Nothing Left To Fear

Nothing Left to Fear

The champagne glass stopped halfway to her lips.

Across the reception hall, through the candlelight and the laughter and the white flowers cascading from tall vases, Al stood with his arm around the groom's shoulder, throwing his head back at something funny. The same laugh. The same tilt of the head. The same way of making whoever stood next to him feel like the most important person in the room.

Samantha set the glass down on a passing tray without drinking from it.

You don't have to stay.

The band swung into something slow and sweet. A woman in red swept past, trailing perfume. Somewhere behind her a child laughed. The room was full and warm and entirely indifferent to the fact that her heart had just dropped through the floor.

She picked up a fresh glass. She stayed.

For an hour she managed it. A dance with the bride's father. Dinner beside a woman named Carol who sold real estate and had opinions about everything. A toast that made the whole room cry. Samantha laughed in the right places and kept her shoulders back and only looked toward Al when she couldn't help it, which was more than she wanted to count.

He hadn't come to her yet. Hadn't seemed to notice her at all.

That should have felt like relief.

It didn't.

She was standing near the bar, Carol long since swept away by a cousin, when she heard his voice directly behind her.

"Samantha."

The old flinch moved through her like a current, involuntary, instantaneous, humiliating. She turned slowly.

Al stood close. Too close, the way he always stood, just inside the boundary of what was comfortable, just enough to remind her of the geography between them. He looked good. Of course he looked good. Dark suit, easy smile, eyes that moved over her the way they always did, that quick, private inventory she had spent years trying to pass.

"You look great." Warm. Genuine, to anyone watching.

"Thank you."

"I didn't know you'd be here." A small laugh, self-deprecating. He was already performing for the room and they hadn't even started.

"Claire invited me. She's been my friend for twelve years."

"Of course." A beat. His eyes didn't leave her face. "How are you doing? Really."

And there it was. Really. The word he used to slip under every conversation like a blade. How are you doing, really, meaning: I know something about you that you don't. Meaning: let's see if you've figured out yet how lost you are without me.

"Really well," Samantha said.

Something shifted behind his eyes.

The band moved into an upbeat number. Around them the dance floor filled, laughing couples, a cluster of bridesmaids, the flower girl spinning in circles with her arms out. Al glanced at the room once and then back at her, and his voice dropped just enough that only she could hear it.

"You seem tense."

"I'm not."

"You always did struggle in crowds." A small, sympathetic tilt of his head. "I used to worry about you at these things. You'd shut down and then take it out on me the whole drive home, remember?"

Samantha looked at him.

She waited for the familiar collapse, that internal crumbling, the desperate scramble to defend herself, to correct the record, to make him understand that it hadn't been like that, it was never like that. She had spent six years in that scramble. Six years chasing a version of events he moved every time she got close.

Her hands were still at her sides.

"That's not what happened," she said simply.

Al blinked. "Sam."

"That's not what happened." Not louder. Not harder. Just true, stated plainly, the way you'd state the weather.

His jaw tightened. "I'm not going to stand here and..."

"Then don't."

The words landed between them like something dropped from a great height. Al stared at her. She watched the charm slip, just slightly, just at the edges, and underneath it something uglier moved. She knew that thing. She had organized her entire life around managing it.

"You know what your problem is?" His voice was still low but the warmth was gone. "You never could let anything go. Six years later and you're still standing here with that look on your face like I owe you something. Like everything that went wrong was my fault." A short, disbelieving laugh. "You did this to us, Samantha. You were impossible to love."

The words hit.

She felt them hit. She wouldn't pretend otherwise. For one suspended second the room contracted and her throat tightened and six years of being told exactly this in exactly this tone pressed against the back of her eyes.

And then it passed.

Like a wave that had finally reached the shore and had nothing left.

She opened her mouth to speak and stopped. Because something was happening behind Al. A figure rising from a nearby table. A woman in a pale blue dress setting down her napkin and standing with the particular deliberateness of someone who had made a decision.

Al's mother.

Margaret Walters was seventy-one years old and had never once, in six years, taken Samantha's side. Not once. She had smiled at her son across a hundred dinner tables and smoothed over a hundred ugly moments and said privately to Samantha on more than one occasion that she needed to learn how to handle him better. She was the reason Samantha had stopped believing her own memory. She was, in many ways, the reason it had taken so long to leave.

Margaret crossed the short distance between them and touched her son's arm.

Al turned.

"Mom."

"I heard you." Her voice was quiet. Not angry. Something past anger. Something that had been sitting in a room by itself for a very long time. "I heard what you said to her."

"It was a private..."

"I've been hearing it for thirty years, Albert." She used his full name the way she never did. "I heard it with your father. I heard it with your brother. I sat across from this woman at my table for six years and watched you do to her what your father did to me and I told myself it wasn't my business." Her hand dropped from his arm. "It's my business now."

The band played on. But something had gone quiet in the immediate radius of where they stood. Heads turning, bodies stilling, the specific silence of people suddenly paying attention.

Al's face had gone the color of old ash.

"This isn't the place."

"Then you should have thought of that."

A woman appeared at Samantha's elbow. Mid-forties, dark hair, someone Samantha recognized vaguely from Al's work. She was looking not at Samantha but at Al, and her expression held something raw and unguarded.

"He does this," the woman said. To no one in particular. To everyone. "He's been doing this for years."

Al turned. "Karen."

"At the Harmon account dinner. In front of six people. You told me I was lucky to have a job I could manage." A pause. "I almost quit that night."

Silence rippled outward.

From a table near the dance floor, a younger woman stood up slowly. She didn't say anything. She just stood, her eyes on Al, and the act of standing said everything.

Then another.

Al looked around the circle forming, his mother, Karen, the women standing, the guests gone quiet, the groom frozen near the bar with his champagne halfway to his mouth, and for the first time in the six years Samantha had known him, Al Walters had nothing to say.

The man who always had something to say.

The man who could talk his way out of any room, charm his way back from any edge, reshape any reality with enough patience and enough words.

He had run out of words.

Samantha looked at him. This ordinary man in a good suit with his mouth slightly open and his eyes searching for an exit. She waited for triumph. She waited for relief. She waited for the tears that had been threatening since the moment she heard his voice.

What she felt instead was something quieter. Something without a name. Like standing in a field after a long storm, looking at the sky clearing, not quite believing yet that it was over.

From across the room, Claire's voice cut through the quiet.

"Sam! Come dance with me. They're playing our song!"

Samantha turned.

Behind her she heard Al say her name once, low, the way he always said it at the end of an argument when he wanted to reel her back in.

Her feet kept moving.

The dance floor was warm and loud and full of people who had no idea what had just happened, and Claire grabbed both her hands and spun her and laughed, and Samantha laughed too, surprising herself with how real it was, how it came from somewhere deep and uncomplicated, somewhere he had never been able to reach.

She didn't look back.

Not because she was afraid of what she'd see.

Because there was nothing back there that belonged to her anymore.