He sat up. I felt the mattress shift. Felt the distance open between us like a wound.
"What happened to—" He mimicked my voice, high and eager, a cruel little imitation of the woman I'd been on our wedding night, the girl who had believed that love could grow in a house built on obligation. "'I don't care about your ex. You're mine now, and it's all that matters!'"
The words hung in the dark. My own words, thrown back at me like stones.
I heard him let out an exasperated sigh. The kind that said I am the reasonable one here. I am the one being patient.
"Can you quit acting like a jealous wife? I could've kept this from you. I didn't have to tell you anything. I could've handled it quietly, the way things are supposed to be handled in this family. But I chose to be transparent, because that's what husbands are supposed to do." His voice rose, just slightly. Just enough to cross the line between frustration and accusation. "Now here you are, giving me the silent treatment."
He let all his frustrations out. Every one of them. How ungrateful I was. How difficult. How he'd been nothing but honest with me, and this was what he got. The words piled up in the dark room like debris after a storm, and I lay there and let them fall around me.
In the end, he said, "Look. You wanted a baby. And here I am, trying to support you. But you're rejecting it. Guess I should just sleep on the couch tonight, huh?"
He stood. The floorboards creaked under his weight. He grabbed his pillow with a sharp, theatrical motion, and then the door slammed hard enough to rattle the crucifix on the wall.
In the silence that followed, I couldn't help but laugh.
It came out broken. A fractured sound in the dark, muffled by the pillow, my body shaking with it. Laughing at how messed up my marriage was and how clueless I had been. How completely, devastatingly clueless.
To him, saying sorry was something he only did so that I would forgive him. That was the entire transaction. He offered the words; I accepted them. And if I didn't accept them, then I was the problem. The jealous wife. The unreasonable woman. The girl who should have been grateful that a man like Simone Valente came home to her at all.