"Elias."
"Yes."
"Tell me without apologizing."
He was quiet for a step or two. "I made a decision about you without asking you," he said. "I made a decision about your intentions and your loyalties and your motives, and I acted on the decision, and the decision was wrong. I should've come toyou the night I opened the dossier. I should've come to you on the curb outside the Union League. I should've come to you, at the latest, on the morning after the kiss in the living room, because whatever else I knew by then about Vanders I also knew what you had — I also knew what had happened between us. And I went through all of it and I didn't come to you. I chose a public act over a private conversation because the private conversation would've required me to risk being wrong in front of you, and I'd decided, before the gala, that I wasn't going to be wrong in front of you. That was the miscalculation. I see it now."
She walked. She walked another half a block before she answered.
"That's the operational version," she said.
"What?"
"The one where your error was procedural. The one where you didn't come to me when you should've. The one where the wrong thing was the timing of your decision-making."
"Noelle — "
"Elias. You chose to hurt me. That wasn't miscalculation. That was aim."
She stopped walking and turned to him on the sidewalk. She didn't raise her voice. She hadn't raised her voice in the conference room and she didn't raise it now.
"You came here to tell me you made a mistake about Gordon Vanders. I believe you. I believe the mistake about Gordon Vanders. What I don't believe — what I'll never believe — is that the Yvonne part was the mistake. The Yvonne part was what you did when you were hurt. You were hurt and you turned it into a weapon you used on me in public. I'm not going to pretend the first part is the part you're apologizing for and leave the second part unsaid, because I don't think you've actually come to me about the second part yet."
He looked at her. His eyes were the hazel she'd learned to read at close range, and at this distance on the sidewalk they were now something more tired and less contained.
"You're right," he said.
"I know."
"Noelle — "
"Don't, Elias."
She turned and walked on. They reached the corner of Armitage.
"I miss you," he said.
It was the worst sentence he could've said, and she knew, with a jolt that wasn't clean, that it was also the only sentence she hadn't armed herself against. The sentences she'd armed herself against were the logical ones and the explanations. She hadn't armed herself againstI miss you, because her husband had never, in the months of their marriage, said a sentence as simple asI miss youabout anything, and the fact of his saying it now landed somewhere she hadn't reinforced.
She looked at him. She looked at the man she'd walked down an aisle toward, the man who'd kissed her, the man whose hand had been on Yvonne's jaw, and the man who was standing at the curb on Armitage and Clark in the cold with his overcoat unbuttoned at the throat. She knew that she was going to love all of them for the rest of her life, and she was going to do it without letting any of them back into her apartment.
"It doesn’t matter.” Her voice wasn’t as firm as it should have been.
The wind moved along the street. Somewhere a car horn. He stepped toward her, and his hand came up. She knew that her husband was about to kiss her.
Noelle stepped back. She stepped back and her hand came up between them, flat, palm out.
"Don't."
He stopped.
"Noelle — "
"You don't get to touch me anymore."
It came out level. She hadn't rehearsed the sentence. The sentence had been in her the whole time and had arrived when it needed to. She'd said it in a voice that her mother hadn't taught her, a voice that was her own.
He didn't move.
