Undone

by Kelly Rimmer

  Jess looks back to my face, finally surprised.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s a gift without agenda.” I shrug. “It just reminded me of you. It still does. You’re beautiful. It’s beautiful. I want you to have it.”

  Jess reaches out and tentatively picks it up. She holds it cautiously in her fingertips, then glances up at me.

  “I do love it,” she murmurs. “When I found it in your drawer, I knew it was for me just because it was exactly what I’d have chosen myself. You know me so well.”

  “If you ever decide that you’re ready to call me a boyfriend or partner or whatever the fuck term you come up with, and if you one day want to, you can just move it to your left hand. Whether you take it or not, whether you wear it or not, whether you wear it on your left hand or right hand, this ring will never be a symbol of ownership. But it can be a symbol that we’re living our lives, side by side.”

  “Living our lives, side by side,” Jess repeats, her eyes swimming in tears. “I really like that.”

  “We’re going to fight and fuck and then fight and fuck some more, but in the end, I think we’re going to keep choosing one another.”

  Jess reaches down and slips the ring onto her right hand. She holds it against her dress, then holds it against her face so I can see it against her skin. My heart skips a beat.

  “Perfect,” I whisper.

  “I’ll tell you this much. You definitely have great taste.”

  “In women and jewelry,” I say, then I motion toward the seats behind me and move to sit. Jess dumps her handbag onto the floor beneath the chair in front of her, curls up on the chair beside me, then reaches across my lap to take one of the glasses of champagne.

  “Should I make a toast?” I ask her jokingly.

  “Let me do it,” she insists. I laugh as she raises her glass. “I won’t toast our happy-ever-after, because we both agree that such things don’t exist. But I will toast to this—to figuring out how to ride the ups and downs of life together. And to you, Jake Winton, my patient, kind love.”

  I blink away tears, and she touches my cheek gently.

  “You’re such a fucking marshmallow,” she whispers, kissing me sweetly.

  “I’m happy,” I say.

  “Me too,” she says as she downs half the glass of champagne in one gulp. “God, that was a day. Broke my heart. Pulled it back together. Packed up and moved across the country. Oh, and your brother says hi.”

  “Did you tell him?” I say, eyebrows high.

  “I told them all. Not just about you. About Tristan and Eric and pretty much everything.”

  “Jess. Wow.”

  “It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. Plus, I do trust them. And I want them to understand me.”

  “And what did they think about us?”

  “They were all sickeningly happy. It was nausea inducing.”

  “So, how’s this going to work for you? Your work schedule, I mean.”

  “I’ll do one week in Palo Alto. Three weeks in New York. Then repeat . . . for . . . at least a few months.”

  “And . . .” I clear my throat. “Where will you live?”

  “I don’t have to stay with you,” Jess says quickly. “I can get my own place.”

  “Do you want to stay with me?” I ask her gently. She gnaws her lip. “Let me ask a different question. If you stay with me, and it’s not working out, what happens then?”

  She looks right into my eyes.

  “I leave.”

  “Exactly. I’ll even help you pack.”

  “Promise?” she whispers.

  “You know I would.”

  She nods, then hesitates.

  “Is your dog going to drive me fucking crazy?”

  “She sure is,” I say cheerfully.

  “Can we cuddle on the couch on Saturday afternoons and watch movies together like complete losers?”

  “Whatever you want, Jess.”

  “I think that is what I want.”

  “Then that’s what we’ll do.”

  EPILOGUE

  Jess

  JAKE WINTON DRIVES me up the wall sometimes, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. He’s in our kitchen right now, bastardizing perfectly innocent popcorn with M&M’s and butter.

  “I got Oreos too,” he tells me with a gleeful grin as he brings the whole tray over to join me on the sofa.

  “You better eat those Oreos properly,” I warn him. He picks one up, cracks it open and gives me a teasing look even as he scrapes the cream into his mouth. “You’re a monster.”

