He stared at her chin, tucked and unmoving. He traced the line up her cheek and over her downcast eyes.
She wouldn't look at him.
Everything felt still.
"I'm sorry" she said in a whisper, still not looking up, but playing with the butter yellow post-it notes on her desk.
"I know."
"I love you." She folded her hands, intertwining her fingers to deliberately lay them against her stomach.
Andy inhaled deeply and exhaled slowly. "I know."
"This isn't about him. You know I don't have anything to do with him anymore." Sharon was level—not scolding, but stern—ashamed.
"I know that too." Andy had never been disappointed in Sharon before. He was too familiar with it being the other way around. But this… this was hard to navigate.
"Andy, I would have…" Andy cut her off before a full argument could be expelled from her perfectly pouted bottom lip.
"All it would have taken was a phone call." Sharon felt the hollow space beneath her ribs grow as Andy continued to scold her. "A text. I could have come over. I could have been there. Or not, it's not like I needed to have been there. But then I would have known. I would have known, Sharon, and it wouldn't have been a secret." Andy felt tired though it was just mid-morning. He could feel the weight from under his eyes fall closer to his cheeks. Everything felt heavy and still.
"It wasn't a secret, Andy. Nothing happened. It wasn't a secret." Sharon was exasperated, but knew better than to become all-out upset.
"You kept something from me. You kept something from me. That makes it a secret. That's not how we do things, Sharon."
"He's my ex-husband."
"I know."
"Well I don't know what you expect me to say here, Andy." She caught herself before the annoyance and self-righteousness rose all the way to the top.
"I want you to say that you understand why I might react this way. I want you to say that you know you were wrong for letting him stay over. I want you to say you had no choice, or he was drunk and you couldn't let him leave. At this point I would even take something as lame as 'his car ran out of gas' or 'you lost track of time.'" Andy was frustrated now, not yelling but finished pretending like this conversation wasn't headed in exactly the direction they knew it was headed.
"He slept on the couch. For God's sake, Rusty was home the whole time he was there!" Sharon wanted to react like she'd been accused of doing what Andy was hinting she'd done. To react like Andy had outright said she slept with Jack. But he wouldn't. And she knew he wasn't going to.
Sharon had gone from stoic eye-contact, to impassioned hand gestures, to finally returning— hands folded—face turned towards the ground. She felt heavy, but remained still.
"It wasn't a secret," she added with finality, a last attempt at self-defense before receding back to her corner.
She brought her eyes to meet Andy's, for the first time being discomfited by their difference in height. They stared at each other for a long time, and everything was still.
"That," Andy half gestured-half pointed in the distance between them, "is where we have a problem."
Andy turned away from Sharon, paused, then opened the door and stepped out, taking all of the oxygen with him.