You'll Thank Me for This by Nina Siegal (top novels txt) 📗

all of this was an act. A kind of emotional tactic, to cast blame her way and to deflect from his own failures as a husband. After all, wasn’t it he who had been avoiding contact with her, staying up late in his office, refusing to even eat dinner with the family or address the way the boys were basically bullying her daughter?

No. She brushed the thought away. He wasn’t being manipulative. He was trying to be genuine, but he just wasn’t very good at it. Grace loved Martijn—it had to be love, what she felt for him, didn’t it?—not a passionate love but a quiet, contented, knowing kind of love that she hoped meant stability for her and for Karin. Couldn’t that be enough?

That was what she had thought going into the marriage. After almost a year of sharing a home, trying to raise three kids together who belonged not to the two of them but to other parents from other histories, it was hard. That was all. It was fucking hard. And they didn’t have that baseline of a history and foundation to fall back on. All they had was who they were, deeply flawed and hurting individuals with a bunch of bad habits that shone brightly under the floodlights of cohabitation.

Grace turned away and continued to walk, through the playground, down the pebble beach, and toward the lake, which was remarkably still on this autumnal evening. The surface of the water, so dark and free of ripples, created a perfect mirror of the other shore, a ring of small summer cottages with boating docks out back, now shuttered for the season. The mirror of the water also revealed to her a suddenly threatening sky, heavy with gray clouds.

She thought how forlorn this playground and beachfront was, remembering how just a few months ago this same lake had been full of laughing children, gliding off the metal slides propped on wooden docks farther out in the water. How the little kids, in their flower-patterned bathing suits with their candy-colored water toys, had splashed and paddled close to the shore. Summer had been here not so long ago. How quickly they’d reached a far more desolate season.

Martijn had followed her to the edge of the lake, and he was watching her from a few yards away. She could feel his gaze on her, waiting for her to say something else, to give him a sign. Was it neediness he was trying to convey?

She knew that this was the moment for her to reassure him that he was enough. That was the right move now, the only way forward. But the best she managed to offer was “Martijn, I hate that you feel you’re not enough. I don’t want you feeling that.”

She could see from his expression, angry and defeated, that it wasn’t what he wanted to hear.

“Are you sure that there isn’t something going on with you?” she asked. “Something that doesn’t have to do with me, or us? I don’t know. I just have this feeling that something isn’t right. You spend so much time in your office upstairs, and it seems like your energy is not really focused. Something is making you, well, edgy. Can you tell me what it is?”

Martijn took a few steps toward her and put his hands on both her shoulders from behind. “You’re so good at sensing things. It’s true. There is something that’s been bothering me—not about us, just work,” he said. “It’s not worth discussing because it’s almost over. Let’s just let it go for now. I’ll tell you about it when we’re back home.”

So there was something. Something outside of the two of them. Maybe he was going through a moment and they would get past it.

“Okay,” she said, turning to face him. “I’m so glad you can tell me at least that. Let’s use this night apart to calm down, and we can talk about it all with more sensible heads tomorrow. Let’s take this opportunity to think things over.”

“Think things over?” he asked, as if she’d meant it as a kind of threat. “About our future?”

“Just a little breather, to figure out where we stand,” she said. “You’ll be out here under the night sky in the forest air—that will help. I’ll go home, relax, unwind, maybe binge-watch some nonsense on TV. Let’s just think about ourselves and what we can do better, and tomorrow maybe we’ll have more energy, so we can think about ways that we can find our way back to each other.”

She hoped this would have a calming effect, but right away she could tell she’d missed her mark. He gazed down at the empty beach for a while. And then he muttered, “Sometimes you talk to me just like I’m a child.” He had said it mostly to himself, then he turned on his heels and marched away, in fact just like an angry child.

Grace was at least allowed to stand there looking out across the lake, watching the sky darken in the water’s reflection.

Chapter 5Breathe

“Um, yoooooo!” Karin cried out, trying to get Dirk to stop marching on ahead of everyone. She was all the way in back, probably too far for him to hear her. They were walking in order of self-importance, thought Karin: Dirk, Margot, Lotte…She called, “We’re supposed to look at the map together and check our compasses, remember?”

It was kind of a thing now, to try to stay with Dirk and Margot when they obviously wanted to be alone. A few months earlier Karin had noticed that Margot had a crush on Dirk. It seemed like it took a while before he responded to Margot, but then suddenly they had a little thing going. During Scout hours, in front of the adults, they hid it all pretty well, but anyone could tell if they saw the way they looked at each other when grown-ups were out of the room.

Karin had never had enough of a real conversation