Charlie walked away when neither of us said anything, and Jagger came back to sit next to me on the couch and pull me into his arms.
“I had no idea,” he mumbled against my head once I’d stopped crying.
“I know you didn’t,” I whispered back. “Jagger, I’m so sorry that I kept what your mom was—”
“Don’t,” he begged, interrupting me. “I’m sorry I left, and I’m sorry I yelled at you.” He grabbed the ring on my left hand and began twisting it around my finger. “I’m upset that you felt like you couldn’t come to me, but after I calmed down I understood why you felt that way. I should’ve told you about my mom a long time ago. If I had, we could’ve avoided all of this.”
I didn’t respond because while I agreed with him, I also couldn’t let him take the blame for something that was both our faults, and I knew he would continue to do just that. “What are we gonna do? About your mom, Charlie, and Keith . . . what do we do?”
“I don’t know, Grey. I just don’t know.”
Jagger
December 23, 2014
“I THINK I should go talk to Charlie,” Grey said a couple days later.
I stopped putting the dishes from our breakfast in the dishwasher and turned to look at her. “Are you sure you want to do that?”
“Yeah, I am. There are things I need to tell her, and things I need to make sure she understands.” Grey sat down on one of the bar stools and rested her chin in one of her hands—her eyes unfocused.
We hadn’t talked much about what Charlie had told us. We hadn’t talked much at all. After working a morning shift at The Brew, Grey had come home and pulled me upstairs to our bed. Without a word she shrugged out of her boots and jacket, and curled up on the bed still fully clothed. She’d said all she wanted was to lie down and think, and for me to just hold her.
Hours later and only a few words exchanged between us, I’d gotten dinner and brought it back upstairs to eat with her in bed. She lay between my legs while we ate, and for the rest of the night we only talked about the wedding and another show of my work in Seattle coming up. That is . . . when we talked.
She’d seemed better that morning and had sung to herself while she made breakfast for us, and I’d just been waiting for the moment when she was ready to talk. I hadn’t expected her to want to go straight to Charlie.
“I can call her—” I started to offer, but Grey stopped me.
“No. I want to go to her, not make her come to us.” Grey’s eyes looked off into the distance for a second, then she asked, “You know how you’ve always come to me when I was hurting?” When I nodded, she continued: “Well, right now Charlie is hurting, so I need to be the one to go to her.”
My eyebrows rose as I took in her determined expression. “And you’re not . . . ?” I asked, trailing off.
“Not like I thought I would be. I feel . . . weird. I just feel weird,” she confessed with an unsure smile. “I’m more upset right now for Charlie than for myself. When she told us, it hurt, and I didn’t understand it. I kept thinking that what Ben and I’d had was a lie. But I know it wasn’t. And somehow everything that happened has kind of given me this awkward form of peace.”
“Peace,” I stated dully. “You found out Ben cheated on you and that my sister had his son . . . and you feel peace?”
She sat up straighter and put her hands on the counter, her palms lightly slapping against the granite. “I told you I feel weird! Okay, so Ben knew how you felt about me, and even made sure to not throw our relationship in your face because he loved you. Ben told Charlie he knew I was supposed to be with you. For so long I didn’t know how to keep moving, and I didn’t think I was. But you were always there helping me, taking care of me, making sure that both of us kept moving. Once I knew how you felt, all I could think about was Ben, what we had, and what he would think if he knew how I felt about you. And I know you struggled with your own feelings about it.”
I shook my head when she paused, and stuttered out, “I don’t—where are you—I don’t know how that has made you feel peace.”
“You don’t?” Grey looked directly at me and a beautiful smile crossed her face. “We’ve both wondered what Ben would think. We’ve both struggled with our feelings for each other because of Ben. And now we know. Ben loved me, and I loved him. But he knew I was supposed to be with you, and knowing that, and knowing how he tried to make it easier on you, just tells me that what you and I have together is exactly what Ben would want for both of us. Not just now that he’s gone, but even when he was still here. It is the most calming thing knowing that. Yes, it hurt when Charlie told us. It hurt knowing that he’d cheated on me when I’d been with him for seven years; we’d already talked about getting married so many times, and we came back to Thatch specifically to talk to our parents about moving in together—knowing they would say no, and tell us we needed to be married first. But I have you now, and right now the thing that hurts me the most is what Charlie went through, how he treated her, and how she’s gone through the last two and a half years with this huge secret.”
“So you feel weird,” I finished for her, and her smile widened.
“Yes. I feel weird, and I want to go talk to your sister.”
“All right, then you should. Do you want me to go with you?”