“He left a note.”

The confession slips seamlessly into the intimacy our bodies, maybe even our hearts, made in this bed. In the darkness of this room only brightened by the skyline twinkling beyond the window.

“What?” Deck adjusts me in the crook of his shoulder, kissing my temple and pushing my hair aside to nuzzle into my neck, too. “What’d you say, Ave?”

He sounds sleepy. We just finished round two, and I must say I’ve never been fucked like that in my life. It was . . . possession and dominance and tenderness and ferocity taking turns, all sides of him sharing me. I love the way he arranges me exactly how he wants, pushes my legs back just so. Tips my ass up to the desired angle. Spreads me to his specifications. And then fucks me like a train.

The man fucks like a train.

And I’ve been railroaded; possibly ruined for everyone else. If I had known there were men out there, fucking like that, I’d have a lot more notches on my bedpost in my quest to find them.

“Ave?” he asks again, reminding me of what I want to tell him, as much as I would love to stay distracted thinking of what we just did . . . twice. For the first time, I want to tell someone other than my therapist the secret I’ve been wearing like an albatross around my neck for the last year.

“He, um . . . Will, my fiancé. He left a note.”

Deck shifts, carefully pulling his shoulder from under my head so he can lie on his side. So he can see my face while he waits for me to go on. I punish my lip trapped between my teeth.

“It was in the bathroom with my ring.”

In the sliver of silence following my last words, I know he’s mentally assembling the pieces of this puzzle before he asks his next question.

“You weren’t wearing your ring?”

The question comes low and soft, a sympathetic query. Not a threat or an accusation or any of the things I’ve told myself I deserve.

“No, I had taken it off a few days before.” I try to swallow, but can’t past the scalding, swollen walls of my throat. “I . . . I . . . God, I . . .”

My breaths come in choppy heaves. I clutch the sheet to my naked breasts to keep my hands from shaking.

“Hey, hey.” Decker cups my jaw in one big hand, brushing his thumb over the tears trickling down my cheek. “Baby, it’s okay. Take your time.”

It’s been so long since a man called me “baby.” Since I shared any intimacy with another person. Long before Will and I ended, our sex life dried up. The casual affection of intimate touches, naked skin, bared souls and endearments had long departed.

“I broke our engagement off a few days before he killed himself.” The admission storms past my lips as if the words know this is their last chance; know that if they don’t escape now I won’t ever let them out.

Decker scoots down until his forehead lines up with mine, the height difference so great my feet stop at his knees under the cover.

“I’m so sorry.” He dusts kisses over my wet cheeks, spearing his long fingers into my hair. “I can’t even imagine. Tell me.”

I stare through the dim light, searching his face for judgment, but it’s not there; just a patient, waiting compassion. It gives me courage to go on.

“We had been over for a long time, I think.” I squeeze my eyes tightly closed. “He suffered from depression. His medication made it so much better, but he didn’t like to take it. Sometimes he wouldn’t take it, and he wouldn’t take care of himself. He’d lose friends. His work would go bad.”

I lick at the bitter smile festering on my lips.

“We would go bad.”

I shrug and shiver, pulling the sheet tighter around me. “I would say he wasn’t trying hard enough. He would say I didn’t understand. We’d . . . fight. We stopped . . .”

My voice dies in the dark. I dip my head to hide my face, ashamed to hear my part in this tragedy spoken aloud.

“You stopped what, Ave?” Deck probes gently, kissing my forehead and encouraging me to go on. “You can tell me.”

“We stopped . . .” I glance up at him through a dampened veil of eyelashes. “We stopped making love. We were like roommates, miserable more often than not, but determined to keep trying. I loved him. I did, but I’m not sure for the last year or so that I was in love with him.”

My harsh laugh puffs across our lips, just inches apart.

“Hell, he probably wasn’t in love with me either there at the end,” I say. “He went on a business trip and he cheated.”

Deck’s hard body goes still, and his thumb caresses under my chin, urging my eyes up to meet his.

“He was a fool,” Deck says. “Not to speak ill of the dead, but anyone who isn’t satisfied with you is a fool.”

“No, I was a shrew.” I wince, replaying some of our arguments. “We both wanted it to work so badly. We loved who we were in the beginning, but we weren’t those people anymore. At least not to each other.”

