Come home

“You’re home early.”

Jeremy didn’t look up from the couch, remote in hand, like the afternoon I’d just survived hadn’t happened at all. Like I hadn’t spent the last hour learning my own parents had left me a fortune someone had spent years trying to steal from me.

“Doctor’s appointment ran long,” I said, and my voice came out so easy it scared me.

I hung my coat by the door, my hands moving through the motions of a normal evening while my mind kept circling Ashford’s voice. Watch everything. Stay married a little longer than you’d like to.

I hated how much sense that made.

“You look pale.” Jeremy finally glanced over, and for one unguarded second there was something almost like concern on his face. It didn’t reach his eyes.

“I’m fine.” I forced a smile. Two years of marriage had made me good at this, pretending, performing, handing him exactly the version of me he wanted to see.

Except I wasn’t performing for him anymore. Not really. I was performing so he wouldn’t notice the woman underneath had changed completely.

“Come sit,” he said, patting the cushion beside him, and my whole body wanted to refuse. I sat anyway.

His arm slid around my shoulders, familiar and warm and utterly wrong now that I knew what his hands were capable of. I let myself lean into him for exactly as long as it took to remember that his mother had called me a debt to collect.

“I talked to my mother today,” he said, casual, like he was mentioning the weather.

My stomach went tight. “About what?”

“Nothing important.” He turned back to the television, and the muscle in his jaw jumped once, the same tell I’d learned to read across two years of marriage, the only crack he ever let show.

Something important. Always something important, wrapped in nothing important, and I was done pretending I couldn’t see the difference.

“You’ve been distant,” he said, after a while, and I almost laughed at the audacity of it. He’d been the distant one for two years. He just hadn’t noticed I’d stopped reaching for him.

“I’ve had a lot on my mind.”

“Like what?”

I thought about the folder in my bag. The photograph of my parents. The fraudulent claim someone tried to file eighteen months ago, someone who knew exactly where to look and exactly how far to push before leaving a trail.

“Work,” I said instead. “Nothing you’d find interesting.”

He didn’t push. That was the thing about Jeremy, he never pushed unless he already suspected the answer mattered. His disinterest was its own kind of tell.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. I glanced down under the pretense of checking the time.

Xavier: You never answered me. Where were you today?

My thumb hovered over the screen. I typed three different answers and deleted them all, the way I’d started doing every time he asked me something that mattered.

I need to see you, I finally sent. Alone.

The reply came back almost instantly, like he’d been staring at his phone waiting for exactly this message.

Xavier: Name the place.

Something in my chest loosened at that, some tight knot I hadn’t realized I was carrying since I woke up in this life for the second time. Xavier never asked why. He just showed up, every single time, ready before I finished asking.

I told myself it was gratitude. I’d told myself that for two years.

“Who’s that?” Jeremy asked, not really looking.

“Victoria,” I lied, easy as breathing.

He nodded, already bored, already reaching for the remote again, and I sat there beside a man I’d once thought I loved, planning to meet another man in secret, and felt absolutely nothing that resembled guilt.

That should have scared me more than it did.

I excused myself twenty minutes later, claiming a headache, and Jeremy barely looked up to say goodnight. I stood in our bedroom afterward, staring at my own reflection in the dark window, and tried to find the woman who used to cry herself to sleep over a man who couldn’t be bothered to notice she existed.

She wasn’t there anymore. Something colder had taken her place, and for the first time since I woke up three days in the past, I wasn’t sure if that terrified me or steadied me.

Both, maybe. Both at once.

I met Xavier an hour later at a small coffee shop two blocks from my old apartment, the one Jeremy didn’t know I still paid rent on, just in case. Xavier was already there when I arrived, two cups steaming on the table, mine made exactly the way I liked it even though I’d never told him.

“How did you know how I take my coffee?” I asked, sliding into the seat across from him.

He went very still. The same stillness I’d seen in the hospital, a man doing math he didn’t want to be doing.

“Lucky guess,” he said.

“You’ve never guessed lucky in your life, Xavier.”

His jaw tightened, and for one long moment neither of us said anything at all. The coffee shop noise faded around us, the hiss of the espresso machine, someone’s laugh two tables over, all of it distant and unimportant compared to the way he was looking at me right now, like he was standing at the edge of something and deciding whether to step back from it.

“You ask a lot of questions you don’t really want answered yet,” he said finally.

“Try me.”

“Not tonight.” His voice had gone quiet, careful, like he was measuring every word before he let it out. “Not until I’m sure you’re ready to hear it.”

“Ready for what, Xavier?”

He didn’t answer. He just held my gaze a moment too long, like there was an entire conversation happening underneath the one we were actually having, and neither of us was brave enough yet to say it out loud.

“Fine,” I said, when the silence stretched past comfortable. “Then tell me something you can say. Why do you keep showing up exactly when I need you? Why did you know Melissa’s name before I ever mentioned it? Why does it feel like you’re always one step ahead of everyone else in my life, including me?”

“Because I pay attention.” He said it simply, like it was the whole truth even though I could tell it wasn’t. “More than anyone else ever has.”

I wanted to push. I wanted to grab him by the collar and demand he stop circling whatever this was and just say it. But there was something in his face, tired and careful and strangely afraid, that made me hold back.

“You’re keeping something from me,” I said instead. “I don’t know what it is yet. But I will.”

“I know you will.” His mouth curved, not quite a smile. “That’s what I’m waiting for.”

My phone buzzed against the table between us, loud in the sudden quiet, and I looked down to see Jeremy’s name lighting up the screen. Three missed calls. One new message, sent thirty seconds ago.

Jeremy: Come home right now. We need to talk about your father.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​