  “You love me,” he reminds me.

  “I must to put up with this shit,” I mutter, then I reach across to the tray of snacks on his lap and snatch an Oreo for myself.

  It’s Saturday afternoon and I’m in my new PMS pajamas—Jake bought them for me for Valentine’s Day. I think he got sick of running the AC on high all the time just so I didn’t die of heatstroke in my Winnie-the-Pooh onesie. These days, I’m rocking a pair of cotton boxers and a tank top, both adorned with bright green hearts.

  Jake loads the movie we negotiated earlier, and I shift closer so he can put his arm around my shoulders, although we’re both extra careful not to disturb the drooling creature who’s sleeping on my lap. The reality is, if I’m at home and seated, Clara is either on my lap or trying to get up on my lap. I’m pretty sure she thinks I’m just a heated dog bed. She has a set of subservient siblings these days—all of whom live very much under her command, just as Jake and I do. Mickey, our rescue greyhound, is asleep in his bed beside the sofa. And Theo and Cleo, my cats, are predictably sitting on the ledge Jake built them on the front window.

  Jake says they love to watch the traffic from up there, but I think they like that spot because it’s the only part of the house where they are safe from Clara’s torment. We still argue about whether cats or dogs are the superior pet, but privately, I’ve come to accept that they both have their charms. One thing we agree on: Theo and Cleo do not notice if we aren’t here. Unlike Mickey and Clara, who both fret so much that since Mickey came to live with us, Reba has more than doubled her daily rate. She’s made a fortune off our motley crew over the past year and a half, but even so, when we told her we were moving back to New York, she actually seemed relieved.

  These months in the Californian sunshine have been the happiest of my life, but my skin can’t take much more of this climate. I need to get back to New York, where at least winter is a miserable frozen wasteland, so my freckles can fade a bit. And my “one week west, three weeks east” plan lasted exactly one month before I missed Jake too much and I flipped the ratio. I live here now, because I quickly came to realize that home is actually wherever Jake is.

  But my work here is done, and my Silicon Valley team now works like a well-oiled machine. There’s not a tech CEO in the country who doesn’t know the name Brainway, and when we floated the company on the stock exchange four months ago, we raised more than enough money to fund our Euro expansion.

  Plus, I’m actually wealthier than Mitch these days. I’ve been gloating about that mercilessly ever since it became official, but the fun has to stop now. He’s recently learned he’s assuming full-time care of his four-year-old niece. Jake and I were already talking about moving back to New York, but the change in Mitch’s situation was enough for us to actively start to plan the move.

  Our family is in New York: Martin and Elspeth and Meowbert, Abby and Marcus and the girls, Izzy and Paul and the baby they’re expecting next month, and Mitch and now little Savannah. When your family needs help, you move heaven and earth to be there for them. Or, as the case may be, you move a whole menagerie of animals and a house full of our combined belongings.

  Jake and I are busy but happy. Clara drives me crazy, but I love her. I tried hiking just to make Jake happy, but I did not love it. We compromised—I go camping with him sometimes, but never for more than two nights. When he wants to do an endurance hike, he plans it for when I’m in New York
working and we run up stupid satellite data bills sexting one another.

  We sleep in on Sundays and when Jake gets home at 4:00 a.m. because he left our bed to say goodbye to a patient, I always wake up to comfort him.

  Part of the journey for me in learning to live and love Jake the way I want to has been working through the trauma of my relationship with Eric, and since I moved to California, I’ve been regularly seeing a great therapist. Jake finds a way to be there for my sessions with her whenever I ask him to. He and I talk a lot too, especially if either one of us feels like the ghosts of the past are coming between us. Sometimes, we cry together. This life with Jake is everything I never knew I wanted, and now, I can’t imagine my future any other way.

  “Uh, Jess?” Jake asks me suddenly. His gaze is on my hand, and I’ve been waiting for this all damn day, so I know exactly what he’s noticed.

