“And look at the two of you,” he says then, turning that warm old smile between Troy and me, settling into the good chair as though the house were already a little bit his. “Thick as ever. You know, there’s no shame in it, Camilla. The whole city’s seen how that man treats you. Nobody would blame you for where you turn for comfort.” A pause, gentle, terrible. “Nobody would blame either of you.”
Beside me Troy has gone very still.
I laugh, because I think he’s being clumsy, because I think it’s the bad joke of an old man who doesn’t understand that Troy is my brother in all the ways that count. “Raymond, Troy practically raised me?—”
“Of course, of course.” He waves it away, still smiling, and the smile is the thing, I’ll think later, the smile never once changes. “I only mean you’ll both be free of the whole sorry business soon enough. Between us.” He leans in as though confiding a kindness. “He’s finished, my dear. Your husband. The board’s lost its patience and so have I. A man like that, a cheap nobody who buys his way into a family like yours and then parades a model around a charity ball while his sick wife collapses on the floor in front of three hundred people, that man does not get to keep what he stole. There’s a meeting. It’s all but done. And when it’s over you’ll have your life back, and the team will go where it ought to have gone in the first place, and you and Troy can stop being so very careful about being seen together.”
He pats my hand. He’s still smiling.
And I sit there in my mother’s chair with my godfather’s dry warm hand on mine and I feel something cold begin at the back of my neck and work its way down, slow, the way cold does, because there is a wrongness in this room and my body has found it a half-second before my mind has.
He saidparades a model.He saidwhile his sick wife collapses.But Raymond wasn’t at the ball. I have shaken every hand on every guest list my father ever built and I would have known, and besides, he’s talking about it the way you talk about a thing you arranged, not a thing you read about. And he keeps sayingyou and Troy,keeps painting us, keeps brushing the same picture over and over with the patient confidence of a man who has painted it many times before, in many other rooms, to many other people.Where you turn for comfort. Being seen together. Stop being so careful.
Someone built that picture. Someone has been showing it around.
“Raymond,” I say, and I’m proud of how ordinary my voice comes out, “who told you Troy and I were seeing each other?”
And there it is. A flicker. The smallest stumble in the smile, there and gone, the look of a man who has said one sentence more than his script allowed, and he covers it smoothly, beautifully, decades of charm closing over the crack like water. “Why, the whole city, darling. It’s been in every paper. Those photographs.”
The photographs.
I turn and look at Troy, and Troy is looking at me with an expression I have never seen on his face in twenty-two years, which is the expression of a man who knows exactly what I’m about to work out and has been dreading the moment I worked it out, and who is not, I understand all at once, surprised by a single word that has come out of Raymond Glasgow’s mouth this afternoon. Not surprised. Confirming.
And the cold finishes its trip down my spine and pools, and the whole impossible shape of the last two months turns over in the dark and shows me, for the first time, its underside.
There were photographs. Of Troy and me. Innocent ones, a coat, a park bench, a hand on my shoulder at my father’s grave,but photographs, and someone had them, and someone made them into a story, and someone walked that story into a room where my husband was standing and set it down in front of him like evidence. My husband, who has been cold to me since almost exactly the day those photographs would have reached him. My husband, who demanded an heir and a separation in the same breath like a man who’d decided his wife had already betrayed him. My husband, who danced with another woman in front of three hundred people as though he were paying me back for something.
He thought I cheated.
Trey thought I cheated, because someone made him think it, and the someone is sitting in my mother’s chair with his old kind smile, the someone is the only man in the world who profits from the team and me and Trey all coming apart at once, the someone has been my godfather for twenty-two years and has just, by accident, in his certainty that I’m too grateful and too broken to notice, told me so.
“Get out of my father’s house.”
Raymond blinks. The smile finally goes. “Camilla?—”
Troy takes a step toward him, and Raymond shuts up.
“Go.”
Raymond scurries away like a frightened animal, and the second the door closes behind him I’m on my feet, which I’m absolutely not supposed to be, not this fast, not with my pulse already doing the thing the beige machine was sent home to scold me about.
“Camilla.” Troy is up too, hands out. ”Sitdown.Whatever you’re about to do?—”
“You knew.” It isn’t an accusation. I don’t have room for one. “You’ve known the whole time. That’s why you wouldn’t tell me. The doctor said no shocks.”
“Cami.” His voice cracks on the old name, the child’s name, the one he’s called me since I was small enough to ride on his shoulders. “He played that man like a fiddle. Trey. Glasgow fed him every lie he needed and let him build the rest himself, and by the time anyone could’ve told him the truth he was already too far gone to hear it. I was going to tell you. When you were stronger. I swear I was going to tell you.”
But I’m not listening anymore, not really, because my whole ruined heart has caught on the one piece of this I cannot put down, the one thread that’s pulling everything else loose, and it’s the simplest and most dangerous thought I have had in two months.
He didn’t choose to stop loving me.
He wasliedto.
And maybe, the thought my fragile stupid heart goes leaping toward before I can stop it, the exact kind of hope the doctor would have me committed for, maybe whatever was real before the photographs is still real underneath them. Maybe none of it was ever the truth. Maybe I’ve spent two months breaking over a thing that never happened, and he’s spent two months believing a thing that never happened, and the only thing standing between us and the truth is the fact that nobody has simplysaidit.
So I’ll say it.
I don’t remember deciding. I’m just suddenly moving, past Troy, past his outstretched hands and his pleading, finding my shoes, finding my coat, finding the keys to a car I’m not supposed to drive, and Troy is behind me saying my name in the voice you use on a person standing on a ledge, and I love him too much to listen to him, and I go.
