I think of her face turned up to his on a park bench. The grey coat I bought her.You’re mine.
I think of the man I let myself quietly become these six months, the one who went home every single night, the one who had four blankets delivered, the one who read the worst of the sports pages out loud in terrible voices just to feel her laugh shake against his side in the dark.
That man is finished. I can feel the exact place inside me where he ends, somewhere in the cold ground between thecemetery and the dream, and I do not intend to waste a single hour grieving him.
I lock the folder Raymond left me in the bottom drawer of the desk, the drawer where I keep the things I fully intend to use.
Camilla will not get away with this. Whatever she has been, whatever she has done, whatever the whole laughing city saw coming while I did not, she has made one mistake the golden boy never will. She put her name down beside mine on a contract. She swore the words to me every morning with her own soft mouth. And I am, as everyone from Raymond Glasgow to the cheapest gossip page in this city will be glad to tell you, a man who has never once in his life let go of a thing that belonged to him.
She wanted to know what it was to belong to me.
She is about to find out.
Chapter Three
Igo to The Res first thing in the morning, before I’ve even finished deciding whether I’m allowed to be this frightened.
He didn’t come home. That alone has never happened, not once in six months, and I could almost have built a story around it if that were the whole of it. Meetings run long. Men like my husband keep hours that don’t bend themselves around a dinner going cold on the counter. I could have forgiven the empty cold half of the bed if he’d only answered one of the calls I made into the dark all night, or one of the texts, or the single small message that’s still sitting unread on my screen this morning with that one gray word underneath it.Delivered.
But he didn’t answer any of them. And a man who needs to know where I am every hour of every day, who has me say the words to him each morning like a small sweet tithe at the door, does not go dark for an entire night unless something has gone very wrong somewhere.
So I come to find him, because I could not sit in that too-quiet apartment one more minute pretending I wasn’t afraid, listening to the refrigerator hum and my own pulse counting itself out in my ears.
The Res takes me in the way it always has, like I’m something it grew from seed. It’s early enough that the lobby’s still half empty, the floors carrying that just-buffed shine, and Gus at the security desk breaks into a grin the second the revolving door spits me out. “Mrs. Flint! We don’t see you near enough these days.” A girl from the front office I’ve known since she was a summer intern in an ill-fitting blazer comes around her desk and hugs me without asking whether I want to be hugged. Two of the equipment guys wave from across the lobby with their arms full of taped sticks, and one of them calls me by the name every single person in this building has called me since I was small enough to ride the ice resurfacer around the rink on my father’s lap.Princess.I learned to walk in these corridors. I learned to grieve in them too, eight months ago, and every face I pass this morning is honestly, uncomplicatedly glad to see mine, and I pull all that gladness around me like a borrowed coat, because underneath it I am shaking so hard I’m surprised it doesn’t show.
The elevator smells the way it always does, rubber and cold metal and somebody’s coffee, and I watch the floor numbers climb and rehearse the good version. I know exactly where he’ll be; it’s the morning Bills and Trey have their weekly report, the same hour they have it every week, in the glass-walled conference room two doors down from the office that used to be my father’s. The whole length of that last carpeted corridor I’m building the version where this is fine, where I knock and he glances up annoyed at the interruption and then registers that it’s me and the annoyance folds itself into that private softness only I ever get to see, and he explains, and whatever it is turns out to be a thing I can hold in two hands and carry.
The conference room door is ajar. Not much, only a hand’s width, but enough that his voice reaches me through the gap before I can lift my knuckles to knock.
“She can say whatever she likes. I have no interest in hearing it.”
His voice is wrong. It’s the cold I’ve heard him aim at other people across that very office, board members and rival owners and once a contractor who’d cheated him, but never, not once in six months, anything to do with me, and some old animal part of me understands a full beat before the rest of me catches up that I should not be standing in this corridor, that I should knock right now or walk away right now, anything at all but stand here and let myself hear the next of it.
“I married her to own the Waymakers. That is the beginning and the end of the arrangement.”
And I don’t make a sound. That’s the strange thing I’ll keep coming back to afterward, that a person can be taken so completely apart and still not make a single sound, that I can turn on the buffed floor and walk back the way I came, past my father’s old office with his name still on the door, down the long quiet corridor while the building that grew me goes on being warm and proud of me as though nothing at all has happened inside it.
I married her to own the Waymakers.
The past six months come walking down the corridor with me, every memory arriving uninvited and turning itself over to show me its other side. The four blankets he had delivered before I’d even finished saying I was cold; I’d taken it for tenderness at the time, and now I wonder if it was only maintenance, the way you’d see to the upkeep of a thing you mean to keep in working order. The mornings he read me the sports pages in that lazy cutting voice until I laughed into my coffee; an arrangement, I understand now, a small daily performance for an audience of exactly one who was always, always going to believe it. The nights after Dad, when he held mein the dark and never once told me to stop. The beginning and the end of the arrangement.
Every one of these used to make me smile. I used to take them out and turn them over on the hard days the way other people worry a lucky coin between their fingers. And now every single one of them only wants to make me cry, because if the words I just heard through that gap in the door are true, then not one of them ever meant the thing I built my whole heart on believing it meant, and I have spent six months loving a man who was only ever, the entire time, balancing an account.
Has all of it been a lie?
My chest pulls so tight I can’t get a full breath in around it, and I keep my eyes down on the carpet and keep walking, because the walking is the only thing holding me upright, and I can feel it coming the way you feel weather coming, the exact moment I’m going to come apart right here in the middle of the corridor where anyone at all can stop and watch their princess fall to pieces?—
“Cams?”
Troy, turning up at the worst possible moment the way he has his whole life, with that uncanny big-brother instinct for materializing at the exact instant I’d give anything in the world to go unseen. He’s dressed like the thing he is now, retired sports royalty in a charcoal coat that probably carries its own insurance policy, the golden boy a year out of the jersey and somehow even more photographed for it. Whatever he reads in my face wipes the easy warmth clean off his own in an instant.
But before I can get a single word out to him?—
“Camilla.”
The other voice comes from somewhere behind me, and I don’t have to turn around to know it. I’d know it anywhere on earth. I knew it through a gap in a door not ten minutes ago,telling the truth about my marriage to a man it pays to keep quiet.
Trey.
