//all you had to do was stay//

Chapter 15

"Harry," she begins as they are settling into bed. He has been home for three months now. "You don't have to stay."

Harry shifts beside her, eyes meeting hers. His gaze is at once frank and obscure, belying nothing of his thoughts.

"What are you trying to say?"

"I don't want you to stay because you feel obligated," Paige explains. Tries to be strong, to be stoic. "You shouldn't have to feel like your hands are tied. I can manage without your help."

He breathes in, out. The emotion in his voice is tightly controlled. "You don't want me to be a part of this."

Paige starts at that, her hand finding the skin of his arm. She shakes her head. "That's not it."

"Isn't it?" He permits her touch, but his tense posture does not soften under her fingertips.

She should feel vulnerable at the naked truth of her words, but Paige keeps herself strong. Her voice does not shake. Her hand tightens over his arm. "I always want you here."

"Enlighten me," he challenges.

"I always want you here. That's the problem. Because..."

Years' worth of words unsaid are made explosive, incendiary. It is her turn to light the fires. Paige does not allow herself to consider how ugly this mask is, how it is borne of her most private insecurities. It is not like her to sabotage her own happiness, and yet it is not like her to let her voice go unheard. She is a rope frayed by the weight of waiting.

"Because I know you. You are like a bird, Harry, I won't keep you from flying."

The hand on his arm slips down to his wrist, drawing the palm of his hand to the plane of her stomach, where she has already begun to show.

"This is not a ball and chain," she says. (Why am I not enough? she does not ask. Why does it take two of us to make you stay?) "This is not a cage."

His fingers brush her skin almost reverently, but a frown mars his face. She realises she has insulted him. Paige grinds her teeth against the apology that leaps at once to her throat.

"You know what I have done," Harry says. "And you know my sins. I've told you why I must go."

"I know all that," she says. "I know it all very well. That's why-don't you see what I'm trying to do? I don't want to tie you to this place. When I married you, I promised I would understand."

Slowly, he withdraws his touch. She does not hold him down. She is afraid to.

"I don't think you do."

Harry gets up from the bed, takes his jacket, and leaves. She does not watch him go.

The sight of his back is familiar enough.

......

Paige does not see him until the next day.

He finds her in the garden. For a moment, the world is silent but for the dull echo of his footfalls in the grass.

She knows she should apologise. She is not ungrateful that he stays. She is not unhappy that he will be a part of their child's life. But Paige is a prideful woman. The words are stymied in her throat like stones.

She does not turn to him. Paige continues to work on the flowerbed, uprooting stray weeds with perhaps more force than necessary. Her eyes are red-rimmed from the sleepless night without him. From the tears that seeped into their sheets.

When he calls her name, she does not move.

Neither does she budge when she feels him crouch down beside her, so close that their shoulders brush.