She didn't pick up. She didn't pick up the second time either, when it rang again a few minutes later. The third time it rang, she muted it.
Noelle finished making dinner, plated the food, carried it to the dining room and sat at the round table that seated six, ate alone, and she was fine. She hadn't expected to be fine. She'd expected, in some version of herself that she'd outlined in the bed in her old room, to be a woman who wouldn't be able to eat in the evenings for weeks. She was eating.
She was fine.
She was, underneath the fineness, something else. She was aware of this — aware of the layer beneath the fineness — and she wasn't pretending the layer wasn't there. She was also not, tonight, going to go down into it.
Noelle finished the fish, washed the dish, went to the library and lit the lamp and opened the garden book again. The phone, muted on the counter, produced no further noise.
She read until ten.
Noelle didn't sleep well.That was the part she'd been expecting, and the expected part arrived on schedule. She lay in the Mathieus' guest bed under a duvet that was too heavy, a pillow that wasn't her pillow, and she looked at a ceiling she'd never looked at before. Her body produced the fidgeting rebellion of a body that had been taken, without warning, out of every rhythm it had been organized around.
She thought about a great many things. She thought about her husband. She thought about her husband's hand on Yvonne, she thought about her husband's hand on her not many nights earlier, and the contrast between the two thoughts was the engine of what kept her awake. She tried to put one of the thoughts down and the other came up. She tried to put both down and a third arrived — the image of her husband across theconference table in the morning, his hazel eyes on hers, the face he'd worn that she had, at one edge of her attention, seen for the first time look uncertain.
Noelle turned onto her side. She thought about the morning her father had told her the marriage was necessary. She thought about the long, steady composure her mother had built a life on, the composure she'd taught her daughter without ever calling it teaching. She thought about the photograph of her mother at twenty-two on the steps of Holy Name Cathedral with the peonies, the smile of a woman who hadn't yet learned.
She'd learned. She'd learned, she saw now, a great deal.
She'd also, in the course of the learning, begun — against every training her mother had ever given her — to love a man. She hadn't intended to. She hadn't asked to. She'd watched herself do it in the private way she watched herself do most things, and she hadn't, to her knowledge, allowed it to reach her face. It had reached her chest regardless. It had taken up residence. It had been sitting in her chest the night he'd kissed her in the living room, and after he'd withdrawn into his study, and the night of the gala when he'd chosen, in front of two hundred people, to end a thing a wife couldn't unend.
Noelle still loved him. She acknowledged it because refusing to acknowledge it would've required her to expend attention on the refusing, and she wasn't going to spend the attention. Her attention was a resource now: the one resource, other than her grandmother's money, that was entirely hers. She was going to need it for the list on the dining room table, the cards in her wallet and the life she was going to have to build out of the items on the list in the weeks and months ahead.
She wasn't going to spend it on a man who'd chosen to hurt her instead.
Noelle closed her eyes. She didn't sleep for a while after that, but the eventual sleep, when it came, was the sleep of a womanwho'd been, for the first time in a long time, alone in a bed that belonged to no one else.
In the morning she listened to the voicemail. The first one, the one he'd left at a little past three the previous afternoon. She made herself coffee, carried it to the library, sat in the chair and held the phone and pressed play.
His voice.
"Noelle." A pause. "I understand you're not going to return this. I'm not leaving it because I expect you to. I'm leaving it because I've been — "
Noelle pressed stop. She sat with the phone in her hand. She'd heard his voice. That was what had happened. She'd heard the low familiar register of the voice that had been the soundtrack of the worst months of her life and also, despite her every defense, the soundtrack of a handful of moments she wasn't, tonight, going to allow to return. She held the phone and didn't finish listening.
Noelle deleted the voicemail and put the phone down on the side table. She drank her coffee. She looked out the window of the library at the bare winter branches of the elms on Astor Street.
She was, she saw, fine. She was fine for the reason she was going to be fine tomorrow, the week after and the year after. She was going to survive it by doing the things on the list on the dining room table, by reading books in the Mathieus' library, by making dinner in a kitchen that was, for as long as the Mathieus stayed in London, hers. She was going to survive it without being the kind of woman who checked her phone to see if her husband had called.
Noelle drank the last of the coffee and got up. Outside, the city did what the city did on a weekday morning. The sound of it was distant from the seventh floor. She hadn't been, before this week, a woman who lived in the sound of a city from a height:she'd been a woman who lived in the sound of her husband's apartment, and before that her father's house, and the sound of a city from a height wasn't a sound she'd ever, in her whole life, listened to on her own.
She listened to it now.
It was, she thought, not a bad sound.
She'd get used to it.
CHAPTER 18
ELIAS
Elias was waitingon the sidewalk when she came out of her apartment.
She saw him before he saw her: the line of his shoulders, the dark overcoat, the way he stood without moving the way only he stood. Her body did what her body did at the first sight of him, which was to pause in the doorway of the building with her hand still on the brass of the door and produce, at the back of her throat, the unwelcome involuntary breath of a woman who hadn't quite finished loving a man.
She let the breath out. She stepped onto the sidewalk.
He turned.
