When she got to the end, she had to push the song around the lump in her throat as she sang:
I hope you can see
That there’s love there waiting
For you, from me
Just before the lights came up on the stage, she saw Rob wiping a tear off his cheek. Then the spot was back on him and he was saying, “I think we’ll leave you there tonight. Thank you for being such a great audience.”
The audience cheered and Emily and Rob headed into the wings to the mic guys. As they were getting unwired, Emily couldn’t stop thinking about Ezra, about the fact that he was here, that he’d heard her song. She had no idea what he would think about it. Whether he would know it was about him, the same way she knew that Rob’s “Crystal Castle” was about her.
The mic guys left, but Emily stood still.
“You’re not happy together right now,” Rob said, “but you still love him.”
“I do,” Emily said, looking into his green eyes. “And I’m not—we’re not. But just because we’re not happy right now . . . I’m not ready to give up. He and I need to talk. We’ve been through a lot and our marriage cracked. But I want to try to put our pieces back together. I owe him that. I owe myself that.”
Rob leaned his guitar into its stand. “You know,” he said, looking up at her, “sometimes the pieces don’t fit back together.”
“I know,” Emily said, taking a deep breath, “but sometimes they do.”
60
When Emily walked out the stage door exit, Ezra was waiting there for her.
“It was powerful,” he said quietly.
“Hm?” Emily said, looking up at him.
“Listening to you play at the benefit last week. It’s part of why I was so thrown. I could feel you in that song. I could feel the rawness of your emotions—your pain and your love and your passion and it . . . it was a part of you I didn’t know, a vulnerability you never shared. It was that times a million tonight. When you sang . . . that was about me, right?”
Emily nodded. “It was. I’m sorry for . . . for screwing up, for making mistakes, for making them worse.”
Ezra slid his arm around her back. “Can we find somewhere to talk? There’s a lot I have to say. Too many words.”
Emily led Ezra down to the beach. It reminded her of the night they got married, of the evening they got engaged, the waves lapping against the shore. The beach, she realized, was always their place. They took their shoes off and sat down on the sand.
“You gave me your journal,” he said.
“I want you to know all of me,” Emily said. “It felt like it was about time I did that. But I didn’t know how you’d feel once you did.”
“You wanted to be whole again,” he said. “You wanted to feel loved.”
The wind lifted her hair and briefly covered her face before it set her free again. “You read it all,” she said.
* * *
—
Ezra bent his knees up in front of him. “I did.” He looked at her. “It was so hard for me to connect the story to you, but when I could, when I did . . . What . . . what you said about me . . . it seems like you were trying to tailor yourself to be someone who matched me, who did what I did and valued what I valued. But . . . I’d like to think I’d have loved all of you, Emily, if you’d given me the chance, if I hadn’t been so shocked by what I learned.”
“I—”
“Wait,” Ezra said. “I came to say more than that, though. I came to tell you that I’m a hypocrite. That I expect things of you that I don’t expect of myself. There are things I haven’t told you, either, things I haven’t shared. And that’s not fair.”
Emily tucked her bare legs underneath her. The sand was cool against her skin. “What didn’t you tell me?” she asked, wondering what it could possibly be.
“When I was in medical school, I was almost engaged,” he said.
“You were?” she asked, not because she didn’t believe him, but because she didn’t know what else to say. He’d kept the same kinds of secrets she had.
“I moved with her out to California for my residency. She wanted to work in medical tech, figuring out how computers could make medicine better. Once we got out there, she changed her focus; she saw the money other people were making and wanted to go after it—success meant something different. It changed her. It changed us. It made me think that the kind of success I wanted wasn’t something she’d be proud of anymore. I’d bought a ring but couldn’t bring myself to give it to her. I finished my residency feeling totally at sea—the only thing that got me through it was my work. It’s how I coped, it’s how I cope, I guess, when things in my personal life are hard. But you’re not me. And you’re not Veronica, either. And I didn’t take care of you the way I promised I always would.”