"What do I think it was?" she asked.
"I don't know. But you're clearly upset, and I need you to hear me when I say that Tori is going through a difficult time and I was supporting her. The same way I'd support any colleague."
"You don't hold your colleagues like that, Drew."
"She was crying."
"People cry. You don't pull them into your chest and close your eyes and put your hand in their hair. That's not professional support. That's—" She stopped. She'd been about to sayThat's how you used to hold me, and the past tense of it, theused to, was so large and so true that she couldn't say it in a parking garage under fluorescent lights. It deserved better than this. It deserved to be said in a room where someone would hear it, really hear it, and Drew was not in that room. Drew hadn't been in that room for months.
"That's what?" he said.
"It doesn't matter."
"It clearly matters. Tell me."
"I have been telling you." Her voice was calm. She watched his face while she said it and saw no recognition, no flicker of connection to the dinner party conversation, the bedroom conversation, the weeks of accumulating evidence she'd narrated to him and he'd filed underresolved."I told you after the dinner party. I told you I felt like a guest in my own home. You said I was overthinking it. I told you that you look at her the way you used to look at me. You said she wasn't a threat. I have been telling you, Drew."
"That's not fair."
"I'm done with fair." She got in the car. "I'm going home. Don't follow me."
"Mad—"
"I need you to not follow me right now."
She closed the door. Through the window she could see him standing in the parking garage with his hands at his sides, his mouth open on a word she couldn't hear. She thought about the man who’d cried during his vows, and she thought about the man standing in this concrete box under buzzing fluorescent lights. They were the same man and they weren't, and the distance between those two versions of Drew was the length of her entire marriage.
Madeleine drove home. Without thinking, she went to the bedroom and took a suitcase from the closet. She packed underwear, two sweaters, jeans, her toiletry bag, the book she was reading, her laptop, her phone charger. She packed her knife roll — the Japanese steel she'd carried since culinary school, the one thing she owned that had never belonged to anyone but her. She paused at the dresser. Her jewelry box was there, the velvet one Drew had given her on their first anniversary. She opened it and looked at her wedding ring, which she'd taken off that morning to do dishes and left on the velvet cushion. She picked it up. Held it in her palm. The weight of it was negligible. A few grams of platinum. It barely registered against her skin.
She set it back in the box and closed the lid.
Madeleine took the elevator down, put her suitcase in the trunk, got in the car and sat there for a full minute with her hands on the wheel and her forehead against her knuckles and breathed.
Then she drove. She didn’t know where she was going. All she could feel was her heart aching, and her mind kept replaying the image of Victoria in her husband’s arms. She drove with the highway unspooling ahead of her in the dark and the lights of Philadelphia shrinking in the rearview mirror until they were indistinguishable from stars.
CHAPTER 6
DREW
Drew stoodin the parking garage for a long time after Madeleine's taillights disappeared around the bend.
He loosened his tie and looked at the oil-stained concrete beneath his feet, waiting for the adrenaline to settle. When it did, when his pulse dropped back to something manageable, the first coherent thought that arrived was:She'll cool down.
It wasn't dismissive. Or he didn't mean it to be. It was empirical. Drew had known Madeleine for nine years and married her for seven, and in all that time she'd never been the kind of woman who ran. She processed. She went quiet, sometimes for a day or two, and then she came back with her thoughts organized, her voice steady and they talked it out like adults. That’s what would happen here. She'd go home, pour a glass of wine, sit with whatever she was feeling, and by the time he got there they'd have a real conversation and they'd be fine.
They'd be fine. The thought sounded like a prayer, though Drew Adler did not pray.
He took the elevator back up. The office was half-empty, the late-afternoon light going gray through the steel-framed windows. Tom had his headphones on. Priya was gone. Drew walked past their desks and felt their awareness of him, orimagined he did — the slight stiffening of Tom's shoulders, a glance that wasn't quite a glance. Had they seen Madeleine's face? Had they heard anything through the glass?
It didn't matter. It was a personal moment. It would pass.
Victoria was still in his office. She was sitting on the edge of his desk with her arms crossed over her chest, her eyes red, her mascara smudged. She looked up when he came in, and the expression on her face was one he recognized from board meetings when a deal was going sideways: controlled distress. One that invited rescue.
"Drew." She stood. "I'm so sorry."
"Don't be."
"She's upset. I shouldn't have — you were being kind and I took advantage of that, and now she's?—"
