"I was going to ask you to marry me. " he said. The words felt enormous in his mouth. Lia did not answer. She did not have to. The truth of it sat in the room with all three of them.
Denise rose from her chair, suddenly unsteady, and crossed to the window as if she needed air, as if the space beside his bed had become too small to hold her. And Henry watching her go saw it again, that guilt, that thing larger than a mother's worry riding heavy on her shoulders. There was a piece of this she had not told him. He was certain of it now. The way she would not look at her daughter.
The way she had started a sentence when he first woke and swallowed it whole. But the questions crowding his mind could not all be asked at once, and the most urgent of them was not about Denise. "Lia," he said. "If I asked you to come back to me, if that's what the whole night was for, then why are you standing all the way over there looking at me like I'm a stranger? " She wrapped her uninjured hand around her bandaged arm and held herself in the silence that followed told him there was a great deal he still did not understand. "Because saying yes to a phone call isn't the same as forgiving you. " Lia said at last.
"I came because you sounded like you meant it. I came because some stubborn part of me has been waiting 2 years to hear you say it. But I got in that truck protecting myself, Henry. I had one foot out the door the whole time. And then the truck went off the road and now you don't even remember the conversation and I'm supposed to start over from a version of you that doesn't exist anymore.
Henry absorbed that. It was fair. It was more than fair. "Tell me what I did. " He said. "Two years ago. " "Tell me because I want to hear if I remember it the same way you do. " She came a few steps closer finally and lowered herself into the chair her mother had left empty.
Up close he could see how thin she had gotten. How the brightness he remembered had been worn down to something quieter and warier. "You decided for both of us. " She said. "That's what you did. " "You decided that a man who owed money on his shop, who worked with his hands, who came home with sawdust in his hair wasn't good enough for someone like me. " "You never asked me what I thought good enough meant. " "You just started pulling away. " "Canceling plans, going quiet. " "And when I asked you what was wrong, you told me I deserved better and you walked out. " "You didn't fight for me, Henry. You decided I was a problem you were sparing me from. " "I thought I was doing the right thing. " His voice was rough.
"Your family, your mother. " "Every time I sat at that table, I felt like I was being measured. " "I didn't want to be the thing that held you back. " "You never let me decide whether you were holding me back. " "That's the part I couldn't forgive. " She looked down at her bandaged arm. "I needed you to choose me out loud. " "Instead, you disappeared and left me to figure out it was over on my own. " The honesty of it sat between them raw and unhurried. Henry understood in that moment that the missing night had not been an aberration. The man who had picked up the phone two nights ago had finally learned the lesson she was describing. He had finally decided to choose her out loud, and the road had taken the memory of it before he could even hold on to the feeling.
"So, if we did this," he said carefully, "if I asked you again, what would you need from me? " Leia met his eyes. "I'd need to know you won't run the second it gets hard. That the next time you're scared, you stay and you say so instead of building a wall and calling it kindness. I can't do the disappearing again. I'd rather you tell me no to my face than vanish. " "I can do that," Henry said.