tubs. I told my sister.”

Richard stared at the lemon tree outside the window, at the fairy lights sagging just slightly in the middle, the string bowed under the weight of wanting to be pretty every night. “We’ll see.”

“‘We’ll see’ isn’t a plan.”

“I’m working on three deals,” he said. “I can’t just—”

She sighed, loud, the sound a door closing. “You always ‘can’t just.’”

He turned to look at her. She was beautiful in the way sunlight pretends to be simple—clean lines, dewy skin, hair in an artless knot that probably took ten minutes of intention. He had once thought that beauty would make the rest of his life easier to look at. Instead it made every flaw brighter by comparison.

“Did you book the service for the car?” she asked, pivoting. The conversation moved like a ping-pong game he didn’t want to play.

“Yes,” he said, and then added, because he wanted to win something, anything, “and I paid the HOA fine.”

“For what?”

He hesitated. “The garbage bins were visible from the street on Tuesday.”

Her mouth fell open. “They hate us.”

“They don’t hate us.”

She lifted her phone again, then put it down without unlocking it. “Richard, I know you think I’m just… noise, okay? But I need to feel like we’re moving forward. Not just… surviving. I didn’t marry you to feel like I’m your emergency.”

The words landed with a dull thud. He leaned both hands on the counter, his wedding band making a soft click against the stone. “I didn’t marry you to feel old.”

Silence. They stared at each other over a bowl of perfect apples.

Tessa’s mouth softened first. “I’m not the enemy,” she said quietly. “I want you. I want us.” She came around the island and slid her arms around his waist, pressed her cheek to his back. Her skin was warm. “You get so far away in your head. I can’t reach you there.”

He closed his eyes. The scent of her shampoo—peach and something floral—rose up. It should have soothed him. It didn’t. The kitchen clock ticked as if to remind them that time hadn’t stopped to watch.

Tessa turned him gently to face her and rose on her toes to kiss him. Her mouth was practiced sweetness; her hands slid under the hem of his shirt, palms cool against his ribs. “Come upstairs,” she whispered. “Let’s reset.”

Reset. As if they were a router she could unplug and plug back in. He pulled away, too fast. “Not now.”

Color rose in her cheeks. “Because of the roofer? Or the bins? Or the money?”

“Because I’m not in the mood.”

She let her hands fall. “You’re never in the mood when it’s about me,” she said, and the sentence came out like she had been saving it for a while. “When it’s about her, you drive across town.”

Richard felt something inside him flare. “Don’t.”

“You think I don’t know when you go past the old house?” She wasn’t shouting, but her voice sharpened. “You think I don’t see the location in our car app? You sit around the corner like a widower, and then you come home and pretend you just needed gas.”

He reached for his keys without thinking, the metal ringing like a bell when they left the dish. “I’m going for a drive,” he said.

“Of course you are,” she said, arms crossed now, ankles crossed too, a fortress in bare legs and a sweatshirt. “Maybe wave to her from the curb.”

He didn’t answer. The front door opened and closed like the breath of a patient machine.

Outside, the air cooled his face. The car greeted him with its quiet, expensive purr, seat molding around his shoulders like a memory that had decided to be kind. He backed out, hands white on the wheel, and turned onto the street that led to the larger street that led to the other life.

He didn’t always drive there. Sometimes he circled the park, watched men in their forties running in shoes that promised joint forgiveness. Sometimes he parked by the lake and let the ripples tell him that nothing important ever stayed smooth. Tonight his hands steered without asking him. The city slid by in glass and brick and small squares of lighted windows.

He told himself he just needed to move. That he wanted wind. That he wasn’t going anywhere in particular. That he was a man who liked to drive at night, nothing more.

Ten minutes later, he turned onto Elena’s street.

It hadn’t changed: the maple that dropped too many leaves in October, the neighbor’s porch with the two rocking chairs nobody rocked, the curve where the road pretended to be shy. He eased the car to the curb half a block down, the way he always did when he lied to himself. He turned the engine off but left the power on, the dashboard clock shining a soft, traitorous light.

The house was mostly dark. One lamp in the living room, a wash of gold against the curtains. Upstairs, a rectangle of light glowed in the front bedroom. The second-floor dormer windows gave the illusion of eyes watching the street. He knew the floorboards in that room, the corner that creaked when you stepped too close to the radiator. He knew where the baseball bat had leaned.

He told himself he would sit here for two minutes. He told himself he just wanted to make sure she was okay, as if worry were a license to haunt. He told himself he was not, in fact, the man his son had started to see clearly.

Movement in the upstairs window.

Elena crossed the room wearing a robe, the belt knotted in the front. Her hair was down, a waterfall that had always made him think of Sunday mornings. She paused at the dresser, opened a drawer, closed it. Turned her head slightly as if listening to some small sound he couldn’t hear. She looked… tired. Not tragic. Not devastated. Just tired in the way people are when they carry themselves like furniture all day and then stand up and remember they’re human.

Richard gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles whitened. He remembered a thousand small things at once: the way she said coffee like it was a prayer, the time she cried in the pantry without making a sound, the night she fell asleep on the couch with a book open face down and his jacket over her feet. He had left those things. He had left the version of himself who had known them.

In the kitchen of the new house, Tessa would be opening her phone again, choosing anger or hurt or both.

Elena moved away from the window, vanished beyond the frame. He waited, suddenly, absurdly, as if she would return and look out and see him and wave, as if they were still the kind of people who waved. She didn’t come back. The light stayed. The house breathed.

He thought of Kevin. The call logs he pretended not to read. The new bass in his son’s voice when he said I’m fine. The last time they’d had lunch, Kevin had watched him the way a young man measures a mountain he used to assume would never crumble. “Mom seems… okay,” Kevin had said, eating fries without ketchup, like a child who’d forgotten the ritual. Richard had nodded and wanted to say She was okay before I left, and then remembered that this, too, was untrue or at least imprecise.

A shadow flicked at the edge of the upstairs window—Elena again, maybe just passing. He imagined knocking on the door like a neighbor, asking to borrow a tool, a cup of sugar, a reason to stand on the old rug and say something right. He imagined her face if she opened it. He imagined himself in every possible version of that moment and none of them were good.

He laughed once, quietly, the sound small and sour in his throat.

A porch light clicked on three houses down. A man in slippers went out to bring in a package and stood for a second on his steps, looking at the sky like he had asked it a question. The ordinary tenderness of that gesture hurt Richard in a place he didn’t have a name for.

He looked back at the window. The light stayed. The shape did not return.

Richard put the car in drive. The engine hummed obediently, like a dog that forgives too easily. He took one last look at the house—at the dormer that had never stopped being a face—and then he shook his head at himself, at the night, at the version of him that believed proximity could undo decisions.