If Kate is sure about anything, it's that she isn't going back for Sawyer, and that is the truth. She would swear it to God if she was sure she still believed in Him; she would shout it at the top of her lungs if she could gather up enough air to form a scream. She stopped thinking like that, stopped thinking in multiples of three, on the day they washed up on a sandy beach in Indonesia, and she clutched her son, her newly-born baby, to her chest and let Jack wrap his arm around her sun-baked shoulders. Sawyer, she loved him in ways she could never say, but she left him behind with the salt water that lapped at her ankles, because why hold onto something that makes you feel sad when you can be happy instead?
And after a while the actively not thinking becomes a passive forgetting and she is as close to happy as she knows how to be. Maybe that's not saying much, but it sure is saying something.
It doesn't last, this glorious imperfect thing she has with Jack, which shouldn't surprise her but somehow does, and his leaving hurts more than she will ever admit to anyone. She and he, they're always just slightly out of tandem, like a waltz performed with the two dancers perpetually out of sync, never knowing who should lead or when to stop. The musical accompaniment comes to a dreadful stop (or pause, please let it be just a pause) with a horrendous off-kilter wail of the violin, and Kate, foolishly, cries the next morning in the grocery store when Chopin's waltz in B-minor comes on over the speakers, even though she never liked classical much.
Sometimes, when she turns on the TV and it's the Red Sox, or when she takes Aaron to the library and he plaintively asks her if Uncle Jack will be home for story time tonight, and the air in her lungs suddenly stings at his name, at those times she entertains a quiet wish that she had been up front about her promise, about Cassidy and her sunny-faced daughter, Clementine, from the start. She remembers the closed-off look he got whenever his ex-wife was brought up, the same exact look that always crossed his face at the mention of Sawyer, and she sees all to clearly what he thought, what he assumed she was doing, what his paranoia and buzzed-up mind transformed into cold hard fact.
But Kate's never been one for second chances. And so before she can allow herself to wallow too much in what-ifs and alternate universes, she remembers the inevitability in his voice whenever he talked about the importance of the Lie, the vital necessity of never revealing their secret to anyone for any reason, and she knows that he would have considered her act of breaking the rules for the mere memory of a man long disappeared something tantamount to infidelity.
Because with Jack, Jack who was broken and trying so desperately to believe in the myth that was their perfect happily ever after, sometimes perception can be reality.
And she doesn't blame herself, not after all, because she was only trying to do right by them both, and if she can never watch baseball again without looking around, as if for a phantom, at the empty space on the couch next to her, well, no one ever said that doing the right thing would be easy.
She's not going back for Sawyer, but often she thinks it would be easier if she were, if she could write it all off as a yearning to have an old passion rekindled, just yet another fleeting desire of her flighty heart. But the left side of her chest has been so silent since she gave Aaron, her poor, confused baby, to Cassie and kissed him goodbye before he could ask her where she was going.
Chopin was on the radio during the too-long drive to Jack's apartment (she still had the address in her wallet, she thought she might have known she would need it), and she would have screamed if she could without shattering.
The possibility that she's going back for Jack, now that's too painful, too horrible to even consider, because if she does she finds herself hating him for it.
But she can't escape that thought, not when he's so considerate and vulnerable and eager, eager to love her and eager to be loved; not when the very sight of him triggers memories that hurt in the worst way because they are so fresh. Whenever she closes her eyes she sees him pushing her son higher, higher, higher on the swingset in the park near their house, until the little boy is squealing with glee, but never so high that he can't be caught should he fall; and so she doesn't let herself fall asleep in his gently, tentatively cradling arms, because she knows the nightmares will make her shake as if with fever. The smell of hot coffee in the morning (she started drinking tea after he left), it burns her in the pit of her stomach, and she cradles the mug in her hands but cannot bring herself to take a sip. The crisp rustle of his jacket against that sharply pressed dress shirt, so familiar and so foreign, as she hurriedly tugs it off from memory only, never once opening her eyes, never once needing to (she wonders, irrelevantly, if he still does all his own ironing). All of it, it makes her want him back like a silly schoolgirl pining after an ex-boyfriend, and then she can't stand it, any of it, because she shouldn't, she can't need this sad, noble, messed-up man more than her own son.
But he's not your son, Kate, Ben said, coolly, and that was all it took to break her.