The thinking had started before the breathing had slowed — had started, if she was honest, before the last of the shaking hadstopped. Her mind had caught up to the giving and begun to assess what the giving was going to cost.
Noelle still loved him. She loved him in a way she hadn't known she was capable of, in a way that was deeper and more dangerous than anything she'd acknowledged before. She loved him the way a woman loved a man whose face she was going to see every time she closed her eyes for the rest of her life. She loved him with the complete, terrified clarity of a woman who'd just discovered the size of the thing she stood to lose.
If he hurt her again, it would destroy her.
She knew it in her body. If Elias Strathmore broke her trust again — if the composure came back, if the door closed behind his eyes, if the cold returned and the managing resumed — she wouldn't survive it the way she'd survived the gala. She wouldn't walk out. She wouldn't file papers. She wouldn't build a bookshop. She would simply, at some level that had nothing to do with composure or training or her mother's lessons, come apart.
She sat up.
"Noelle?" His voice was soft. His hand moved on her back.
"I need to go."
"What?"
"I need — I need to think, Elias. I need to think about this."
She could hear him behind her in the dark, processing. She waited for the thing his body was going to do: whether he was going to reach for her, whether he was going to produce words, whether he was going to do the thing he'd always done, which was to manage the moment.
He didn't reach for her. He didn't produce a sentence.
"All right," he said.
She got up and dressed. She dressed in the dark without looking at him, because looking at him was going to undo the decision she was making.
Noelle didn’t turn until she got to the door.
He was sitting up in the bed. The sheet was at his waist. The light from the window was on his face, and his face was stricken. There was no other word for it.
"This may have been a mistake," she said.
She watched the word land.Mistake.She'd heard the word in his mouth on the night of their kiss, in the living room, a lifetime ago. She was now the one saying it.”
“I don't think it was," he said. His voice was very quiet.
"I need time."
She looked at him for one more second. “Please let yourself out.”
Noelle left, stood in the hallway of the Mathieus' building and breathed. And then, without thinking, she dialed a number.
Her mother answered on the second ring.
"Noelle?"
"Can I come over?"
“Of course.”
When she arrived, her mother was in the kitchen. Her mother was in a robe and slippers and had, Noelle could see, been reading at the kitchen table. A book and a glass of wine, the lamp on, the house quiet around her. Her mother looked up when Noelle came in and didn't ask any of the questions her face was asking.
"Sit down," her mother said.
Noelle sat. Her mother poured a second glass from the bottle on the table, set it in front of her and waited.
"I slept with him," Noelle said.
Her mother didn't react. Her mother took a sip of wine.
