Chapter Two
Filing Papers Instead of Feelings
By nine fifteen the next morning, Senna was on the phone with her lawyer, still in yesterday's clothes, a wrinkled black shirt that smelled faintly of the studio's carpet, hair scraped back with a pen because she hadn't been able to find a proper clip in the state the loft was in.
"I want separation proceedings filed today," she said, standing at the kitchen window where, twelve hours earlier, she'd watched the rain come down while her marriage ended a few feet behind her.
"And I need his name off the building lease.
He co-signed it two years ago for the loan on the studio renovation.
I want that changed before he thinks to argue about it. "
Herr Baumgartner, her lawyer, a dry, efficient man she'd used for every contract Klarheit Audio had ever signed, made a small noise of assent and started listing the documents he'd need.
Senna answered each question with the same flat precision she'd used on Colt the night before, the kind of clarity that came, she was beginning to understand, from refusing to let herself feel any of it yet.
Feeling it could come later. Right now there were forms.
She was still on the phone when she heard the door downstairs, a key in the studio's outer lock, and Greta's voice calling up the stairwell with the particular cheer of a woman who has no idea what she's walking into.
"I brought pastries," Greta said, appearing in the kitchen doorway with a paper bag from the bakery two streets over and stopping dead the moment she saw Senna's face. "Oh."
"I'm fine," Senna said, ending the call with Baumgartner and setting the phone down with more care than the gesture required.
Greta set the bag on the counter without comment, studied her niece for a long moment with the same unhurried attention she gave the secondhand books she sold for a living, the kind of looking that found the true edition under a bad reprint.
"You don't look fine. You look like you've already filed three forms and called two lawyers and haven't cried once. "
"One lawyer. And no."
"Senna."
"I don't have time to fall apart, Greta. I have a six book contract and a studio and a mortgage that's about to have one fewer name on it. Falling apart is a luxury I can schedule for later." She heard how it sounded even as she said it, clipped and defended, and didn't soften it.
Greta pulled out a chair at the kitchen table, the same table, and sat down heavily, the way she did when she was about to say something Senna wasn't going to want to hear.
"You know I watched you do this once before," she said.
"When your mother left. You were nine, and you didn't cry either.
You alphabetized your books instead. Every single one, over three days, while your father sat in the next room not knowing what to do with either of you. "
"This isn't the same."
"I didn't say it was the same wound. I said it's the same instinct.
You manage the parts you can control so you don't have to feel the part you can't." Greta reached across the table and closed her hand over Senna's, warm and dry and steady.
"I'm not telling you to stop. I know better than anyone that you'll grieve on your own schedule or not at all.
I'm telling you I see what you're doing, and I'll be here whenever the schedule changes. "
Senna didn't answer that. She let her aunt hold her hand for a moment longer than was comfortable, then extracted it gently to reach for her coffee, which had gone cold an hour ago and which she drank anyway.
"Did he say why?" Greta asked, gentler now, pushing the bakery bag an inch closer as though proximity to pastry might soften the question.
"He said it happened once. Six weeks ago, after a job went bad and he didn't come home and I didn't ask why.
" Senna heard her own voice go flatter as she said it, a defense mechanism she recognized and let happen anyway.
"Then he said the messages kept going after that.
So it wasn't once. It was six weeks of once, however many times that adds up to. "
"And you believe the six weeks part."
"I believe he didn't lie about it when I asked directly, which is either the most honest thing he's done in a decade or the least honest, and today I don't have the energy to work out which.
" Senna turned the cold coffee cup slowly on its saucer, a habit she reached for when her hands needed something to do that wasn't shaking.
"I keep waiting to feel it the way you're supposed to feel it.
Betrayed. Wrecked. I feel like I'm auditing a bad session.
Like I'm looking for the exact place the take went wrong so I can cut around it. "
"That's still feeling it," Greta said. "It's just wearing your work clothes."
Senna almost smiled at that, the closest she'd come to it since the previous night, and Greta, seeing it land, didn't push further, just reached into the bag and set a pastry in front of her niece with the quiet insistence of a woman who had raised nobody but had somehow absorbed every instinct of someone who had.
? ? ?
Downstairs, the studio was already half awake by the time Imke arrived for her ten o'clock shift, and one look at Senna's face told her everything she needed to know without being told.
