Two Empires, One Heart

Chapter 3

I don’t know how long I sat at that light before someone behind me leaned on their horn, short and impatient, and I realized it had gone green and back to red without my noticing.

I pulled forward on shaking hands and turned down the first street I recognized, not toward home, not toward anywhere, just away, and parked outside a church I didn’t attend, in front of a gate I’d never opened, and let my forehead rest against the wheel.

I did not cry the way I expected to.

I expected sobbing, the kind that takes your whole body with it. What came instead was quieter and worse, a shaking that started behind my ribs and didn’t seem to have an end, my breath catching wrong, over and over, like my body had forgotten something as simple as how air was supposed to move through it.

The container sat beside me. I looked at it for a long time.

Four months of getting the rice right. Four months of a too big house made smaller by the smell of it, tasting and adjusting at hours I couldn’t sleep through, for a man who looked irritated that I’d walked in early on his own betrayal.

I got out and set it down on the curb.

I don’t know why I didn’t throw it. Throwing it would have made sense, would have been the kind of thing a woman is supposed to do in this moment, loud and final. Instead I set it down carefully, the way you set down something you’ve finished being angry at because you’ve moved past anger into a feeling with no name yet, and got back in the car, and drove.

My phone buzzed twice on the passenger seat. I didn’t look. I already knew it would be him, and I already knew what he’d written would be some version of the same three sentences he’d given me for two years, soft enough to be forgivable.

I turned it face down and didn’t touch it again.

The drive to my father’s took forty minutes. I’d made the same drive in reverse two years ago, in a car full of boxes I never finished unpacking anywhere else, telling myself I was moving toward something instead of away from everything. I remembered thinking, that day, that I was finally becoming someone. I hadn’t understood yet that becoming someone, for Marcus, meant shrinking until there was almost nothing left to notice missing.

The city thinned into streets I used to know by heart, streets I hadn’t let myself drive down in two years, because some part of me knew that if I really saw the house again, I wouldn’t be able to keep pretending I’d made the right choice.

The gate looked smaller than I remembered. Everything from childhood does, I think, once you’re old enough to have broken something you can’t fix.

I sat outside it a long time with the engine off, the yellow dress suddenly feeling like a costume borrowed from someone else’s life. I thought about turning around, finding somewhere with no name attached to it, sitting there until I remembered how to be a person before I let anyone look at me.

The front door opened before I decided either way.

My father stood in the cardigan he’d worn every evening of my childhood, and for a moment he simply looked at me through the windshield, unmoving, as if he were afraid that coming any closer might prove I was something he’d only imagined.

I got out of the car.

I don’t remember crossing the driveway. I remember only that one moment I was standing beside the car and the next I was in front of him, two years of silence collapsing into a few feet of gravel, and I opened my mouth to say something, an apology, an explanation, some version of a speech I must have written and rewritten a hundred times in two years and never once delivered.

Nothing came.

My father looked at the yellow dress, at my face, at whatever was written there that I couldn’t see myself, and asked nothing at all.

“There she is,” he said, quiet, like he’d simply been waiting.

That was what finally broke me. Not the office. Not his hand on my elbow or Wren’s laugh or the forty minutes of silence in the car. Three words from a man I’d been too ashamed to call in two years, said like I had never left at all, like the door had been standing open the whole time, waiting for me to remember it was there.

I don’t know which of us moved first.

I only know a moment later I was in his arms in the doorway of the house I’d turned my back on, crying the way I hadn’t let myself cry in front of anyone in two years, and he held on and said nothing else, because some things only need to be said once, at exactly the right moment, for a person to finally set down everything they’d been carrying alone.