Chapter 124 What needs to be done

Chapter 124 What needs to be done
Nora’s POV 

She was crying and smiling at the same time. That was the thing that broke me open.

Not the hospital, or the floor I had scrubbed on my knees with shaking hands while the sun came up because I couldn’t let her come home and see it, or the chair I sat in for hours outside the surgery doors. Not any of the things that had happened in the last days that qualified objectively as the harder things, but this...

Seeing Alexa with her eyes wet and her mouth curved, looking at me like I had done something remarkable when all I had done was run a bath, make stew and read the discharge card carefully.

Something in my chest that had been held at tension since I walked into this apartment yesterday evening and turned on the light…something that had been pulled tight and tighter through the hospital, the police and Natalie, all of it…released. All at once.

I felt my own eyes go.

Not the gradual filling that gave you time to decide whether to let it happen. Just there, Immediately, like her tears had given mine permission.

I pressed my lips together and that didn’t help at all.

She made a sound. Half laugh, half something else.

I made the same sound back.

Then I was around the table and she was turning toward me as I put my arms around her carefully, always carefully now,  not to alter the healing, and she put her one free arm around me. We sat there at the table in the evening light of the apartment and cried.

Not about anything specific.

About everything.

We cried until we didn’t anymore.

That was the simple truth of it. We cried and then at some point the crying had run its course the way it always did and what was left was just the two of us at the table with puffy eyes and the smell of the stew still in the apartment, the evening light doing its gentle thing through the windows.

She laughed first.

Fully this time, not the half-laugh from before. The real one, starting in her shoulders, taking her face over.

“We’re a mess,” she said.

“Complete mess,” I agreed.

She reached up and wiped her face with the back of her hand and I did the same, we looked at each other across the small distance that remained between us and the evening sat quietly around it all.

I didn’t plan when to say it.

I had thought about it in the hospital. I had sat with it through the discharge and the car ride. I knew I was going to say it. I just didn’t know when.

And now that the crying has subsided and the laugh is  happening, and the evening was soft around us, something in me said.. now. Not because it was the right time. There was no right time for this. But because waiting for the right time was just another word for not doing it and I was done not doing things.

“Alexa,” I said.

She looked at me. Still with the remnants of the tears in her eyes, and the laugh on her face, the specific openness that came after both of those had moved through a person.

“I need to say something,” I said.

Something shifted in her expression. A small adjustment. The shift of someone reading the register of what was coming and beginning to prepare.

“It might…” I stopped. Started again. “What I’m about to say is going to sound somehow to you. Or it might sound like I don’t mean it. I need you to know before I say it that I mean every word of it.”

She was very still.

“Okay,” she said.

I looked at her face.

This face. That I had memorized once and had spent years trying to un-memorize and had failed at completely. The face that had produced in me something that I understood now was not going anywhere regardless of what I decided. That was why I had to say it. Because it wasn’t going anywhere.

“I want you to go back,” I said. “To your family.”

The room went silent, like a forgotten graveyard. Alexa looked at me.

I held her eyes seriously.

“Nora…”

“Let me finish,” I said gently. “Please. Let me get through it.”

She pressed her lips together. Nodded once. The nod of someone doing something that cost them.

I breathed.

“Our love keeps hurting people,” I said. “That’s the truth that I’ve been sitting with since the hospital. Since I came home and found you on that floor.” I kept my voice steady. “Every time we find our way back to each other something gets broken. Not just us…the people around us. Leon. Aria.” I paused on Aria’s name because it deserved the pause. “ That little girl needs her mother.”

Something moved across Alexa’s face.

I kept going because if I stopped I wouldn’t start again.

“You lost everything to be here,” I said. “Your marriage. Your home. Your daughter’s daily presence. Your whole life that you had built for years.” I looked at her steadily. “And I love you for it. I love you for choosing me even knowing what it cost. But that’s exactly why I can’t let you keep paying it.”

