“I’ve started wondering whether Delaney would be happier without me.”
I lowered the paper.
For months, I’d believed Colton was growing tired of my blindness. Now I wondered whether he was struggling with something he was too ashamed to admit.
Still, he had consulted someone about ending our marriage without telling me.
And he had packed a suitcase.
At six fifteen that evening, I heard his car pull into the driveway.
I arranged the documents on our living-room coffee table and waited.
“Hey, Delaney,” he called from the kitchen. “How was your day?”
“We need to talk.”
He entered the living room and stopped when he noticed the suitcase.
“Where did you find that?”
“Under our bed.”
His shoulders stiffened.
I lifted the divorce papers.
“Were you planning to leave me while I was sitting here waiting for you to come home?”
Colton slowly lowered himself onto the sofa.
“Delaney, please let me explain.”
“Then tell me who Joanna is.”
His expression changed.
“Joanna?”
“Don’t pretend you don’t know her.”
He rubbed his face with both hands.
“She’s my therapist.”
“I figured that out. What I want to know is why you’ve been discussing divorce with her.”
PART 3
Colton didn’t answer right away. He stared at the papers on the coffee table as if they belonged to someone else.
“I printed those six weeks ago,” he said finally. “After a night I’m not proud of.”
“Which night?”
“The night you asked me to read you the mail and I snapped at you in front of your sister.” His voice dropped. “I went out to the garage and sat in the car for an hour. I searched online for what happens to a person’s care if their spouse leaves. I found a template for divorce papers and printed it, and I sat there with it in my lap, hating myself.”
I said nothing. I wanted him to keep talking, so I let the silence do the work.
“I never filled them out, Delaney. Look at them. There’s no name, no date, no signature.”
I looked. He was right. Squinting through the blur, I could see that every line was blank.
“Then why keep them?”
“Because Joanna asked me to bring everything I was ashamed of to our sessions.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I started seeing her three months ago. She told me caregivers hit a wall sometimes, and that the thoughts I was having didn’t make me a monster. They made me exhausted. She said hiding the papers wouldn’t make the thoughts go away, so I should bring them in and talk about them.”
“And the suitcase?”
He let out a short, humorless laugh.
“Wednesday night, after we argued, I packed it. I was going to stay at my brother’s for a few days, just until I stopped feeling like I’d say something unforgivable. Then I stood in the bedroom and thought, she’s blind, and I’m about to walk out on her in the middle of a fight. I shoved the suitcase under the bed and went to sleep on the couch.”
“You didn’t sleep on the couch. You came to bed.”
“I came to bed at three,” he said. “You were asleep.”
I remembered the shifting of the mattress in the dark. I had thought nothing of it.
“And the letter?”
“That was an exercise. Joanna wanted me to write down everything I couldn’t say to you, and bring it to her first so I could say it better.” He finally looked at me. “I was going to talk to you this weekend. I swear. I just didn’t know how to say, I love you and I’m drowning in the same sentence.”
I felt something loosen in my chest, and something else tighten.
“Colton, you should have told me.”
“I know.”
“Two years, and you let me think I’d become a burden.”
“I let myself think that. That’s the part I’m working on.” His eyes were wet. “You were never the burden, Delaney. The fear was. I was so scared of failing you that I stopped being kind to you.”
I took a long breath.
“I need to tell you something too.”
He went still.
“I’ve been reading these papers,” I said. “Not by touch. With my eyes.”
For a moment, he didn’t seem to understand. Then his face went through several expressions at once: confusion, disbelief, and something that looked like terror.
