“Fine, then.”
This is my answer. It’s the only one I have in me.
“You’ll remain my wife, so that you can be a mother to our child. But make no mistake about the terms of it.” I hold her gaze across the desk so she’ll know I mean every word. “One mistake from you, and I will cut you out of that child’s life so completely you’ll be reading about its birthdays in the papers along with everyone else.”
“What mistake would I ever?—”
“Another man,” I say.
Her eyes go wide and wet. “I would never?—”
“Then we won’t have any problem at all, will we.” I tip my head toward the door before she can finish swearing me an innocence I can’t let myself believe in. “I’ll see you at home.”
She gets to her feet, and her legs don’t quite hold her, and she catches at the arm of the chair to stay upright. “T-Trey...”
My jaw locks down so hard it aches, because my name in her mouth used to be the best sound in the whole world to me. She’d say it sleepy in the mornings, say it laughing into her coffee, say it soft against my shoulder in the dark, and I built a small quiet private religion out of the way she said it. Now it goes into me like something with an edge, because she’s saying it the way a person says a name they’re begging, and I have made very sure she has nothing left she’s allowed to beg me for.
“We’ve discussed everything that needs discussing,” I tell her. “I expect you ready when I come home. The sooner we get you with child, the sooner we both get what we want out of this.”
She goes. I watch the heavy door settle shut behind her and I sit dead still in the big chair until I’m certain she’s past the elevator and out of earshot, and then I let out a breath with six months and one ruined morning packed down inside it, andbefore it’s even fully out of me I’m reaching for the phone, because the only thing I have ever known to do with a feeling is put it to work.
I call Nolan.
He’s the man I keep on retainer for the work that can’t be done out in the open, the one who quietly profiled three separate sets of investors for me before I let any of them near the team and saved me a fortune in every case. He picks up the way he always picks up, on the second ring, no name, no greeting, no weather.
“Boss.”
“I need a favor.”
“Sure.”
I give him the names without any preamble. Barrymore first, and longest, everything there is to be had on him going back a full year, where he goes and who he sees and what he wants and whether any part of what he wants is currently asleep in the farthest guest room of my apartment. Then Raymond Glasgow, because a man who walks into my office with a folder of photographs already copied and waiting is a man who has been planning this a great deal longer than a single morning, and I want the name of everyone who sat at the table with him while he did it. Then two more names off the board, the two who’ve always been the loudest on the subject of the right schools and the right grandfathers.
“Find out what they’re all up to,” I tell him. “Every one of them. I don’t care how small it seems.”
“How fast?”
“Yesterday.”
He’s gone without a goodbye, which is the single best thing about him and the reason I keep paying him what I pay him.
After that I make myself go back to work. There are contracts on the screen that need my eyes and a quarter that will not closeitself, and I sit in front of the whole of it and get absolutely nothing done, because every time my attention slips its leash it goes straight back to the same place, the low leather chair, the folded hands, the coat she never took off, the face that flinched when I saidfarceand broke clean apart when I saidsomeone like you.An act, I tell myself again, and the word has a little less power over me every hour that passes, because I have sat across this desk from a great many people performing for their lives and not one of them has ever once looked the way she looked.
If it was an act, it’s the only act I’ve ever watched that made the performer bleed.
The thought rides with me through every wasted hour of the afternoon, down in the elevator, into the back of the car, home through traffic I don’t see a foot of, and it’s still sitting beside me at eight that evening when I let myself into the apartment and find it dark and silent in a way it hasn’t been since the night before our wedding. No music. No lamp left on for me in the hall. None of the small ordinary sounds of another person somewhere in the rooms. My own room, when I reach it, is exactly as I left it this morning, the bed made and untouched, the air gone cold and impersonal, scrubbed clean of every small warm trace of her I’d stopped noticing because I’d let myself believe they would simply always be there. Her things are gone from the top of the dresser. Her side of the closet stands open and bare, the hangers pushed to one end. And for one absurd, lurching second some part of me is certain she’s run after all, deal or no deal, straight out the door and into his car.
Then I understand. She hasn’t left the apartment at all. She’s only leftme.
Fine. As though I’d make any kind of scene about it. As though I’d go knocking down my own hallway like a boy locked out of his own house, demanding to know why my wife won’t share a bed with the man who spent this morning telling her toher face that he was tired of her. She has done exactly the thing I told her this morning she was free to do, every part of it short of the one thing I forbade her, and if she wants to put a wall and a length of corridor between the two of us tonight then she is more than welcome to the wall and the corridor both.
I tell myself all of that very firmly, standing alone in my cold immaculate room. And then I go and find her anyway, down the dark hall past one empty guest room and the next, all the way to the last and farthest one, the small room at the end with the window that never gets the morning, the exact room a person would choose if the thing she wanted most in the world was distance from the man who’d put her there. The door’s open a few inches. She’s curled on top of the made covers with her shoes still on, fallen asleep the sudden hard way people fall asleep when crying has simply worn them all the way down, and the tracks of it haven’t dried yet on her face.
I stop in the doorway and I don’t go in, because going in is not a thing the man I’ve spent all day pretending to be would ever do.
She looks so small. She looked small this morning too, in the chair, and I told myself then that it was strategy, that the smallness was aimed at me like everything else. But standing here now in the dark with no cameras and no board and no audience of any kind, with no broad desk to put between us and hide behind, I can’t make the lie hold its shape. There’s no one here to perform for. There is no reason on this earth for her to be lying asleep and tear-streaked and undone in the worst and farthest room in my home unless the grief is real, unless I am the one who did this to her, unless the thing I broke apart this morning to keep was a thing that had somehow, impossibly, against every term of every contract, already been mine.
I stand over the wreck I’ve made of her in the dark, and the question comes rising up out of the oldest and the ugliest part ofme, the part that grew up on the wrong side of every set of tracks there is and never once in its life expected to be the one chosen, and it asks the only thing it has ever truly wanted to know.