She didn't ask. She simply moved through the morning's schedule with a quiet efficiency Senna would remember gratefully for a long time afterward: rescheduling the eleven o'clock session with a translator who could just as easily come Thursday, pushing Petra's next chapter back a day, fielding a call from the publisher's German office with an ease that let Senna sit in the control room and not have to perform competence for a stranger on the phone.
"You don't have to do that," Senna said, once the morning's calls were handled and Imke was back at her desk, headphones around her neck, not asking a single question about why.
"I know," Imke said, not looking up from the schedule. "I'm doing it anyway. Tell me if that's wrong."
"It's not wrong." Senna watched her for a moment, this quiet, competent young woman she'd hired eight months ago mostly because she had the rare gift of listening without needing to fill silence with her own voice, and felt something in her chest loosen fractionally, the first give in twenty four hours of held tension. "Thank you."
By early afternoon, the separation paperwork was moving through Baumgartner's office, a formal notice already drafted for delivery to Colt at the clubhouse address he'd given years ago for exactly this kind of correspondence, back when they'd set it up as a joke, a just-in-case that neither of them had ever expected to use.
Senna read the notice twice on her laptop screen before approving it, feeling nothing she could name, and sent the approval back with a single line: Send it today.
Her phone rang at half past two. Colt's number, the one she still hadn't blocked, lighting up the screen where it sat face up on the mixing desk.
She watched it ring, watched the studio's low afternoon light catch the edge of the phone case, and let it ring out completely, all the way to voicemail, without moving to answer it or silence it.
Imke, at the desk beside her, didn't say anything, just kept her eyes on her own screen, giving Senna the particular courtesy of pretending not to notice.
The phone buzzed once more, a voicemail notification this time, and Senna looked at it for a long moment before picking it up, opening her contacts, and blocking the number with three decisive taps, the same clean, controlled motion she used to cut a bad take from a finished file.
It felt, for exactly as long as it took to set the phone back down, like winning something.
The feeling didn't last. An hour later, reviewing the day's session notes with Imke, she caught herself glancing at the studio's front window twice in the space of ten minutes, checking the street outside as if she expected to see something there, and had to consciously redirect her attention back to the screen.
She told herself it was simple vigilance, the residue of a bad night making her jumpy.
She did not examine, too closely, why vigilance and hope could sometimes wear the exact same expression on a person's face.
? ? ?
That evening, after Imke left and the studio emptied into its usual after hours quiet, Senna went upstairs to the loft and did the last thing on her list for the day: she had the locks changed.
A locksmith Greta recommended came at seven, replaced both the building's studio entrance and the loft door above it within the hour, businesslike and unbothered by the particular species of domestic wreckage his work implied, and left her with two sets of new keys and an invoice she paid without checking the amount.
She stood in the loft afterward, alone in a space that suddenly felt larger than it had that morning, the kitchen table where the confession had happened wiped down and cleared, Colt's coffee mug, the one with the chip in the handle he refused to throw away, washed and put back in the cabinet like any other dish.
She had not decided to keep it. She had simply washed it out of habit and then not known what else to do with an object that belonged to a marriage that no longer, on paper, existed.
She went to bed early, in a bedroom with a lock on the door for the first time in three years, and lay awake listening to the ordinary sounds of Sachsenhausen settling into night: a tram somewhere in the distance, rain starting again against the window, softer this time, the last of the storm working itself out.
She thought, once, about whether Colt had received the notice yet, whether he was sitting somewhere in the cold industrial dark of Gutleutviertel reading the word separation in a lawyer's careful language, and made herself stop thinking about it by counting, slowly, backward from a hundred, an old trick from childhood she hadn't needed in twenty years and reached for now without shame.
Before sleep took her fully, she found herself thinking, unwillingly, about the day Baumgartner had first drawn up the loft's lease two years ago, how Colt had signed his name beside hers without reading past the second page, trusting her the way you trust the person whose judgment you've decided is better than your own in exactly this kind of matter.
She had liked being trusted that way. She wondered, drifting toward sleep, whether that trust had ever run in both directions the way she'd assumed it did, or whether she had simply been better than he was at making trust look effortless while something underneath it quietly came apart.
She fell asleep somewhere in the sixties, and did not hear, three floors below and across the street, an engine idle once and then cut into silence.