“Come on, man, what do you think it means? I’m almost forty. She’s twenty-six. You should see the prenup she signed, and she didn’t push back at all. She was so eager to nail me down.”
“You wanted her to fight you on it?”
“Not at the time.”
“Dude, you’re a fucking mess, do you know that?” Logan chuckles.
“Says the man who’s spent twelve years chasing down the one who got away.”
“Sounds like I’m not alone anymore. In fairness, though, I got played. You shot yourself in the foot.”
I’ve drunk enough that I don’t argue the point. “Just do me a favor. Look again. Dig a little deeper. Find out what Cora was doing during those months before she showed up in New York.”
“You sure you want to know?”
“No.” I’m not sure of anything right now. What I’m doing or why or how I’m going to make things go back to the way they were. “But look anyway.”
“Anything for you, brother.”
“Same.”
“Try to sleep.”
“You, too.” We both hang up, knowing neither of us is likely to get a wink.
I polish off the bottle and turn on my laptop, filing emails as I sober up. When dawn breaks, and the sun peeks through my office curtains, I’m at inbox zero, my chest burns, and my eyeballs feel like sandpaper.
The staff’s soft footsteps sound in the hall as they start their day, preparing my breakfast, bringing my car around. A new alert pops up on my phone. My last trade went through. I’ve made the family another cool five million.
My gorgeous wife and healthy, happy children are asleep in their beds. I have it all, and Logan was right.
I blew it all up on a whim.
7
CORA
I’m turning into a ghost.Part of it comes from avoiding Adrian. He’s been staying up later and getting up earlier, which makes it more challenging to duck him, but apparently, dodging a man is like riding a bike.
When he comes by the nursery, I take the opportunity to go pump while he watches the girls. He’s always been too gentlemanly or squeamish to watch me do it. He’s kind of uptight about me breastfeeding in general. He approves—it’s natural, after all—but if I don’t cover up, he looks past my ear while I’m doing it.
He’s stopped sending Vera to invite me to dinner, and now he comes to ask me himself. Sometimes I tell him I’ve already eaten. Sometimes I ignore him until he goes away. If he comes outside when I’m playing with the girls, I say it’s naptime, or time for a snack, and if he follows along, I say I have to go get something and leave him on daddy duty.
He knows what I’m doing. He gets pissed, but he won’t let on in front of the girls, and when he tries to corner me later, if he manages to find me alone, I call for whatever staff is in range of my voice, and ask them questions until Adrian gets frustrated and stalks away.
I haven’t gotten to a pawnshop yet. I’m without a personal vehicle again, and I can’t trust the drivers or guards. Pence is gone, thank God, but so are Schmidt and Tiller. I want to know what happened to them, but not enough to willingly talk to Adrian.
Mostly I feel like a ghost because my body is drifting away from me. All my limbs are strangely light. My breath is shallow. My walks with the children are aimless. My brain drifts, and Pearl has taken to tugging my shirt to get my attention.
I’m not pregnant. My period came the day after the showdown in the library. I cried. If there was a gun to my head, I couldn’t say whether it was grief or relief.
The leaves are changing. The geese are flying south, which is one of my favorite things, but I didn’t even notice until Pearl pointed them out to me in the garden the other day. I’d been staring at the sky and saw nothing.
It’s not good. I’m in trouble, but I don’t see what I can do to help myself. I miss Mrs. Flowers. She always did more good for me than all the shrinks and meds and groups.Take a shower. If you can’t, brush your teeth. If you can’t brush your teeth, brush your hair. If you can’t do that, get out of bed and sit on the sofa. Forward momentum is the thing. If you can’t do it now, try again later. If not today, then tomorrow.
She was good at her job. She understood that there’s no sense in poking your finger in an open wound. Sometimes, you have to slap a Band-Aid on it and get on with your life.
Michelle did set up a couples therapy session with a counselor in the city. I didn’t show, and Adrian didn’t come home that night. Did he go to Delaney out of spite? I think of her all the time, randomly. She haunts me like I’m haunting my life.
