The next morning, Emmett called while I was feeding Lily.
I answered because I had decided I could speak to him without promising him anything.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi. Is she awake?”
“She is.”
“Can I hear her?”
I held the phone near Lily as she made a small, impatient noise.
Emmett laughed softly.
“That sounds like her.”
“It is.”
We stayed quiet for a moment.
Then he said, “Can I ask you something about your father?”
I looked toward the nursery door.
“What do you want to know?”
“Who is Bennett?”
I almost smiled.
“Bennett manages the household.”
“That's all?”
“He has worked with my father for years. He helps run the residence.”
“Residence,” Emmett repeated.
I heard him searching for a word that wouldn't make his question sound rude.
“Your father's house is called Kensington?”
“Yes.”
“And the people who work there have been there for a long time?”
“Some of them have.”
He went quiet.
“What?”
“Nothing. I'm just trying to understand.”
“You don't have to understand every detail.”
“I know. But I realized at dinner that I don't know much about your family.”
“You know the parts I've talked about.”
“That's the problem, Nora. I never asked why you didn't talk about the rest.”
I shifted Lily against my shoulder.
“Because I wanted us to have a life that was ours.”
“I thought you didn't like talking about your childhood.”
“I didn't like feeling that people saw my father before they saw me.”
Emmett took a breath.
“I thought he was comfortable. I knew you grew up here, but I didn't know he had people working for him.”
“You met Harrison years ago.”
“I thought he was a family friend.”
“He is, in a way. But he also drives for my father.”
“And Bennett?”
“Bennett has been with the family longer than I've been alive.”
Emmett didn't answer right away.
I could almost see him sitting at our kitchen table, the phone pressed to his ear, looking at the note I had left behind.
“Your father answered my call through someone else,” he said.
“Bennett answered the house phone.”
“He said Kensington residence.”
“That's the name of the house.”
“I thought it was a business.”
“It is a family home.”
“Both?”
“Yes.”
The word seemed to settle between us.
Emmett had spent years thinking of my father as a quiet, well-off man who liked gardening and old cars.
He had never asked what my father did before retiring from the work he still oversaw.
He had never asked why my family name appeared on the gates.
And I had never pushed him to ask.
We had both allowed a comfortable version of my past to stand in for the whole thing.
“Is your father angry with me?” Emmett asked.
“My father is concerned about me.”
“That isn't an answer.”
“It's the one I can give you.”
He exhaled.
“I don't want him to think I'm some man who married you without knowing who you were.”
“Then you should think about why that matters to you now.”
He went silent.
I hadn't said it to punish him.
I wanted him to hear the difference between being embarrassed and being sorry.
“I am sorry,” he said eventually. “Not because of your father. Not because of this house. I'm sorry because I left you alone when you needed me.”
I closed my eyes.
It was the first time he had said it without mentioning the dinner, his mother, or how tired I had been.
“Thank you for saying that.”
“I want to do better.”
“Then you have to do it when no one is watching.”
He didn't argue.
After we ended the call, I stayed in the nursery for a long time.
I could hear my father moving through the hall downstairs.
Somewhere in the house, a clock chimed the hour.
The ordinary sounds made me feel grounded.
I had spent so much of my marriage worrying about how things looked from the outside.
I had worried about whether Emmett's mother thought I was polite enough, whether Maya thought I was too sensitive, whether my husband thought I was making his life harder.
I hadn't spent enough time asking whether I felt safe telling the truth inside my own home.
That afternoon, my father invited me to walk with him in the garden.
I bundled Lily carefully and carried her in the pram while he walked beside me.
The air was cool, and fallen leaves collected along the gravel path.
We stopped beneath the oak tree from the old photograph.
“Your mother loved this spot,” he said.
“I wish I remembered more.”
“You remember more than you think.”
I looked at him.
“Do you think I made a mistake by not telling Emmett about everything?”
“No.”
“Really?”
“You were allowed to have a private life. You were allowed to decide what to share and when.”
He put his hands in his coat pockets.
“But if you want a marriage to last, you need to be able to tell the truth about yourself without fearing that it will change how the other person treats you.”
I thought about Emmett's expression when he saw Harrison at the door.
I thought about the way he had looked around the sitting room.
I also thought about the way he had held Lily.
He had been gentle with her.
He loved her.
That was true.
It was also true that love had not stopped him from leaving us behind.
I was beginning to understand that two things could be true at the same time without canceling each other out.
“Do you think he can change?” I asked.
My father looked at me.
“People can change when they are willing to be uncomfortable long enough to learn something.”
“And if he isn't?”
“Then you will have your answer.”
We returned to the house before Lily grew restless.
That evening, Emmett sent a message asking whether we could meet again.
I agreed to speak with him the following day.
This time, I asked that we meet without his mother or Maya.
He replied, “Of course.”
The next afternoon, we spoke by phone while Lily slept beside me.
Emmett told me he had visited his mother that morning.
He had explained that he was not going to ask her to apologize merely to make me return home.
He had told her that the message she sent was cruel and that leaving me out of the dinner had been wrong.
“What did she say?” I asked.
“She said I was letting you turn me against her.”
“And what did you say?”
“I told her you hadn't asked me to stop seeing her. You had asked me to stop treating you like an inconvenience.”
I sat very still.
It wasn't everything I needed.
But it was the first time he had described the problem without making me responsible for his mother's feelings.
“Did she understand?”
“No.”
“I'm sorry.”
“Don't be. I need to learn how to say no to her without blaming you for it.”
I looked down at Lily's tiny hand resting against her blanket.
“That sounds like a good place to start.”
He asked when we could talk about what came next.
I told him I wasn't ready to decide whether to return.
“I don't want you to think I'm keeping you away from your daughter,” I said. “I want us to figure out how to be parents without pretending the marriage is fine.”
“I understand.”
“Do you?”
“Yes. And if you don't believe me yet, I understand that too.”
I hadn't expected him to say that.
For a moment, I had no answer.
Then I told him we could arrange another visit.
When the call ended, I looked at the photograph on the bedside table.
The little girl on the bicycle was still smiling, even though she was leaning so far to one side that she was nearly falling.
My father had been holding the seat.
But he hadn't done the balancing for me.
I wondered if I could learn to trust myself in the same way again.
That night, I placed the brass key in the drawer beside the photograph.
I didn't need to know every door it could open.
I only needed to know that I had somewhere to go when I needed to find my footing.
Click here to continue reading: PART 12: I Didn’t Return Home Because Emmett Asked Me To, but Because He Finally Understood What Home Was Supposed to Mean
My Husband Put On His Dinner Jacket While I Stood in the Kitchen With Our Six-Day-Old Daughter
Part 11 of 12
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