"If I go," he said, "I need to know she isn't filling the house with him the minute my taillights hit the highway. If I don't go, I need to know I'm not refusing a career to babysit a marriage that's already dead. I don't know which humiliation I'm choosing."
Patricia looked at Rachel. "This is where you stop being a fog."
Rachel had known the moment was coming. She had rehearsed two speeches on her runs around the cul-de-sac, breath white, headphones in with nothing playing. One speech followed Andre to a life that was awake and narrow and honest at last: a townhouse, a custody calendar, Sophie's backpack by a different door, the relief of not lying, the grief of not being the woman who woke up in Jason's weather. The other speech stayed: not as a reward for endurance, not as a return to the old silence, but as a decision to try to become a wife again in front of the man she had injured, knowing he might still, later, decide he could not look at her.
She chose in the room, which was reckless, and she chose aloud.
"Don't go for six weeks," she said to Jason. "Or go, if the work matters, but not because you have to guard me. I'm not going to Andre. I'm ending it as a fact, not as a mood. I should have ended it before I ever said relax in our doorway. I didn't. I'm ending it now. I want to try to stay in this marriage if you still want a marriage and not a punishment. If what you want is the cliff, I will help you draw it without a war. But I am not waiting in the doorway anymore. That's my choice. You still have yours."
Jason stared at the plant in the corner as if it had asked the question. His hands were open on his knees. When he spoke, his voice was rough. "I don't know if I can want you without seeing him in the kitchen. I'm not saying that to be cruel. I'm saying it so we don't build a second lie on top of the first."