I always knew Will had . . . spells. Seasons when he would withdraw because life felt too hard, and nothing, not even our closeness, could pull him out. I didn’t realize how bad it was until last year, and even then, I never imagined he’d harm himself. He stopped going to work. Stopped eating and showering regularly. Stopped making love to me. Stopped everything that made him happy. Stopped everything that made him . . . Will. He stopped everything that made us . . . us, and it broke my heart. Long before anonymous out-of-town hook up ho, my heart had been broken in minutes and hours and over days. We drifted out of love, into heartbreak, and settled into a terrible indifference. We were unrecognizable, and I didn’t know if it would have happened eventually anyway, or if his depression, the wall it erected between us, forced us to it.

“So, what happened?” Decker prompts.

“When he told me he’d cheated, I. . .” I want to cover my ears against the memory of our raised voices; of our hurtful words. “I gave him his ring back. I told him it was over and went to a hotel.”

Guilt assails me, fresh and wrenching. My heartbeat accelerates and my pulse pounds in my ears.

“That was the last time I saw him alive.” I struggle to get the words out. “How could I do that, Deck? I knew he was depressed, was struggling, but I never thought he’d do something like that.”

“Not your fault, Ave.” He squeezes my chin between his fingers firmly. “Don’t do that to yourself.”

Doing that to myself has become a habit I’m not sure I can break. Blaming myself for what happened.

“When I broke it off, he thought I would reconsider, and asked that we not tell our friends and family yet so no one knew that just days before, I’d . . .”

Abandoned him. Left him on his own. Left him to die.

The details of that night overtake what I see, what I hear, hurling me back into that cold bathroom. All the sounds and images and horrors flood my memory. I’d gone to the apartment to tell him I was sure; that we should go ahead and tell everyone it was over. Not just because of him cheating, but because we weren’t working anymore and hadn’t for a long time. As soon as I let myself into the apartment, I’d heard the music drifting from the back to the entrance.

Have yourself a merry little Christmas

Let your heart be light

From now on your troubles will be out of sight

The closer I’d gotten to the bathroom, the louder the music became and the more I was sure something was wrong. The air trembled with it. Each lyric ached with the pain I’d seen in Will for years, ebbing, flowing, sometimes less, sometimes more—always there, but finally too much.

“He was in the tub,” I whisper, my eyes unfocused on the room I’m in now, but seeing that other room; seeing Will in water turned scarlet with his blood. Seeing the deep lines sliced in his wrists, perpendicular to his pain; intersecting with the misery I’d seen in his eyes for months, but been helpless to soothe. I hadn’t known his despair went that deep.

I still see that note, my name scrawled in Will’s loopy penmanship. I still see the ring I had returned to him there on the counter.

“Avery, I tried,” I say, my mouth trembling, an unsteady messenger for Will’s last words. “That’s all the note said. That he tried.”

Was it an apology? For cheating? For giving up? Was it a condemnation of me, for underestimating his despair? For pushing too hard? For wanting too much? Always more from him, or for him? The questions make well-worn laps in my mind, round and round, dizzying me with the finality of Will’s one-sided farewell.

The song. The tub. The blood. The ring. The note.

Second after painful second, I manage to drag myself out, like I’ve had to do so many times since that night. I focus on Decker, pleading for him to understand, or maybe to help me understand.

“Sometimes I’d say he wasn’t trying because that’s all I know how to do,” I say. “I’ve spent my whole life trying. Achieving. Making things happen for myself, and on some level, I didn’t understand that it wasn’t that easy for him. That it wasn’t about trying. It was deeper than that. For him it was harder than that. Maybe he was trying until he just couldn’t try anymore. And I saw that too late, Deck, and now he’s gone.”

My shoulders shake with the emotion I’ve been hiding from for a year.

“When I saw the note, it had my name on it. No one else’s.” I shrug helplessly. “There was no message for anyone else, so I kept it to myself.”

My laugh comes out hollow, barely a laugh at all.

“And if I’m honest, I didn’t want anyone to know. To blame me like I blamed myself.” I swipe trembling fingers over my wet cheeks. “God, I didn’t want his mother to blame me like I blame myself. For her to think he did that because of me.”

The words slip-slide on my tears, barely discernible, but Deck understands. He pulls me close, one hand stroking at the small of my back and one hand cupping my face as he kisses the wetness on my cheeks.

