When the Shooting Stops

"Penny for your thoughts?" She peered at me inquisitively.

"Just, uh--" Just trying to ignore how much it hurts to see you've moved on. "--You just look so

different."

"Oh! I- Yeah, I..." Liz self-consciously looked down at herself, then twirled a lock of hair nervously. Such a familiar movement, so completely re-contextualized.

Echoes of memories bounced through my head: flirting with the hot girl at the bar while trying to get her number, not knowing that she felt as anxious as me; seeing my maybe-girlfriend naked the first time, her bashfulness growing with my awestruck silence; my new bride hopefully asking if our finances could support going into business for herself; my distraught soon-to-be ex realizing the last straw had broken the camel's back.

She smiled at me, abashed and with her eyes a bit downcast. "Things... Well, they changed after you left. Not immediately, but not too long after. Maybe six months? The initial fame kind of died down, and I was left with... Well, with Two-Timing Traci. Or her reputation, anyways. New clients started to dry up. Old clients began arguing about their bills, wondering if I was cheating them. The business..." She sighed loudly. "I gave it up."

"Oh shit, really? I'm so sorry."

Liz shook her head. "Went back to corporate America. That first job didn't last very long. I--" Tears misted her eyes as she gazed fully at me. "Will, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I didn't know how- how bad it could be. You told me, but I didn't get how awful that must have been for you, with your shitty coworkers. I only found a printed out meme in my cubicle a few before I was almost ready to cry. That plus the whispers, the women in the office avoiding me, the douchebags hitting on me thinking I was easy..."

She swiped her sleeve across her face. "I ended up sticking it out there only about four months. Then I took a month off, got a makeover, and..." She waved her hand at herself. "Elizabeth, frumpy corporate drone."

Instinct took over, and I reached over to stroke her hair. That simple kindness brought the glassy sheen back to her eyes, even as she smiled gratefully. She leaned into the caress, and murmured, "Thank you. God, Will, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. I was such a bitch about everything, and--"

"No."

"I was, I--!"

"Stop. I mean..." I sighed deeply as the flat, grassy landscape rolled by outside. "Yes, you could have been more understanding. I needed your support, but I don't know that I would have accepted it. I blamed you for everything back then."

"I deserved it!"

"Some of it, yeah. Maybe even most of it. But not all of it. There were so many things that..." I swallowed and shook my head. "Never mind. It doesn't matter now." My hand fell away as I remembered the band that marked her as someone else's, then I nodded in its general direction. "I mean, you're happy now, right? I've moved on, and you've moved on."

Liz's brow furrowed as she squinted at me, uncomprehending; then her mouth and eyes shot open in surprise. "What?! No, I--" Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her look down at her hands and slip the ring off. "No, I'm not married. I just wear this to avoid getting hit on when I travel. I haven't... Dating hasn't been a priority."

"Oh." I couldn't think of anything else to add, my brain instead locked into the task of rolling this new revelation round in my mind. 'Dating hasn't been a priority.' What did that mean, specifically?

She quietly murmured, "You've moved on, you said?"

Mentally shaking myself back to the here and now, I sputtered out, "Uh, yeah, I..." A frown creased my features. "After we split, I... reinvented myself, I guess. Before everything happened, I had been trying to find a new place to work, and afterwards... Well, I couldn't find anything. You know what happened there."

"Again, I'm so sorry--"

I gestured with one hand for her to stop apologizing. "Things didn't get better for me on that front. But I talked to Ray--you know, my old coworker?--and he suggested I try freelancing for a while. Picking up short-term gigs on Upwork and Fiverr and the like. The occasional longer-term contract where I could work from home. Employers don't see your full name on those sites until after they hire you, and with a beard, no glasses, a different haircut, and using my legal name instead of 'Bill,' no one ever realized who I was. Or if they did, they didn't say anything, at least.

"I didn't have..." I chuckled quietly. "Well, my former at-home exercise wasn't available anymore, so I started going to the gym. No one bothers you at the gym if you're just some guy trying to work out by yourself. I got in shape, which I know I'd let slip."

Hell, as long as I'd told her this much, I might as well keep going. "It made me feel better after everything. I know I'll never be as big or strong as Chad, but I also know I'd let myself go, and I always wondered if that was part of why--"

"No! No, do not do that, William Kowalski. You were ten times the man he ever was. You were a good man, and a handsome one, and you loved me, and I..." Liz fumed with indignation, apparently aimed at herself. "When I think about how I let myself be seduced... No, when I left myself open to being seduced. That was my fault. He seduced me, yeah, but I made myself vulnerable to it.

