Chapter Seven: What Damien Didn't Know
1724 Words
Damien called at seven.
She had been expecting it. She had told him she would call and then hadn't, which was unusual enough for her that he had given it until seven before reaching out himself. That was Damien. Patient without making you feel like patience was something he was performing. He gave people room and then checked in quietly when the room had been given long enough.
She answered on the second ring.
"Hey." His voice was warm and unhurried. She could hear something low in the background, music or television, something easy. "Tough day?"
"A little," she said. She was sitting on her couch with her knees pulled up and a cup of tea going cold on the cushion beside her. "The writing was difficult."
"Patricia's manuscript?"
"Yes." She had not lied. The writing had been difficult. She had eventually found her way into the chapter, had written nearly a thousand words by late afternoon, but the process of getting there had been like pushing something heavy uphill and she was tired in a way that went beyond the work.
"You'll get there," Damien said. "You always do."
She nodded even though he couldn't see it. That was the thing about Damien. He believed in her capabilities with a consistency that required no maintenance. He never doubted her and he never made a show of not doubting her. It was simply a fact he operated from.
She should tell him.
She knew she should tell him. She had known it since the moment she'd walked out of Groundwork and felt the weight of Elias still sitting in that cafe behind her. Damien deserved to know that her past had shown up in her city, that her ex-fiancé, the man she had told Damien about only in the broadest possible terms, was currently staying somewhere nearby and had told her he would be there for a few days.
She opened her mouth.
"How was your meeting?" she asked.
She heard him shift, settling into whatever chair he was in. "Long. The Morrison project is behind and nobody wants to take responsibility for why, so we spent three hours doing the thing where everyone talks around the actual problem." A short pause. "But it's fine. These things sort themselves out."
"They do," she agreed.
They talked for twenty more minutes. Easy, comfortable conversation about his week and her work and the vineyard weekend in November, which his sister had been sending increasingly detailed itineraries about, each one more ambitious than the last.
"She's included a wine pairing dinner, a morning hike, and something called a grape pressing experience," Damien said. "I don't know what that involves but I'm mildly concerned."
Liora almost laughed. Almost. "It'll be fun."
"You say that now."
"I mean it."
"I know you do." A pause. Softer now. "I miss you. It's been almost two weeks."
"I know. I'm sorry." She pressed her free hand flat against her knee. "After the vineyard thing we should plan something. Just us."
"I'd like that."
They said goodnight. She put the phone down and sat in the quiet of her apartment and looked at the opposite wall and thought about the fact that she had just talked to her fiancé for twenty minutes and had not said a single word that mattered.
She was not a dishonest person.
She had worked very hard at being honest, especially after spending years helping other people find true language for their experiences, there was something in her that rejected the false version of things. She could not write authentically about love and grief and hope and then live inside a sanitized version of her own life. It didn't hold together.
And yet here she was.
She picked up her tea. It was cold. She drank it anyway.
She couldn't sleep again.
It was becoming a pattern she didn't like, lying in the dark with her thoughts doing their unsupervised thing, going places she hadn't given them permission to go. She lay on her back and stared at the ceiling and told herself, methodically, all the reasons she had built the life she had built.
She had chosen Portland because it was far enough from everything that had happened and different enough in character that nothing in it reminded her of before. She had chosen her work because it gave her access to the full range of human feeling without requiring her to be exposed. She had chosen Damien because he was good and kind and real, because being with him felt like standing on solid ground, and after what Elias had done to her she had decided that solid ground was what love was supposed to feel like.
She believed that.
She did believe it.
She turned onto her side and looked at the nightstand. The key was still there. She had not moved it and she had not done anything with it and she still had no idea what it opened, and she was starting to think that the not knowing was its own kind of problem, something she was going to have to solve eventually regardless of whether she wanted to.
He needs to know.
Four words from someone who knew enough about her life to have access to what was under her bed. Someone who had also known enough about Elias to know where to send the box.
She thought about who that could be. She had been thinking about it for days and arriving at the same place every time, which was nowhere definitive. Sienna didn't have a key to anywhere Elias could be reached. Damien didn't know enough of her history to have known about the letters. Her mother knew about the letters but not about the box specifically, and her mother was in Bend and did not own a courier uniform.
She was missing something.
She sat up and turned on the lamp and reached for the notepad she kept on the nightstand for the middle of the night thoughts that needed somewhere to go. She wrote down every person she could think of who had been in her apartment in the last year. Sienna. Damien. Her building's maintenance man, who had come twice. A friend from a writing group who had come for dinner once in the spring.
She looked at the list.
None of them made sense.
She put the notepad down and turned the lamp off and lay back down and thought about letter forty-one.
She had not thought about that letter in a long time. It was one of the earlier ones, written maybe six weeks after the wedding that hadn't happened, when the anger had started to ease slightly and something more honest had begun surfacing underneath it. She had written about the morning after they'd first met. The coffee shop in Manhattan, the one on the corner near her old apartment, where she had gone the morning after their first date and sat with her coffee and been annoyed to discover that her first thought upon waking had been about something he had said.
He had remembered it.
He had read two hundred and fourteen letters and he had chosen that one to recite back to her, not one of the angry ones, not one of the devastating ones. The one about the beginning. About the moment before any of the damage was done.
She lay in the dark and thought about why he would have chosen that one, and the answer she kept arriving at was the one she didn't want.
Because it was about when she had loved him before she'd known she was going to. Before the love had learned to protect itself. The cleanest version of it. The version that had nothing to do with weddings or vows or the long logistics of being left.
Just the morning after the beginning, and a woman who had already known she was in trouble.
She pressed her face into the pillow.
She was not going to call him.
She was not going to seek him out. She was not going to think about the way he had looked at her in that cafe, steady and undone at the same time, like a man who had finally seen something clearly and was not sure how to stand in the truth of it.
She was not going to do any of those things.
She had Damien, who was good. She had her work, which was good. She had this apartment and this city and this life she had built from scratch with her own hands and her own stubbornness.
She had all of that.
She closed her eyes and told herself firmly that it was enough.
Somewhere in the city, twelve minutes away according to Rowan Hale, Elias Voss was in a hotel room probably not sleeping either.
She did not think about that.
She thought about it anyway.
She was at her desk by seven the next morning, earlier than usual, driven there by the particular restlessness of a bad night. She opened Patricia's manuscript and read back through the thousand words she had written yesterday. They were good. Genuinely good, she thought, which was not something she said about her own work lightly. The fight scene had come out honest and raw and true in the way that the best writing always was.
She read one paragraph three times.
She had spent so long being careful with herself that she had forgotten what it felt like to be known. Not the surface version of being known, the preferences and habits and history that any attentive person could learn. The other kind. The kind where someone held the most unguarded parts of you and you didn't have to explain them.
She had written that yesterday afternoon, within an hour of walking home from the cafe.
She stared at it now and understood, with the clear and uncomfortable honesty that good writing always demanded, exactly where it had come from.
She saved the document and closed the laptop and went to make more coffee and stood at the kitchen window watching Portland do its morning thing, gray and patient and entirely indifferent to the fact that something inside her, something she had been very confident was finished, had just moved.
Not much.
But enough.
- Writer
