I want it back before the sentence is even finished.
Iris doesn't cry. That's the part I'll be seeing at three in the morning for the rest of my life. She just stands in our kitchen and puts the armour back on — piece by piece, exactly the way she took it off. Three months, in reverse, in about four seconds.
"Is that what you want?" she asks. Her voice is calm. Polite, even. "For me to go?"
No. God, no. Please.
"I don't know what I want," I say.
She nods once, the way you'd accept a delivery.
Then she walks away. And she doesn't slam the door.
She just closes it.
The house is enormous when you're avoiding someone inside it.
She moves back into her old room — the one she hasn't slept in since June. I stay in ours, a word I keep saying to myself in an increasingly unconvincing tone.
We are unfailingly polite. We sayexcuse mein the hallway. She makes coffee and leaves half the pot, and I drink it cold at eleven, because drinking it warm would mean going in while she's still in there.
On the second night I cook a four-course dinner for two at half past nine. I plate both. I sit down. I eat neither.
I have run kitchens through Christmas. I have faced down two hundred covers with a dead oven and a sous chef crying into the beurre blanc.
I cannot walk down one hallway and knock on a door.
Sophie lets herself in on the third day, because nobody in this village has ever knocked in their lives.
She takes one look at me.
"Oh, Catherine."
"Don't."
"You've done it, haven't you." She perches on the edge of the table, arms folded, entirely unhurried. "You've gone and done the thing you always do."
"I don't need—"
"She rang me," Sophie says. "Iris. Yesterday."
Everything in me stops.
"To say what?"
"To ask whether you were eating."
I look at the floor.
"She'sdown the hall, Cat." Sophie stands, collects her bag, pauses on her way past me. "She isn't on a plane. She isn't in Chicago. She has spent three days sitting in a spare room, in a house she could walk out of at any moment, ringingmeto find out whether you've had your dinner." She squeezes my shoulder hard enough to hurt. "I'm not going to tell you what to do about that. You know precisely what to do about that. You've simply decided you're not allowed."
She lets herself out.
I sit in that kitchen for a very long time.
It's dark when I go and get the letter.
It's in the drawer of the nightstand, in with the tin of buttons and the reading glasses I don't need yet. I've read it forty times. I know it by heart. I take it out anyway, because there's a difference between knowing a thing andlookingat it.
