The Res rises up grey and enormous against the afternoon and I leave the car crooked at the curb where the valets will fuss over it and I go up, up, the private elevator, the long hush ofthe executive floor that still smells of my father, and my heart is hammering wrong the whole way, fast and skipping, four-in-six-out coming to pieces in my chest, and I press my hand to the place where it hurts and I keep moving, because I have rehearsed it in the elevator, the whole speech,Raymond did this, the photographs were a lie, Troy is my brother, you were played, and Trey, oh Trey, I never, not once, not ever?—
His office door is open.
He’s standing behind the desk, and he looks up when I come through it, and for one suspended second something happens in his face, some flare of a thing I’m too breathless and too desperate to read, and I open my mouth to say all of it at once.
And he speaks first.
“Perfect timing.” His voice is the old voice, the cold one, the one from the very worst days, and he slides a thin sheaf of cream-colored paper across the desk toward me, already signed, his name black and final at the bottom. “I’ve just signed our divorce papers. Once you add your signature, you will never have to see me again.”
Chapter Fifteen
There’s a thing I told a board of directors once, years ago, when one of them asked how I’d built what I’d built so fast and so young. I told them I had never once in my life let go of something that belonged to me. It got a laugh. It wasn’t meant as one. It was the truest sentence I owned, the whole of my character in eleven words, and I have spent every year since proving it on anyone foolish enough to test it.
And here I stand behind my father-in-law’s desk, in the office that smells of a better man than me, letting go of the only thing I have ever owned that mattered.
The papers are between us on the desk, signed, my name black and final at the bottom where I put it an hour ago with a hand I would not permit to shake. I have just told my wife she will never have to see me again, and I have said it in the coldest voice I have, because cold is the only wrapping I could find that wouldn’t fall open and show her what’s inside it. She came through that door breathless and desperate and beautiful, about to say something, and I cut her off before she could, because I have learned what saying things does to her heart, and because I overheard, four days ago, exactly how she feels when she’s free to say what she likes.He makes me sick.I have built the restof my life around those four words. The least I can do, the only decent thing left in me, is make it so she never has to look at the thing that sickens her again.
So I’ve set her free. It’s the most expensive thing I’ve ever given anyone and the first I’ve given without expecting to be paid back, and I brace myself now for the part where she takes up the pen, because watching her sign will be the price, and I’ve always been willing to pay.
“I’m sorry, Camilla.” It comes out grim, scraped, nothing like the thing it is. “For all of it. But most of all for nearly—” The word won’t come at first. I make it. “For nearly killing you. I’ll carry that. You don’t have to.”
She doesn’t take the pen.
She stands there on the other side of the desk and she looks at me, just looks, and her eyes fill, and then they spill, the tears coming without a sound, running down a face Loren is no longer here to fix, and she does not wipe them away and she does not look down at the papers and she does not reach for the pen. She only stands there in the wreck of everything I’ve done and cries, looking at me as though I’m the one who has been hurt, and I cannot bear it, I find. Of all the things I have stood and borne in this room and the rooms before it, this is the one I cannot.
My fists clench at my sides.
“You don’t have to pity me,” I tell her, and it comes out hard, because hard is what I have when everything else has run out.
“I’m not.” Her voice shakes, but the words are clear. “But you don’t have to lie to me either.”
And something gives way in my chest, some final wall I’ve been holding up with both hands for two months, because she’s right, she’s exactly right, she has looked straight through the cold and named the only lie left standing in this room, which is the divorce, which is this whole performance of letting her go as though letting her go were what I wanted. I’m lying to her rightnow, with every signed page on this desk, and I’m tired. Just unspeakably tired of the lying that the truth simply comes up out of me on its own.
“The only time I lied to you,” I say, “was when I told you I was thinking of replacing you with someone else.” I watch her go still. “And the only time I lied about you was when I told Bills that I only married you because of the Waymakers.”
“I heard you say that.” Her voice breaks clean in the middle of it. “I heard you, Trey.”
I jerk where I stand.
“You never said—you never said anything.” It’s barely sound. The whole shape of the last two months is rearranging itself behind my eyes, fast and merciless, every cold thing she’s done suddenly wearing a different face, because if she heard me tell Bills I married her for the team, if she’s been carryingthatsince before the photographs, before the heir, before any of it, thenhe makes me sickwas never what I built my life around four days ago. It was a woman who believed the man she loved had only ever wanted her for a hockey contract. It was grief. It was grief the whole time, and I called it revulsion and signed these papers on the strength of it.
“What can I say,” she whispers, “that won’t make me seem like I’m begging you to…” Her voice falters and dies.
“Beg what?”
She shakes her head, fast, the tears coming harder, refusing it.
And my heart slams once against my ribs, hard enough to hurt, because I can see what’s happening, I can see both of us standing here a single sentence apart from the only thing either of us wants and each too afraid of the other to cross it, and I have spent my whole life believing that the truth is a liability, a thing you give up only when it’s been pried out of you, a weakness. I’mabout to bet everything I have left on it being the opposite. On it being the one thing that gets us out.
“If I beg you to forgive me?—”
“I already did.”
The speed of it nearly stops me. I make myself go on.
“—and not to leave me, so I can spend the rest of my life making it up to you, will you?—”
“Why do you want me to stay?”
