She wiped her eyes.
“That’s what it felt like.”
Eric sat down.
For the first time since he’d arrived, some of the anger left him.
“I should have listened sooner.”
Vanessa stared at him.
He continued.
“But you should have talked to me before you scared our kids half to death.”
“I did talk to you.”
“No. You talked. I postponed. Then you stopped talking and started planning.”
Neither of them argued with that.
Then Eric said something Vanessa clearly hadn’t expected.
“I’ve been talking to Halden about reducing my travel.”
Vanessa blinked.
“What?”
Halden was Eric’s supervisor.
“I’ve been trying to move into the local operations position.”
“For how long?”
“About a month.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because I didn’t know if I’d get it.”
Vanessa stared at him.
“I didn’t want to promise something and then disappoint you.”
She laughed bitterly.
“So instead you said nothing.”
“Yes.”
That single word seemed to take the fight out of both of them.
They had each been making decisions alone.
Eric had been doing it because he thought silence was safer than uncertainty.
And Vanessa thought she’d become convinced silence meant rejection.
Still, there were three children down the hallway whose lives had nearly been rearranged because of it.
I looked at Vanessa.
“You keep telling us what Eric wouldn’t do.”
She looked at me.
“When did Brooks get a vote?”
Her mouth opened.
Nothing came out.
“Owen?”
She looked down.
“Jenny?”
Tears slid down her cheeks.
“I thought once we got there, they’d be fine.”
“That’s exactly the problem.”
I stood.
“You decided everyone would be fine after you made the decision for them.”
“Irene, I’m sorry.”
“You told me, ‘You’ll manage.'”
She winced.
“You were right. I managed.”
I kept my voice calm.
“But don’t ever confuse my ability to handle something with your right to dump it on me.”
She nodded slowly.
“I won’t.”
Eric canceled the children’s reservation that afternoon.
Nobody boarded a plane.
Vanessa spent several nights with a friend while she and Eric cooled down, but the children stayed in their own home.
Eric rearranged his work schedule enough to be there.
They didn’t fix their marriage in one weekend.
I would’ve trusted them less if they claimed they had.
Over the next several weeks, they began having the conversations they’d both been avoiding.
Vanessa stopped treating moving as the only possible solution.
Eric stopped treating every difficult conversation as something that could wait until his schedule cleared.
About a month later, Vanessa came to my house alone.