  “Hmm?”

  “Did you lose your ring?” he asks. His tone is carefully neutral.

  I look at my right hand, then tilt my head, as if I’m confused. But then I raise my left hand and waggle it in front of him.

  “You mean this one?”

  Jake stares at the ring in its new pride of place on the fourth finger of my left hand. He clenches his jaw. His eyes become suspiciously shiny.

  Look, this whole swapping-hands thing is really going to be a huge pain in the ass, because now every person we see is going to ask if we’re engaged, and then I’m going to have to explain to them that no, we’re not, and we’re not going to be, but that we are in this for the long haul.

  I did this for Jake. He’s taught me that commitment is a gift we give to one another, and I’m ready to stop pretending this love we share is temporary or fragile. Jake and I are rock fucking solid. I’m not easy to live with, which he tells me all the time, but he also tells me it’s much easier to live with me than without me.

  “Thank you, sweetheart,” Jake croaks. I shift Clara out of the way—despite her growl—then climb up onto his lap so I can kiss him.

  Fuck the movie. I have another surprise for him in our bedroom, given I threw the condoms away today.

  “Thank you,” I whisper, kissing him deeply. “I love our life, Jake.”

  “Me too. And I love you.”

  “Why wouldn’t you?” I sigh happily as he slides his hands up under my tank. “I’m completely fabulous.”

  Turn the page for a special preview of Kelly’s upcoming novel,

  Truths I Never Told You

  Coming soon from Headline Review

  PROLOGUE

  Grace

  September 14th, 1957

  I am alone in a crowded family these days, and that’s the worst feeling I’ve ever experienced. Until these past few years, I had no idea that loneliness is worse than sadness. I’ve come to realize that’s because loneliness, by its very definition, cannot be shared.

  Tonight there are four other souls in this house, but I am unreachably far from any of them, even as I’m far too close to guarantee their safety. Patrick said he’d be home by nine tonight, and I clung on to that promise all day. He’ll be home at nine. You won’t do anything crazy if Patrick is here, so just hold on until nine. I should have known better than to rely on that man by now. It’s 11:55 p.m., and I have no idea where he is.

  Beth will be wanting a feed soon and I’m just so tired, I’m already bracing myself—as if the sound of her cry will be the thing that undoes me, instead of something I should be used to after four children. I feel the fear of that cry in my very bones—a kind of whole-body tension I can’t quite make sense of. When was the last time I had more than a few hours’ sleep? Twenty-four hours a day I am fixated on the terror that I will snap and hurt someone: Tim, Ruth, Jeremy, Beth . . . or myself. I am a threat to my children’s safety, but at the same time, their only protection from that very same threat.

  I have learned a hard lesson these past few years; the more difficult life is, the louder your feelings become. On an ordinary day, I trust facts more than feelings, but when the world feels like it’s ending, it’s hard to distinguish where my thoughts are even coming from. Is this fear grounded in reality, or is my mind playing tricks on me again? There’s no way for me to be sure. Even the line between imagination and reality has worn down and it’s now too thin to delineate.

  Sometimes I think I will walk away before something bad happens, as if removing myself from the equation would keep them all safe. But then Tim will skin his knee and come running to me, as if a simple hug could take all the world’s pain away. Or Jeremy will plant one of those sloppy kisses on my cheek, and I am reminded that for better or worse, I am his world. Ruth will slip my handbag over her shoulder as she follows me around the house, trying to walk in my footsteps, because to her, I seem like someone worth imitating. Or Beth will look up at me with that gummy grin when I try to feed her, and my heart contracts with a love that really does know no bounds.

  Those moments remind me that everything changes, and that this cloud has come and gone twice now, so if I just hang on, it will pass again. I don’t feel hope yet, but I should know hope, because I’ve walked this path before and even when the mountains and valleys seemed unsurmountable, I survived them.