“Nora…”

“You almost died,” I said. “In this apartment. On that floor. You almost died and it was because of me. Because Natalie followed the thread of me here and decided that the way to hurt me was through you.” I felt the words costing me as I said them and I paid the cost because the cost was not the point. “I am not willing to be the reason you keep getting hurt. I’m not willing to be the reason Aria grows up without her mother.”

Alexa’s jaw was tight.

“What we have is real,” I said. “I am not standing here telling you it isn’t. I am not telling you that what happened between us was nothing. It was everything. It has been the most real thing I have felt in more years than I can count.” I felt my voice trying to do something I wasn’t going to let it do and I held it. “But sometimes love isn’t enough. Sometimes the most loving thing… the biggest version of love, the one that costs the most… is stepping back….is to let go.”

The evening light was doing its final thing now. The last of the day’s warmth in the room, gentle and dimming.

“Your daughter needs her mother,” I said quietly. “ The way mothers were supposed to be present.” I looked at her. “Leon is…whatever happened between you, he is a good man who loves you, and has been holding your family together while you’ve been here. And maybe it’s too broken to repair. Maybe too much has been said and done. But you owe it to Aria to try.”

Alexa’s eyes were bright.

Not the crying kind. The other kind.

“You deserve a life that isn’t constantly on fire,” I said. “You deserve to sit at a dinner table with your daughter and not be looking over your shoulder. You deserve Leon’s steadiness and Aria’s childhood memories, and the house that still has you in the furniture.” I stopped. “You deserve all of it. And I…” My voice cracked… the thing I had been holding it from doing. I waited for it to come back. “I want you to have it. Even though it means I don’t.”

The room was very quiet.

Alexa looked at me for a long time.

Something was happening in her expression that was going through too many things too fast for me to track. I watched it move through her face and I held my own steady because if I let it go now neither of us was going to get through this with the clarity it needed.

“So that’s it,” she said finally.

Her voice was low.

“That’s not…”

“You’re telling me to go.” The low voice had something underneath it now. “After everything. After…” She stopped. “After I gave up my family to be here. After I did the unbelievable just to be with you. After I…”

“I know,” I said.

“Do you?” Her voice went up. “Because it doesn’t sound like you know. It sounds like you’ve made a decision without me. Again.” She looked at me with eyes that had moved past the brightness and into something more heated. “You don’t get to decide what’s best for me Nora. You don’t get to look at my life and decide which parts I should keep and which parts I should walk back to.”

“Alexa…”

“No.” She pushed back from the table.

Slowly… she had to move slowly, the wounds required it, and I could see the anger warring with the physical reality of that, she stood up, straightened, and looked at me with the full force of what was happening behind her eyes.

“I left,” she said. “I made that choice. Not you. Me. And it was not a small choice, it did not come from nowhere and you don’t get to sit across a dining table and tell me to go back like it’s simple. Like I can just…walk back into that house and everything that happened stops having happened.”

“I’m not saying it’s simple…”

“Then stop making it sound simple.” Her voice cracked on the last word and she pressed her lips together. I saw her pull it back from wherever it was going. “You always do this. You decide what’s best and you present it as love and you don’t ask me what I want. What I actually want.”

“What do you want?” I said.

She looked at me.

“What do you want Alexa?” I said. “Tell me. Not what happened or what you chose or what it cost. What do you actually want right now?”

She opened her mouth but closed it.

She looked at me for one more long moment with everything in her face that she hadn’t finished sorting through. Then she turned and walked to the door.

She couldn’t walk fast right now and the slowness of it made it worse somehow, the determination it took to make that exit at that pace with that much pain.

She opened the door.

“Alexa,” I said.

But she walked out.

The door stayed open behind her. I could hear her in the corridor, the slow careful footsteps going toward the lift.

I sat at the table. The evening light was almost gone.

I sat, holding the cost of the thing I had just done and I didn’t try to make it smaller than it was, because it wasn’t small.

It was not small at all.