Chapter 442 - 442: Reconciliation?

Aiysha didn't answer right away.

She looked at the envelope, then at Jones, then down at the sticky laminated menu in front of her like it might have the answer printed somewhere between the pancakes and the hash browns.

"You brought them," she said finally.

"I brought them." Jones wrapped both hands around his coffee cup.

"I didn't know what that text meant, Aiysha. Three in the morning. 'Are you awake.' For all I knew, you wanted to tell me you'd already found a lawyer."

"I haven't."

"I know that now."

A waitress came over before either of them could say anything else. She was young, chewing gum, with a pen tucked behind her ear and the look of someone who had been on shift since midnight.

"What can I get you two?"

Jones glanced at Aiysha. She shook her head slightly.

"Just coffee," she said.

"She'll have the short stack," Jones said at the same time. "Blueberry. Extra butter on the side."

The waitress looked between them, scribbled something down, and left.

Aiysha stared at him. "I said just coffee."

"You always say just coffee," Jones said. "And then you eat half of mine."

She opened her mouth to argue, then closed it. He wasn't wrong. He had never been wrong about that.

It was a stupid thing to remember. Blueberry. Extra butter on the side.

They had been coming to this diner since before Clarissa was born, and somewhere along the way he had stopped asking what she wanted because he already knew.

She didn't know why that made her throat tighten.

-

The coffee came. Then the pancakes. Jones had ordered eggs and bacon for himself, and for a few minutes they ate in silence, the kind that was too heavy to be comfortable but too familiar to be cold.

Aiysha cut a piece of pancake and pushed it around her plate.

"How's the horse?" she asked.

Jones snorted into his coffee. "Still staring. I think he's judging me."

"For what?"

"Sleeping alone in a stranger's apartment when I've got a perfectly good bed across town." He said it lightly, but his eyes didn't match his voice. "Even the horse knows it's stupid."

Aiysha put her fork down.

"Jones."

"I'm not trying to guilt you. I swear I'm not." He held up a hand. "I know I'm the one who left. I know I said I needed space. And I know..." He hesitated. "I know I was part of why things got like this. Maybe most of it."

She hadn't expected that.

For years, every argument they had ended the same way. Jones got quiet. Jones went to work. Jones came home tired and pretended nothing had happened. She had begged him, more than once, to just talk to her. To just sit across from her and say something real.

And now here he was, doing exactly that, in a diner with cracked red booths and burnt coffee, with divorce papers sitting beside him.

"Why now?" she asked quietly.

Jones looked out the window for a long moment. The parking lot was starting to fill. A man was walking a dog past the glass.

"Because I've been sitting in that Airbnb for days with nothing to do but think," he said. "And every time I thought about signing those papers, I couldn't do it. I'd take them out of the drawer. I'd find a pen. And then I'd put them back."

"Why?"

"Because I kept thinking about Clarissa asking why Daddy doesn't live at home anymore." He swallowed. "And because I kept thinking about you. The old you. Before we both got so tired."

Aiysha looked down at her plate.

She had told herself she was done. She had told Jones she was done. She had meant it, too. She remembered the night she had said it, standing in their kitchen with her arms crossed, feeling like she had finally found the courage to stop pretending.

But that was before. Before she had sat on Kyle's couch with mascara running down her face. Before she had done something so stupid and so humiliating that she still couldn't think about it without her whole body going hot.

Before she had realized that the thing she was missing wasn't a different man.

It was being looked after. Being seen.

Maybe Jones could learn to do that. Maybe she could learn to let him.

"I don't know if I can promise you anything," she said slowly.

"I'm not asking for a promise."

"Then what are you asking for?"

Jones was quiet for a while. Then he reached beside him, pulled the brown envelope out from under his jacket, and set it on the table between them.

Aiysha's heart dropped.

"I'm asking," Jones said carefully, "if these can stay in the envelope for a while."

She looked up at him.

"Not forever," he went on. "I'm not stupid. I know things don't just go back to how they were because we had pancakes. But a month. Maybe two. I'll come home. I'll sleep on the couch if that's what you want. We'll try counseling if you want. Whatever it takes." He gave a small, embarrassed shrug. "I can afford it now."

Aiysha laughed. It came out wet and shaky, and she pressed the back of her hand to her mouth.

"And if it doesn't work?"

"Then I'll sign them," Jones said. "No fight. No lawyers. I'll make it easy for you. You have my word."

She stared at the envelope.

It would have been so easy to say no. To take the papers, tell him it was too late, and walk out of that diner with her head held high. A week ago, she would have.

But a week ago, she hadn't been lying awake at three in the morning staring at another man's WhatsApp status.

That was the part that scared her. If she said no now, she didn't know whether she would be saying it because the marriage was over, or because some stupid, lonely part of her was waiting for someone who had never offered her anything.

Kyle had told her that her marriage was worth fighting for.

He had been sitting on the arm of his couch, keeping his distance, when he said it. He had meant it.

The least she could do was find out whether he was right.

Aiysha reached across the table and pushed the envelope back toward Jones.

"Keep them," she said. "In the drawer. For now."

Jones let out a breath he had clearly been holding since she walked in. His shoulders dropped. For a second he looked ten years younger.

"Okay," he said softly. "Okay."

"And you're sleeping on the couch."

"Fair."

"And you're fixing the tap."

"Today," he said immediately. "I'll pick up a washer on the way home."

Home. He said it without thinking. Neither of them pointed it out.

-

They stayed another hour.

The conversation got easier. Jones told her about a call he'd had with Clarissa, who had apparently decided she wanted to be a veterinarian, then an astronaut, then a veterinarian on the moon. Aiysha told him about Tasha nearly choking on her coffee that morning. He laughed, a real laugh, and she realized she couldn't remember the last time she had heard it.

At one point, he reached across the table and stole a piece of her pancake.

"Hey."

"You weren't eating it."

"I was getting to it."

"You've been getting to it for forty minutes."

She kicked him under the table. He grinned.

It wasn't fixed. She knew that. One breakfast didn't undo years of silence, and she wasn't naive enough to think the feelings she had been fighting would just disappear because her husband had remembered how she liked her pancakes.

But it was something.

When the check came, Jones paid without looking at it. Another thing that had changed since he had started making real money. Since Kyle had brought him into the business and turned their crumbling building into something worth owning.

Everything seemed to come back to Kyle, one way or another.

Aiysha pushed the thought away.

Outside, the morning sun had burned off most of the haze. Jones walked her to her car, hands in his pockets, the envelope tucked under his arm.

"I'll come by this afternoon," he said. "With the washer."

"Text me first."

"At three in the morning?"

She rolled her eyes, but she was smiling. "At a normal hour, Jones."

He hesitated by her car door for a second. Then, awkwardly, he leaned in and kissed her cheek. Quick. Careful. Like a man testing ice.

"Thanks for texting," he said.

She watched him walk back across the parking lot to his own car.

Then she got in, shut the door, and sat there with the engine off.

Her phone was in the cup holder. She picked it up out of habit. Her thumb drifted toward WhatsApp.

She stopped.

For a long moment, Aiysha just looked at the screen. Then she locked it, put it face down on the passenger seat, and started the car.

"It'll go away," she whispered, pulling out of the lot.

This time, she almost believed it.