HIS FORSAKEN WIFE HIS GREATEST REGRET

When Grief Opens a Closet

Brett's POV

She had wanted a child so badly. The IVF. The months of trying. The ectopic pregnancy that had taken the baby and the tube together and left her smaller somehow, quieter, like something had been turned down inside her.

And then she was gone. Just like that.

And I was here, in this room, grieving her while trying to help a woman I barely knew, carrying guilt about a child who had died because of a decision I made on the worst night of my life.

This is your punishment. The thought came. Same as it had come in the hospital. Same cold, certain voice.

I didn't argue with it.

Maybe it was.

I sat with my face in my hands for a while.

Then I breathed. Steadied. And then sat up.

I thought about Victoria — not the grief of her, but the kindness of her. What she was actually like. The way she gave things away out of the generosity of her heart.

I knew exactly what she would have said if she was here right now.

Give her the clothes, Brett. Don't be precious about it. She needs them.

I looked at the clothes for a moment. Then I reached past the purple jumper — not that one, not yet, maybe not ever — and found something simple. Dark jeans, soft and well-made. A blue shirt, loose and easy. A light jacket.

I took them off their hangers.

Held them.

The smell of her was in this, too.

I pressed the folded clothes against my chest and stood in the quiet of the room, and closed my eyes.

I'm giving this to Roberta. I hope you understand, I thought. Wherever you are, Vicky. I hope you know why.

The room didn't answer.

But somehow, in the silence of it, I didn't feel like she was angry.

I felt the way you sometimes feel things you can't explain, that she was simply waiting for me to get moving.

The woman needs clothes, Brett.

I almost smiled.

I know, I thought. I know.

I walked out of the room.

Stood outside the guest room door. Then I knocked.

***

Roberta's POV

I stood under the shower longer than I needed to.

When I got out, I wiped the mirror and looked at myself.

Thinner than I remembered. The coma had taken something from my face — a fullness that might never come back. My eyes looked like someone had pressed too hard behind them.

I looked like what I was.

A woman who had been through something.

I dried off and reached for yesterday's clothes.

The smell hit me before I finished pulling it over my head.

Hospital smell. The antiseptic staleness of fabric that had been worn through something. I had been in these clothes the night Ziva died.

I had been in them when Jace pushed me, and I became unconscious.

I need to wear something else.

But there was nothing else. There was nothing else. Everything I owned was in a house. I had just agreed to go back under time pressure with a man I barely knew waiting outside.

I wore it anyway.

It would have to do.

There was a knock at the door.

I opened it.

Brett was standing in the hall with clothes folded over both arms.

I looked at them before I looked at his face. Dark jeans, a blue top, and a jacket.

Then I looked at his face.

His eyes were red.

Not swollen or wet. Just the specific redness of someone who had been crying recently and had pulled themselves back together before anyone could see. I knew that look. I had worn it for most of the last year of my marriage.

He had been crying. These are obviously his late wife's clothes.

"I figured you might want to change," he said. His voice was even.

I looked at the clothes.

I looked at his eyes.

Something sat very heavy in my chest.

"They'll fit, I think. You're about the same—" He stopped. Cleared his throat. "Same size."

I didn't take them.

"I can't take these," I said quietly.

"Why?"

"These are for your wife. " I kept my voice gentle. "I can't—" I shook my head. "I'll manage what I have. It's fine."

He looked at me for a moment.

"You've been wearing those clothes since the night Ziva died."

I said nothing.

"You slept in them. You were in them since yesterday." He held my gaze. "Roberta." A pause. "You need something more comfortable and cleaner."

I pressed my lips together.

He shifted the clothes slightly in his arms. "Victoria bought things to use them. She wouldn't have wanted them sitting in a room when someone clearly needed them." Something moved across his face and was gone. "Please."

I looked at the clothes.

I looked at him.

He was still carrying whatever he had been carrying in that room. I could see it sitting behind his eyes — the weight of having held his wife's clothes and made a decision that cost him something real.

He had done that.

For me.

For a woman he had known for nine days.

I reached out and took the clothes from his arms.

"Thank you," I said. It came out smaller than I meant it.

He nodded once. "I'll be downstairs."

He turned and went.

I stood in the doorway and watched him go and wondered — not for the first time and not without guilt — what kind of man did this. What kind of man sat at a stranger's hospital bed for eight days and cried over his dead wife's clothes before giving it out.

And what would he do if he knew what I was hiding from him.

I closed the door.

The clothes fit like they were made for me.

That was the unsettling part. The jeans sat perfectly at my waist. The top— so much better than anything I had owned in years. The jacket over the top was simple and clean.

I stood in front of the mirror on the wall.

For a moment, I just looked.

I thought about Victoria. The woman in the hospital on the stretcher. I had seen her for thirty seconds at most, and what I had registered was beautiful and loved.

She had worn these clothes.

I pressed my hand flat against my chest.

I'm sorry, I thought. I'm sorry for being in your clothes and in your house right now.

I went downstairs.

Brett was by the door.

He looked up when he heard me on the stairs.

He went still. He was about to reach for his keys and instead stopped moving entirely. His eyes on me. Something passing through them that he didn't put words to and I didn't know if I wanted to hear it.

I knew what it was anyway.

I was wearing his wife's clothes, and for one unguarded second, he was somewhere else entirely.

I walked across the hallway toward him.

"We should go," I said. Quietly. Giving him the out.

He blinked once.

"Yes." He reached for his keys. His hand didn't find them immediately. He picked them up eventually. "Yes, let's go."

We went.

***

The car was quiet.

Not the comfortable quiet of this morning over breakfast. This had texture to it — things sitting unsaid, things felt that neither of us was prepared to examine out loud on the way to confront the ruins of my marriage.

Brett drove.

I sat and looked at my hands and thought about how I was wearing his dead wife's clothes and I had a secret that would change everything between us and I still didn't know how to say it or whether to say it or what it would cost both of us when I did.

"Thank you," I said again. Couldn't help it.

"You already thanked me."

"I know." I looked at him.

He glanced at me briefly. Back to the road.

"She had good taste," I said. "Your wife."

A beat.

"She did," he said. His voice was even, but there was something underneath it. "She was very specific about what she liked. About most things." The corner of his mouth moved slightly. Not quite a smile. "She never apologised for it."

He glanced at me again.

Something shifted in his face. Something that was close to real.

He focused on the road.

Brett pulled up half a block from the house.

"Jace isn't there," he said. "My guys confirmed it twenty minutes ago. But he may be back—"

"I'll be quick."

"Get the important things first. If you hear anything—"

"I'll come straight out."

He looked at me.

"Roberta."

"I'll be careful," I said.