“Listen to me.” His voice falls soft and firm over my hiccupping. “I don’t know what you could have done differently in your relationship. When a relationship fails, we look backward with much more perspective than when we’re in it. Believe me. I learned that after my divorce.”

I sniff and nod against his chest for him to go on.

“And replaying our arguments and rehearsing our mistakes won’t change how we handled things,” he says. “But in a situation like that, you aren’t responsible for someone making that decision. Our lives are just that.”

He dips his head to catch and hold my eyes with his.

“Ours.” He frowns, pressing his lips together over a sigh. “You remember that Sports Illustrated party a couple years ago?”

“Yeah.”

We hadn’t spoken, but I remember that lightning strike of seeing Deck again after so long. How my palms went sweaty and my heart went haywire and my stomach went all fluttery. I had seen him from time to time over the years from a distance, but that night, he’d been so close. Closer than he had been for a long time, and as much as I made sure nobody knew, it affected me. He affected me.

“I wanted your fiancé out of the way.” His voice is gruff, prompting me to pull back just enough to see his face. “And I didn’t care that I was there with Tara. I didn’t care that you were with him. I’d wanted you for years, since the first time I saw you, and I resented him touching you. Resented his ring on your finger. I resented him having you when I never got my chance.”

He pauses, a deep swallow bobbing his Adam’s apple.

“I thought about that when I heard he had died,” Decker says. “I felt guilty for even wishing him out of the way.”

“But you didn’t . . .” I pause to sort my thoughts and find the right words. “You had nothing to feel guilty about. Your desire for me didn’t kill Will. He did that.”

“Exactly, Avery.” He brushes my hair back from my face. “Exactly.”

His words sink in and I try to put myself in that place where I’m absolved of guilt. I can’t quite do it yet. I know he’s right theoretically, but that night I found Will wasn’t theoretical. It happened to me, and I haven’t gone a day without seeing him that way. Without asking if he was there because of me.

“I can’t imagine how much pain Will was in to do something like that,” Decker continues. “I assume it’s something he wrestled with at other points in his life.”

“All through college.” I pause, before sharing another thing I haven’t even told Sadie yet. “His mother actually told me his first attempt was in high school, and then again in college. I had no idea.”

I shake my head, overwhelmed with how much I missed. “How did I live with him, share my life with him, wear his ring, plan our future and not know he’d tried to take his own life? Twice?”

“How would you have known if he didn’t tell you?” Decker asks. “We hide in the open. We cover our scars so we can move on. Sometimes we hide because we’re ashamed. Because we’re afraid people won’t accept us or love us or understand. No matter the reason, you didn’t know. But even if you did, would you have stayed in a broken relationship for the rest of your life from fear that he would do something like this? These were demons he’d wrestled with before he even knew you, Avery. You can’t take responsibility for his life, for his decision. You couldn’t do it while he was alive, and you can’t do it now that he’s gone.”

My therapist has said these things to me. I’ve replayed them to myself on days when I thought the guilt, the weight of his death would drive me mad. But there’s a ring of truth when Decker says it that I haven’t allowed myself to hear before. Maybe I thought I was letting myself off easy. In situations like this, you need someone to blame, and it feels wrong to blame Will. If I allow myself to place the responsibility with him for even a second, I become furious. I get livid with him for leaving me and his mother and his friends who care about him. Who love him and miss him and will live the rest of their lives asking the same questions I do.

Why?

How could you?

What didn’t I do?

Could I have been enough to keep you here?

I want to throw things at the wall and I want to punch him in the face. More than anything, I want to rewind to an illuminating moment when I could have made a difference. I replay our years together over and over, watching from an objective distance, searching for that second when I could have looked in his eyes, seen how truly miserable he was with this life, and fixed it.

And maybe that’s the problem. I’ve accomplished all my goals and created the destiny I envisioned for myself. A woman accomplishing what I have in sports and television is rare, much less a woman of color. I rose above expectations and limitations at every turn. I defied the odds. Every hurdle, I’ve jumped. Every problem, I’ve fixed. But I could never solve Will.

If you can’t come through when it’s life or death, when it counts, then what good are you?

I finally drift off to sleep in the rare comfort of someone else’s arms and realize that is the question that’s been haunting me. I may find no peace until I have an answer.