One Last Thing Before I Go

her looking at her, and she feels exposed and scared. She needs someone to lead her out of here; she doesn’t care if it’s Rich or Silver. But no one does, and what’s the point of having two men in your life when neither is going to whisk you away in moments like these?
    “Denise!” It’s Valerie, leaning into her. “Are you OK?”
    Denise shakes her head, unable to speak. Rich steps forward and reaches for her elbow, to steady her. “What’s wrong, honey?”
    “Please take her out of here,” Casey says, mortified.
    “I don’t know what’s going on,” Rich says, sounding lost and, Denise thinks, maybe a little scared. She feels a stab of intense guilt that threatens to double her over. He has been nothing but good to her, he has been loyal, gentle, and unwavering in his love for her, and all she has done lately is put him through the wringer. She pulls him into her and leans against him.
    “I’m sorry,” she says.
    “For what?”
    “For all of it.”
    He gives her a long look, like he’s trying to see through her. She looks up at him and wonders what he thinks, what he knows, and what he’ll be willing to forgive.
    “Take me home?” she says.
    But that’s not what happens.
    * * *
    Silver looks at Casey and Jeremy standing on the stairs and he can tell, from Casey’s posture, from Jeremy’s flitting eyes, that they’ve just had sex. He couldn’t say why, but he just knows. He wonders if they can tell the same about him and Denise. He is still reliving the last hour in his mind, the way they came together with no discussion, the way all of the walls between them had somehow fallen away in an instant, as if they’d never been there. There’s a part of him that knows he shouldn’t make anything more of it than it most likely was—a last communion before the world shifts again. But there’s something in him that dares to hope it might have meant something more. He has always had a dangerous tendency to embrace blind optimism in the face of hard facts. He knows this, knows it is largely responsible for the mess of his life these last ten years or so, but even knowing it, he can’t seem to shut down the voice in him telling him that everything happens for a reason, that even a stopped clock is right twice a day, that Casey’s improbable pregnancy bringing him back into Denise’s life just as she planned to marry Rich has a certain karmic potency that seems to have rendered the laws of love and probability up for grabs.
    He can’t help himself. When he looks at Denise, even now as she sniffles wetly onto Rich’s shoulder, he knows that he loves her as much as anyone can love anyone. But she is not anyone, she is the mother of his daughter, and maybe he and Denise walking past their old house, then going home and having sex in his bed, as if that was where they belonged . . . maybe that was all fate, or Providence, or the God of his sand-swirled ceiling righting the old wrongs and setting them all on a new course together. In its own way, sleeping with Denise tonight then coming here with her to collect Casey feels right and portentous, like the start of their family all over again. He looks at Denise and he knows that this is what he had meant to tell her earlier; that lying naked with her, hip to hip, feeling himself inside of her, had felt like coming home after being lost at sea for years. He looks at her and he wants to tell her that, to tell her that kissing her and touching her and fucking her again has woken up something inside of him, the thing he lacked all those years ago when he let her and Casey slip away, and that if she gave him another chance, please, now that he has seen the stakes, now that he’s seen all the damage and the pain, all the lost and desolate years, he knows that this time he’d grab hold of them both and never let them go.
    He looks at her, wanting to tell her all of this, but then he sees her expression, and the expressions on Rich’s face, and on Casey’s face, and on every other face staring at him, and he realizes, too late, that he already has.
    * * *
    Denise looks at Silver in horror, then at Rich, who is backing away from her like she’s just grown a pair of fangs. A cold sweat breaks out on her back, her stomach churns, and she feels the ground falling away from her, isolating her. She’s alone in this, like she was when Silver first left, and what the fuck was she thinking, going to bed with him like that? Pity? Closure? Both are an