"You did nothing wrong. Nothing, do you understand? I loved you, but I was too stupid to... to cherish that the way I should have. To cherish you the way I should have." She looked out the window. "Such a fucking idiot."

I nodded to myself, then softly said, "Thank you." Clearing my throat, I continued my story. "But I found that I enjoyed it, just kind of being able to zone out and focus on the weights or running. I started doing it for myself, instead of out of a sense of... inadequacy or whatever. Anyways, then mom got sick, and I ended up moving back to Dallas to be near her. To Prosper, actually."

Liz looked back at me with a bright smile. "Hey, I'm up in Celina! Wait, your mom... Is she okay?"

"Yeah, she's fine now. The cancer went into remission, and hasn't come back since. But low cost of living, a bit of anonymity..." I shrugged. "I figured I might as well stay."

"She had cancer? Oh my God! I'm so sorry! I didn't hear about it, or I would have..." She frowned. "I guess I wouldn't have done anything. Who wants to hear from the ex-daughter-in-law that ruined their son's life?"

I snorted. "Mom loved you. Hell, she still loves you. I guarantee she'd want to hear from you."

"Really?" That fragile, hopeful tone in her voice hurt my heart. I recognized the source of it. Isolation does that to you, makes you crave any contact that seems safe. I had suffered through it for quite some time, and I hated to see her do the same.

"Yeah, really. I--" A tiny ping and a new indicator on the dash told me it was time to pull over. Scanning the horizon, I saw a convenient station at the next exit. "Need to get gas. You want snacks or anything?"

"I'll grab them while you pump. Need to use the restroom anyways."

Ten minutes and a pair of bathroom trips later, we settled back in the car. The gas station had been at a convenient halfway point, so Liz took over the driving duties while I rummaged through the plastic bag of goodies she'd acquired: bottles of water for both of us; Chex Mix for her, as expected; and a Moon Pie for me. She looked over to see me regarding it warily and frowned.

"Oh, shit. I forgot you were eating healthier now. I'm sorry. It didn't even occur--"

The wrapper came off in a flash, and I made little nummy noises after I ate my first bite. "Oh my God, I haven't had one of these in like two years."

Liz grinned, relieved. "They always were your favorite for road trips."

"Still are. I just don't take a lot of road trips these days. No real reason to. The fun is in the company, and... Well, not a lot of company to be had these days."

She shot a furtive, disbelieving glance at me. "Really? You're fucking hot now. I mean, you were hot before, but..." Her lips pressed into a tight line. "Shit, sorry. You know what I mean."

"Hulk smash?"

My ex had to stop laughing before responding, "Yes, you jackass! You have to be fighting them off with a stick."

I shrugged. "For a while, yeah, I was. But then, it just became such a hassle. Not the fighting them off, but everything that came after. 'Oh, you're not on social media? Why's that? Oh...' Or, 'Wait, why do I know your name? And your face is so familiar.' The ones that got excited about that really sucked; I could almost see them thinking, 'Wonder if he's still a sucker?'"

"Tell me about it. I literally had a guy tell me, after I explained that I had no interest in fucking him, 'Shit, you and I both know you're a slut. Why are you playing hard to get?'"

"Asshole."

"Bitches."

We tapped our water bottles together in toast, snacking and drinking silently as she drove for a good long while, until we were just outside Dallas. Then Liz chuckled quietly.

"What?"

She glanced over at me, smirking. "I was just remembering the first time we did a road trip, when you wanted me to meet your family." I thought back and felt myself blush at the memory of her giving me road head for the first time; that made her laugh out loud. "I see you are, too!"

"It's a good memory!" We both laughed then, but the mood in the car turned melancholic afterwards. "It is. That was a good time. We were great together."

Elizabeth turned her face back to the road, sniffled once, and just said, "Yeah." The silence overtook us again.

I felt like I needed to say something. More, I felt like she needed to hear something. "Liz?"

"Hrm?"

"I'm sorry, too."

Her eyes shot over to me, then back to the road. "Jesus, for what?"

"For not being... stronger, I guess. For not managing to make it through everything with you. 'For better or worse,' right? But I couldn't keep to it. And I'm sorry for that."

My ex-wife frowned, not looking at me. "I cheated on you. Or I would have. And I was a real bitch there at the end."

