“I should have told you the second she replied,” he said, rubbing both hands over his face. “I know that. I told myself I’d stop the moment it started feeling real, and then it kept almost being real, and I kept thinking — one more step, and then I’ll tell her. I finished the two stories you never finished because I knew how you wanted them to end, Em, I’d heard you talk about them for years. I signed for you because Priya needed something on file before your birthday, and I panicked, and I forged four letters of your name in a hotel lobby feeling like the worst person alive the entire time.”
“You forged my signature on a legal contract.”
“I know.”
“You built an entire career for me behind my back.”
“I know how it sounds.”
“It sounds,” I said, “like you decided, once again, that I couldn’t be trusted to want things for myself. That I’d say no, so you made the decision without me. That’s not a surprise, Matthew. That’s a hijacking.”
He flinched like I’d hit him. “I never wanted to take anything from you. I wanted you to see what I saw. I’ve watched you talk yourself out of every good thing you’ve ever almost done, since we were fifteen, and I thought — if the only way to get you to the finish line was to carry you there myself, at least you’d finally be standing on it.”
“And what happens,” I said, “the day I can’t carry myself anywhere, because you’ve spent our whole marriage doing it for me?”
He didn’t have an answer. For the first time in eighteen years of knowing him, Matthew Reyes had absolutely nothing to say.
The book came out anyway, four months later, because by then it was printed, distributed, and legally out of both our hands. I did the interviews. I did the readings. I stood in front of strangers and answered questions about stories I hadn’t technically chosen to finish, in a voice that was mine, about endings someone else had written for me out of love and fear and a complete failure to ask permission.
