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She stood and stepped into her crinoline. Tied on her dress. She located pins on the counterpane and the floor and smoothed her hair up into its arrangement, all without looking at him.
“I’m sorry I fucked this up so bad,” she said.
“You didn’t fuck anything up.”
She took her phone from the bed. Thumbed over the screen and tapped out a message. “It’s nice of you to say. Can I get a ride from Jean?”
“Sure.”
It only took her ten minutes to pack her bag and erase every trace of herself from his apartment.
It took him an hour to stop watching the street after she’d left, his heart full of the vain hope that she’d change her mind and come back to him.
Chapter 22
“I really am sorry about the room,” Allie said for the fifth time. “I thought it would be more normal.”
“The room is fine.”
Her father sat on the bed near the window, looking out over the pit where the Twin Towers had once been. It felt like they were six hundred stories up from the street. He’d turned green in the elevator. The bathroom had a shower with no door or curtain—not even a lip of tile to separate it from the toilet area. When she’d used it, she flooded the floor and had to employ all the provided towels to mop it up, which surely wasn’t how it was meant to work.
They had to sit on the beds because there was literally nothing in the room but mattresses and windows and the bathroom.
Allie had paid enough for this room to fund a palatial suite at the American Club in Kohler back home, but it was just a last minute rack rate in
New York. What she’d wanted was to check them into some Holiday Inn Express equivalent, where her father would feel familiar and not besieged by unfamiliar metropolitan fanciness.
No dice.
“You think you can tour the memorial?” he asked.
“Huh?”
“The 9/11 Memorial.”
“I’m not sure.”
“I’d like to.”
Pacing the narrow aisle between the window and the bathroom, she looked it up on her phone. “There’s guided tours of the museum and the memorial at forty bucks a pop. We can get in at…eleven, one, or four.”
“See if your sister wants to come.”
She glanced at him, uncertain. Tomorrow was Friday. She’d thought that by tomorrow afternoon, at the latest, they’d be on a plane home, or confronting her mother. Not visiting the 9/11 museum.
But she sent May a text. Dad wants us to go to the 9/11 memorial tomorrow. Guided tours at 11, 1, 4. Says to see if you want to come.
May replied, Sure. 11’s fine.
Both of you?
Yeah.
Allie bought four tickets.
Four tickets, not five. No ticket for Winston.
“Sit. You’re making me nervous.”
