"Noelle."
"I need you to start."
A pause. She didn’t need to say more, he knew exactly what she was talking about.
"You're sure?”
"Yes."
"Today?"
"Today."
"All right."
She had met with Henry in the months before the wedding, in private. She had told him, at the second meeting, what she wanted drawn up and what she wanted held. He had drawn it up. He had held it. They hadn’t spoken about it since.
"The filing can be ready by eleven," Henry said. "Service at the residence?"
"Yes."
"Is there anything you want adjusted?”
"No."
"All right."
Noelle set the phone down on the nightstand. She had, she saw, been building this exit since before she had walked down the aisle. She hadn’t wanted to know she was building it. She’d held the knowledge at a careful distance, letting herself feel, instead, that she was being reasonable, that a woman of her position was reasonable to have her own counsel, her own arrangements held in reserve. She’d been reasonable. She had also, she now understood, been correct. The exit had been waiting the whole time. She had only, in the hours since the gala, needed to walk into the room where it had been waiting.
She calledher mother at nine. "I'm at the Drake."
"I know."
A brief silence. Her mother had known, of course she had known; her mother had people at the Drake. Her mother had probably known within an hour.
"Do you need anything?”
"I need clothes. A few things. I'll send a list to Maura."
"You'll come home for lunch?”
"Yes."
"All right. We'll manage it."
"Mother — "
"Not on the phone."
Noelle was at her parents' house by noon. She changed in her old bedroom. She put on the clothes she kept at her mother’s home, went downstairs and sat across from her mother at the breakfast room table and ate a bowl of soup she did not taste.
Her mother did not ask her what she wanted. Her mother, who had lived the whole of her own marriage across from a man who had not looked at her in years, did not ask her anythingat all. Her mother poured a second glass of water into Noelle's glass when it was half-empty and she said, at one point,the Mathieus are in London until March,andtheir apartment is closed,andthe housekeeper is there on Tuesdays,and Noelle had understood that her mother had, over the course of the morning, arranged for her daughter a place to live.
"Mother?”
"Yes."
"Thank you."
