“Six years, Ethan. I can’t keep waiting forever.”
He was standing in our bedroom doorway, watching me fold sweaters into a suitcase.
It was the big gray suitcase. The one we’d bought together for our trip to Portugal three years ago. There was still a luggage tag on the handle with both our names on it in his handwriting. Ethan Cole & Claire Bennett. I’d looked at it while I was packing and almost lost my nerve.
“I love you, Claire,” he said.
I didn’t look up. I folded a blue sweater in half and then in half again.
“Then why won’t you marry me?”
He rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand. It was the thing he always did when he didn’t want to answer.
“It’s not that simple,” he said.
I’d been hearing that answer for three years.
It’s not that simple. Not right now. Can we talk about it later? Please, not tonight.
The thing was, Ethan was a good man. He was a good partner in every other way. I want you to understand that, because otherwise what I’m about to tell you won’t make sense.
When I had the flu two winters ago, he brought me soup from the Vietnamese place on Grand Avenue every day for a week, even though it was out of his way. When my dad’s roof started leaking last spring, Ethan drove two hours on a Saturday to help him patch it, and he didn’t complain once, even when he slipped and almost fell off the ladder.
He remembered my coffee order. He remembered my sister’s kids’ birthdays. He still held my hand in the car.
But whenever marriage came up, he shut down. Like a door closing.
We’d built a whole life together in six years.
We had Sunday morning pancakes. He made them, always too big, always a little burned on one side. We had a favorite Italian restaurant on Fifth Street where the waiter, Paolo, knew our order before we sat down. We had a ridiculous Christmas tradition of buying each other the ugliest sweaters we could find. Last year, he got me one with a cat wearing a Santa hat, made of real sequins. I got him one with a reindeer whose nose lit up and played “Jingle Bells” when you pressed it.
He wore it to my office party. All night. He pressed the nose every twenty minutes.
I’d imagined growing old with that man. I’d imagined it in a lot of detail.
Last Christmas, my younger sister, Jenna, got engaged at the dinner table. Her boyfriend, Mike, stood up in the middle of dessert, knocked over a glass of wine, and got down on one knee on my father’s dining room rug.
Everybody cried. Jenna screamed. Dad opened a bottle of champagne he’d been saving for ten years.
Under the table, Ethan squeezed my hand.
That night, in the car on the way home, I finally asked him.
“Do you see us doing that someday? Like Jenna and Mike?”
He kept his eyes on the road. His hands tightened on the wheel.
“Please, Claire,” he said. “Not tonight.”
When we got home, I went into the bathroom and turned on the shower so he wouldn’t hear me crying. I sat on the edge of the tub in my Christmas dress for twenty minutes.
When I came out, he was already in bed with the lights off. He pretended to be asleep.
I knew he wasn’t.
I was thirty-five now.
I didn’t need a big wedding. I’d told him that a hundred times. I didn’t need a church or a dress or a party. We could go to City Hall on a Tuesday, for all I cared.
I just wanted to know we wanted the same future.
“Claire, please.” Ethan stepped into the bedroom and reached for my hand.
I pulled it away.
“I love you,” I said. My voice was shaking. “But I can’t spend another six years wondering if you’ll ever choose me.”
His face crumpled.
“I already chose you,” he whispered.
“Then why doesn’t it feel that way?”
He didn’t have an answer.
I zipped my suitcase.
My dad had offered me his spare room.
He lives about twenty minutes away, in the same little blue house on Maple Street where Jenna and I grew up. My mom died when I was sixteen, so it’s been just him in that house for almost twenty years. He’s sixty-eight. He’s a retired high school history teacher. He still wears cardigans with leather patches on the elbows. He still calls me “kiddo” sometimes.
Dad adored Ethan. Absolutely adored him. They watched baseball together every Sunday afternoon in Dad’s living room, yelling at the Cubs. Dad called him “son” sometimes, when he thought I wasn’t listening.
So when I called Dad that afternoon and told him I was leaving Ethan, I was ready for him to try to talk me out of it.
He didn’t.
He was quiet on the phone for a long time. Then he said, “I’ll come get you.”
That was all.
I should have known right then that something was wrong.
Dad arrived at six-thirty in his old green Volvo.
He came inside. He hugged me in the hallway. He looked tired and sad, older than I remembered. Then he went into the kitchen, where Ethan was sitting at the table with his head in his hands.
I went upstairs to get my last bag, the one with my makeup and my phone charger.
I was coming back down the stairs when I heard them talking.
They were in the kitchen, keeping their voices low. I don’t think they knew I was there. The stairs in our townhouse are carpeted.
“She thinks I don’t want her,” Ethan said.
His voice was raw. Like he’d been crying.
“Give her a little time,” Dad said.
“I’ve given you three years, Robert.”
I stopped on the stairs.
“You said you’d tell her yourself,” Ethan went on. His voice was getting louder. “You promised. You said, ‘Give me a few weeks.’ That was three years ago. I can’t keep lying to her every time she asks.”
Dad said something I couldn’t make out. It was low and murmured.
Then Ethan lowered his voice too.
“I bought the ring years ago, Robert,” he said. “It’s been sitting in my sock drawer for two and a half years. But I can’t ask her until you tell her the truth.”
My heart started pounding so hard I could feel it in my ears.
The truth. What truth? What could my father possibly know about why Ethan wouldn’t marry me?
There was a long silence in the kitchen.
Then Dad said, very quietly, “If I tell her, you’ll have to tell her what you did too.”
I gripped the banister so hard my knuckles went white.
For a terrible moment, I wondered if Ethan had cheated on me. If my father had found out somehow and helped cover it up. If they’d made some kind of deal.
But that didn’t make any sense. Why would that stop him from proposing? Why would he need my father’s permission to propose?
None of it made sense.
I couldn’t stand there another second.
I walked down the last few steps.
“What does that mean?” I said.
Both men turned toward me.
Ethan went white. Dad pushed his chair back so fast it scraped loudly across the tile floor.
“Claire,” Dad said. “How long have you been standing there?”
“Long enough,” I said. “Long enough to hear what matters. Tell me the truth.”
I stared at my father. He’d never lied to me. Not once in thirty-five years. He was the one who’d sat me down at sixteen and told me Mom wasn’t going to get better. He was the one who told me the truth when nobody else would.
“Sweetheart,” Dad said. “Maybe we should sit down.”
“No,” I said. “I’m done waiting for answers.”
Dad looked at Ethan. Then back at me.
When he finally spoke, my bag slipped out of my hand and hit the floor.
“Claire,” he said. “Ethan has a daughter.”
For a second, I didn’t understand the words.
“A daughter?” I said. “What are you talking about?”
I looked at Dad. Then I turned to Ethan.
Neither of them said anything.
“Ethan,” I said. “Tell me he’s joking.”
Ethan swallowed. I watched his throat move.
“It’s true, Claire,” he said. “I have a daughter. She’s seven.”
Seven.
We’d been together for six years.
My stomach twisted.
“Did you cheat on me?”
“No!” Ethan stood up so fast he almost knocked over his chair. He took a step toward me. “Claire, I swear to God. I never cheated on you. Never. Not once.”
“Then how do you have a seven-year-old daughter I’ve never heard of?”
“Her mother and I broke up before I met you,” he said. “A few months before. I didn’t know she was pregnant. I swear I didn’t know.”
I pressed both hands against my temples. I felt dizzy.
“Her name is Lily,” he added quietly.
