When what they really mean is, "I'd rather it cost me than cost you." I had seen that in men before. I had watched it happen on a ridgeline in Helmand. I knew exactly what it looked like from the outside. Janet wasn't pulling away because she had stopped caring.
She was pulling away because she thought she was the problem. She believed that her presence in my life was costing me, my work, my reputation, my friends, and the quiet I had built so carefully. She was making herself the target so that I wouldn't have to choose. And I understood something else. I had spent four years waiting for people to decide about me.
My wife, my commander, the whole world. I had waited in doorways and hallways and on the edges of other people's decisions. This time I wasn't going to wait. I drove to the shop on a Thursday evening just after closing. The sign in the window was turned to closed, but the lights were still on in the back.
I stood outside the glass for a moment and watched her through the door. She was moving alone among the buckets, straightening stems that didn't need straightening, sweeping fallen petals into a small pile with a broom. She moved slowly now, one hand resting at the small of her back. The room was full of flowers, and it looked very empty. Buckets of roses that should have been sold by Wednesday were beginning to droop at the edges.
It was the first time I had seen that shop look tired. I knocked on the glass. She froze. She stood there a moment without turning around. Then she crossed the floor, unlocked the door, and opened it without lifting her eyes.
You're pulling back, I said. I'm not pulling back. She said it quietly to the floor. I'm protecting you. Protecting me from what?
She didn't answer. She turned, walked back to a workbench, and picked up a handful of stems. She started arranging them into a bucket. And I watched her hands. They were trembling, just slightly.
Not the shaking of fear, the shaking of someone holding something very heavy that she was about to set down. The silence stretched a long time. The refrigerator in the corner clicked on. The fluorescent light above us flickered twice. "Jake," she said finally.
It wasn't the wine. I waited. It wasn't Wes's wedding. It wasn't the music or the string lights or because I was lonely, though I was. I've let you believe that for 4 months, and I let myself believe it, too, because that was easier.