  I’m constantly trying to talk myself around to calm, and sometimes, for brief and beautiful moments, I do. But the hard, cold truth is that every time the night comes, it seems blacker than it did before.

  Tonight I’m teetering on the edge of something horrific.

  Tonight the sound of my baby’s cry might just be the thing that breaks me altogether.

  I’m scared of so many things these days, but most of all now, I fear myself.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Beth

  1996

  “What’s the place . . . you know . . . where is the place? What . . . today? No? It’s now. The place.”

  Dad babbles an endless stream of words that don’t quite make sense as I push his wheelchair through his front door. My brother Tim and I exchange a glance behind his back and then we share a resigned sigh. Our father’s speech sounds coherent enough if you don’t listen too closely—the rhythms of it are still right and his tone is clear; it’s the words themselves he can’t quite grasp these days, and the more upset he gets, the less sense he makes. The fact that he’s all-but speaking gibberish today actually makes a lot of sense, but it’s still all kinds of heartbreaking.

  The grandfather clock in the kitchen has just chimed 5:00 p.m. I’m officially late to pick my son up from my mother-in-law’s house, and Dad was supposed to be at the nursing home two hours ago. We were determined to give him the dignity to leave his house on his own terms and this morning Dad made it very clear that he wanted to be left alone in his room to pack for the move.

  Tim and I promised one another we’d be patient, and for four and a half hours, we were patient. He pottered around the backyard doing overdue yardwork—weeding the chaos around the bases of the conifers, scooping up the pinecones, reshaping the hedge that’s run completely amok. Dad’s house is in Bellevue, east of Seattle. Over the last little while he’s been too ill to tend his own yard and we’ve confirmed my long-held suspicion that nature would entirely swallow up the manicured gardens in this region within just a few months if humans disappeared. While Tim tried to wrangle some order back to the gardens outside, I vigorously mopped the polished floors, vacuumed the carpet in the bedrooms and sorted the fresh food in Dad’s fridge to distribute among my siblings.

  But every time I stuck my head through Dad’s bedroom door, I found him sitting on his bed beside his mostly empty suitcase. At first, he was calm and seemed to be thoughtfully processing the change that was coming. He wears this quiet, childlike smile a lot of the time now, and for the first few hours, that smile was firmly fixed on his face, even as he looked around, even as he sat in silence. As the hours passed though, the suitcase remained empty, save for a hat and two pairs of socks.

  “I can’t . . . Where is the . . .” He started lookin
g around his room, searching desperately for something he couldn’t name, let alone find. He kept lifting his right hand into the air, clenched in a fist. We couldn’t figure out what he wanted, Dad couldn’t figure out how to tell us and the more he tried, the more out of breath he became until he was gasping for air between each confused, tortured word. The innocent smile faded from his face and his distress gradually turned to something close to panic. Tim helped him back into his wheelchair and pushed him to the living room, sitting him right in front of the television, playing one of his beloved black-and-white movies on the VCR to distract him. I stayed in the bedroom, sobbing quietly as I finished the packing my father obviously just couldn’t manage.

  This morning Dad understood that he was moving to the nursing home, and although he’d made it clear he didn’t want to go, he seemed to understand that he had to. This afternoon he’s just lost, and I can’t bear much more of this. I’m starting to rush Dad, because I’ve finally accepted that we need to get this over and done with. I guess after a day of getting nowhere, I’m ready to resort to the “rip the Band-Aid off” approach to admitting him to hospice care. I push his wheelchair quickly away from the door, down the ramp my sister Ruth built over the concrete stairs, down to the path that cuts across the grass on the front yard.

  “Lock the wall,” Dad says, throwing the words over his shoulder to Tim. In the past few weeks, I’ve found myself arguing with Dad, trying to correct him when he mixes his words up like this. Tim’s told me not to bother—Dad can’t help it, and correcting him won’t actually fix the problem. My brother is definitely much better at communicating with Dad than I am. He calls back very gently,

  “I’m locking the door. Don’t worry.”