"Yeah, you were."

When I didn't continue, Traci glanced over again to see me smiling, then let out a snort. "Asshole. Apology accepted." A pause. "Really, I mean it. But you don't owe me that. I fucked our lives up. I fucked my life up, I fucked your life up, I--"

Quietly, I interrupted, "Saved the lives of thirty people."

"... What?"

"Not directly. I mean, you didn't mean to do it, but you did. Just like you didn't mean to upend our lives or turn us into memes or have a SWAT team show up in our living room. But you still did."

"Will..."

"Just listen, okay?" I sighed. "It's been three years, Liz. And I've had a lot of time to think about this. Had a lot of stuff happen since we split. All the stuff we've talked about: freelancing, getting back in shape, changing my name and appearance, mom getting cancer, all of it. Some stuff we didn't talk about, too. And one night, after an unsuccessful date with some ditz a friend tried to set me up with, I needed... Something. Some good reason to just keep pushing through."

I took a deep breath in through my nose and let it out slowly. "So I sat down and wrote down everything that had happened. Tried to make sense of it all, I guess. You know me, I'm not the kind of person that believes things happen for a reason, or at least not in a supernatural way. A follows B follows C, but there's no uncaused cause that makes them happen.

"But when I started to make my list, I looked at the things that happened because of what you did. All the bad stuff, yeah. But I replayed the video of the shooting in my head, too. The lunch rush was going on, and the place was packed.

"Chad wouldn't have been there unless you and him had gotten close enough to have a 'friendly' lunch. I can't imagine any of the other people in there could have gotten to the asshole fast enough. Certainly no one big enough to strip the gun from his hands and beat him to death with it."

Elizabeth had gotten really quiet, scarcely breathing as I spoke. Her eyes focused on the road, but I knew her attention stayed fixed on my voice as I continued. "Like I said, things don't happen according to some divine purpose. If it did, those other people wouldn't have died, either. Hell, maybe the guy would have gotten the help he needed before he ever got to that point if there was someone watching out for us. But things did happened like they did, and because they did, dozens of people, at least, got to go home to their families that might not have otherwise. And, yeah, Chad got his moment in the sun, but then that all came apart, too."

I chuckled at the memory of seeing the video of him being perp walked out of his office. His PR team was top shelf. His corporate lawyers, though? Not so much. A certain Mexican restaurant sent him a cease and desist about using their name in his advertising, and they told him he could ignore it.

That led to a lawsuit, which led to discovery, which led to new revelations: workplace harassment settlements, sexual abuse, drugging women, and a whole laundry list of other shit that the great American manly man hero couldn't be bothered or didn't know how to purge from his cloud storage.

Liz shuddered and nodded. "Yeah. God, I can't believe..." She sighed. "I can't believe how easily he drew me in."

"He had a lot of practice with all those other women. Anyways, that's another good thing: he didn't get any further with you than he did. Regardless of you and me... Well, you saw some of it, I'm sure. I'm glad that didn't happen to you. But it probably would have, if you two hadn't been there that day. And he would have kept getting away with it, hiding behind his family's money and his fame."

"But everything that happened to you--"

"Yeah, that sucked. I won't lie. But you weigh that against the lives of the people that survived and against having a predator in prison that never would have gotten put there otherwise? How selfish would I have to be to say 'oh, I'm the one that really matters here?' Boo fucking hoo." I nodded at the road. "Don't miss your exit."

She pulled onto the interchange and I paused, giving her time to let her brain engage with the absolutely ridiculous mess that is the High Five. Once our behemoth of a rental had shifted back and forth across the lanes and we'd pulled onto 635, then the tollway, I returned to my story.

"Even the bad stuff for me was... Well, it didn't lead to wine and roses, but I got out of that awful job and started doing freelance stuff. I'm really happy with my work now, and I never would have done it if we hadn't split up. I just wouldn't have put myself out there.

"Without that flexibility, I couldn't have gone home to take care of my mom, either. Wouldn't have gotten in shape. Wouldn't have done... well, any of the things I have. And, yeah, it's been lonely sometimes, but I'm starting to make friends again, real ones that I can tell the whole story to."

She smiled, a painful looking grimace that hinted at an inner turmoil. "That's good. I'm- I'm really glad for you."

I watched her as she tried to keep it together. "I'm sorry if... I think maybe things haven't gone as good for you?"

