Chapter 3 – Emily
Emily
That's how long she's been under our roof, and I have learned to measure time now in the small increments of her presence—the click of her heels on the marble in the mornings, the particular pitch of Ben's laughter drifting up through the floor at dinner, the way the house rearranges itself around her the way a room rearranges itself around a fire.
I'm sitting at the edge of our bed unbraiding my hair when Ben comes in from the bathroom, and he's already got the tablet in his hand, already thumbing it awake before he's even lowered himself onto the mattress.
The blue light finds his face in the dark and makes it strange, makes it into a stranger's, and I watch the reflection of the tickers scroll upward in the glass over his reading glasses, little green and red numbers climbing and falling like something with a pulse.
"Tara's settling in well," he says, not looking at me. "Don't you think?"
I set the elastic on the nightstand. I take my time with it.
We haven't touched each other in weeks. In long enough that I've stopped reaching across the space between us in the night, long enough that the space itself has become a third thing living in this bed with us, patient and cold.
There was a time he couldn't keep his hands off me.
There was a time he'd pull the tablet out of my hands and set it face-down on the floor and say later, say it low, say it like a promise.
Now he holds it the way other men hold a wife.
"Oh," I say, standing to pull my nightgown over my head, "she's settling in all right."
I hear him shift. "What's that supposed to mean?"
And there it is—that small snag in his voice, the thing that snags in mine too, the both of us catching on the same burr.
I smooth the fabric down over my hips and I turn to look at him, really look, and he's finally lowered the tablet a few inches, enough that I can see his eyes over the top of it.
"You haven't noticed," I say. It isn't a question, but it comes out soft, the way everything comes out of me soft.
"All of it. The little comments. The—" I search for the word and it embarrasses me even as I reach for it, because naming a thing this small out loud makes me sound exactly like the woman Tara keeps painting.
"The barbs. Every time you leave the room. She's got this way of?—"
"Emily." He says my name the way you'd set down something you were tired of carrying. "She just lost the entire life she'd planned. Two weeks out. Do you understand what that does to a person?"
"I understand it doesn't have anything to do with me."
"She's grieving. People say things when they're grieving. You're reading into it."
You're reading into it. I have heard this sentence, or its cousins, so many times over the last year that I've begun to wonder whether it's true, whether there really is some flaw in the way I take in the world, some warp in the lens.
That's the cleverest thing about it—the way it turns you into the problem.
The way it hands you the choice between believing your own eyes and believing the man you love, and makes you feel monstrous for not choosing him.
I don't argue. I never do. I pull back the covers on my side and I get in, and I lie down facing the ceiling with the whole cold country of the mattress between us, and I think that will be the end of it.
It usually is. Silence is the surface I've learned to skate across, and I'm good at it now, I've had years of practice, I can glide the whole length of an evening without once breaking through.
But then he says, still scrolling, casual as anything, "I'm bringing her in to the office tomorrow."
I don't move. "The office."
"Give her the lay of the place. Introduce her around to everyone." He turns the tablet off, finally, and the room drops back into ordinary dark, and I hear him settle into his pillow. "It'll be good for her."
"Why?" I say it to the ceiling.
"Why what?"
"Why does she need the lay of the place, Ben. She's a guest. She's here to—" I stop. I almost say heal, and the word curdles before I can get it out, because I don't believe it anymore, I'm not sure I ever did. "She's here to recover."
There's a pause, and in the pause I feel it coming the way you feel a change in the weather in an old injury, some ache that knows before the sky does.
"She's going to do some consulting for us while she's here," he says. "Marketing. It's her whole field, Em, it's what she's good at. And frankly the department could use it. Fresh eyes."
I sit up.
I don't decide to. My body does it for me, up out of the dark before my mind has caught the words and turned them over, and I'm sitting there with my hair loose around my shoulders and my heart going the way it went that first morning on the hill.
"Your marketing department," I say slowly, and I hear how careful my own voice has become, careful the way you're careful carrying something full to the brim, "is run by people you personally recruited.
Top of their programs. You flew that woman—Mia—you flew her in from London and gave her a signing bonus that made the trade papers.
You told me she was the best you'd ever seen. You said that. In this bed."
"And even the best can learn a thing or two.
" He says it lightly, like he's doing me a kindness by staying so reasonable, like reason is a thing he's extending toward me the way you'd extend a hand to someone standing too close to an edge.
"Nobody's above a fresh perspective, Emily.
That's not an insult to Mia. That's just good business. "
"Fresh perspective." My mouth is dry. "Tara bounces from job to job. She was doing real estate the last time she came through, and before that it was the wellness thing, the supplements, and now suddenly she's—what, she's going to advise the people who built your entire brand from nothing?"
"You built your brand from nothing," he says, and there's an edge in it now, the reasonableness thinning. "I built it from nothing. That's exactly the kind of person who sees what the pedigree crowd can't. She's scrappy. She's hungry. You wouldn't understand that."
You wouldn't understand that. The old wound, pressed with a thumb.
As though I've never wanted anything I had to fight for.
As though the only difference between us that has ever mattered to him is the one thing I can't help, the family I was born into, the house I grew up in, the fingertips I split open on the cello for fifteen years while other girls slept.
"Besides," he goes on, softer again, magnanimous again, rolling toward me in the dark so that I can just make out the shape of him, "it'll be good for her to have something to focus on.
Something besides the breakup. You can understand that, can't you.
A person needs a purpose. Something to put their hands to.
" He reaches over and, for the first time in longer than I can bear to count, he touches me—two fingers, light, against my forearm, the way you'd gentle a nervous animal.
"It's a good thing we're doing. Let it be a good thing. "
I look down at where his fingers rest on my arm, at the place I have wanted to be touched for weeks and weeks, and I feel nothing move through me but a cold, clear grief, because I understand now that even this is for her. Even this is so I'll be quiet about her.
I want to focus on something too, I think.
God, do I want something to put my hands to.
I want a purpose that isn't waiting. I want to be given the lay of some place, any place, want someone to fly me in and call me the best they've ever seen and mean it in this bed.
I have a hunger too. Nobody has ever once thought to ask.
"I want to focus on something else myself," I say, so quietly I'm not sure he hears me.
And then I lie back down, and I turn my face away from the shape of him in the dark, and I wait for the sound of the tablet coming back on.
It does.