She shook her head, voice breaking. "No. No, not really. I've been trying to find the positive in my life, but I haven't managed to. I guess, though, you're right." The smile turned a little braver. "All those people lived. Chad went to jail. You're doing well." She nodded to herself. "Yeah. Yeah, you are right. One or even two people's unhappiness... it can't measure up to that. That sucks, but it can't. I just wish...

"Fuck, Will, I just wish that something could have been different. That all of it could have been. I'm glad you're able to look at it positively, but I'm never going to stop being sorry for what I did to you. Or for ruining our marriage. Or for... For any of it. And maybe that's selfish, but I just feel so awful for what I did--"

By then, Liz had almost completely lost control of her voice's tone and pitch, but I could hear a through-note of self-loathing in all her words. Yeah, she hadn't managed nearly as well. Regardless of what she'd done to me, to herself, and to our marriage, I didn't want that kind of pain for her. Even if I didn't still care for her--which I did--she'd spent three years being kicked around both by complete strangers and her own guilt. She needed to hear the words.

"I forgive you."

Her eyes darted to me. "What?!"

"I forgive you, Traci. Liz, I mean. Shit, I'm sorry, I--"

"Stop. Stop. Traci is fine. For you, Traci is always fine." She sniffled again. "You mean it? You forgive me?"

"Yeah, I do."

Liz froze, completely silent for almost a minute, then whispered. "Thank you."

I looked out my window, but I saw her reflected in the night-darkened glass. My ex-wife twirled her hair again, that nervous gesture that had meant so many things in our time together. I hoped it meant something specific now, but I couldn't be sure.

The tollway took us north of Dallas. We shifted onto 380, then up to Preston and further north. The silence had grown intense by then. Not awkward, exactly. I knew what I wanted to say. I think she did, too. But neither of us wanted to speak first and get it wrong. Our time grew short, though, so I broke the detente.

"Another good thing came out of this." Liz looked over at me, trying to hide her hopeful expression. "I like your hair. Very Wednesday Addams."

She guffawed at that, wiping a tear from her eye, one we could both pretend the laughter had put there. "I was going for Jessica Jones, but okay."

"Oh, my bad." 'Fortune favors the bold,' I thought. "Do you want to get coffee some time? I'd like to catch up some more."

"Yeah. Yeah, I'd like that." Liz smiled broadly; the tension between us lifted. "I'd love it, actually."

"Okay. Oh, take a right up here." A series of turns took us through a quiet subdivision and to my house, a modest little starter home. We exchanged numbers and made plans to get together later that week, then I exited the SUV and grabbed my luggage from the trunk. Liz gave a smile and wave as I opened the front door and stepped inside, and I returned them. Something in her expression gave me pause, though, just before I closed the door.

I dropped my bags on the entryway floor and walked back over to the car, peering in the driver's side window. Liz tried to shoo me away, but I could easily see her anxious expression and motioned for her to open it. She nodded, visibly trying to get herself under control as it slowly rolled down, then trying to play it off with a breezy, "Did you forget something?"

"Hon?" The crack in her mask widened. "What's going on? Are you okay?"

"I'm fine!" A little manic laugh escaped her lips. "Fine. Just tired. You know, long trip and all, and I- I just need to rest."

"Trace--"

Her lip quivered, and her voice cracked. "Please. I'm fine. Please, Bill."

"Hey, it's okay. You can tell me. I don't want you driving home if you're not okay."

Liz's teeth tugged at her lower lip as her finger tangled in her hair again. "I'm not. I'm-- God, I'm such a mess. Why am I fucking this up?" I tried to reassure her, but she kept talking, mostly to berate herself. "This is the happiest four hours I've had in... A year? Maybe more? And I can't even keep my shit together long enough to drive home.

"I can't- I can't pretend that watching you walk in that door and wave goodbye hurts worse than anything has since I watched you drive away the first time. I'm so fucking scared that I'll screw up this tiny sliver of a chance, and that's what I'm doing right fucking now, and you'll see what a goddamned mess I am, and you're all put together so good now! How could you possibly love me if I'm like--"

Her eyes went wide when she realized what she'd said. "Oh no. No, no, I didn't mean-- I'm not expecting anything from you, I promise. I promise, Bill. But I can't help how I feel. I love you. I've missed you so much. And I know I'm being a weird little freak right now, and I'm sorry. God, sorry again. I'm just-- Fuck! Fuck. Fuck, I'm just- I'm gonna go."