Chapter Fifty-Three #3
“I am sorry that I took my hand off your back,” he says.
"I am sorry that I stood at the top of a room and let four hundred people watch a recording of my voice destroy my wife, and I am sorry that I did not cross that room, and I could have crossed it in two seconds, and I did not, and it was not because of my mother’s hand on my arm.
"It was because I did the sum, and I got an answer, and the answer was you.
"I am sorry that you were on a plane at five forty in the morning. I am sorry that there was nobody in that corridor. I am sorry about the bathroom floor and the hot tap and the five nights, and I did not know about any of it and that is not an excuse, it is a description of what I bought.
“I am sorry that I have made it impossible for you to be angry with me. That is the truest thing you have ever said to me and I have been doing it since July and I have known I was doing it since about September.”
He stops.
“And I am not sorry for the company,” he says.
"I want you to have that as well, because you will find it out anyway and I would rather you had it from me.
I am not sorry for the note and I am not sorry for the fleet and I would do all of it again on a Tuesday, and none of it was for you, and none of it is a payment, and I am never going to present it to you.
“That is all I have got, Nora. It is not enough. There is not enough on this earth and there was never going to be.”
And he stands there.
He does not fill it. He does not add a sentence. He does not offer me a term or a reason or a way out, and his hands are at his sides and they are empty, and he waits to be told.
I sit down on the step.
I sit down because my legs go, and I put my hands flat on the stone on either side of me, and I breathe, and above us four hundred and twenty two years of building lets the day go out of itself the way it does.
“You are not forgiven,” I say.
“No.”
“I am not going to forgive you. Not this year. Possibly not ever, and I am not going to lie to you about it in a courtyard to make an evening easier.”
“No,” he says.
“I am simply not going to carry it on my own any more.”
He puts the hat down on the step.
He does not reach for me. He has not reached for me since a corridor in June and he is not going to, and I have known that for thirteen weeks and I know it now, sitting three inches from him with the light going, because that man will die on that step before he takes one thing that has not been given to him with two hands.
He is never going to close it. That is what the last four years have made of him.
So I do.
I take his face in my hands.
His skin is warm and there is grit on it from the floor and he has not shaved since the hearing, and he makes a sound when I touch him that I am not going to write down, and his eyes close, and his whole body goes still in the way a building goes still when you finally take the load off it.
“Nora,” he says.
“Be quiet.”
And I kiss my husband on the steps of the Cassaro Palazzo at seven minutes past seven on a Thursday in November, four years and two days after a man in a ballroom looked at me across four hundred people and chose the room.
He does not move for a full second.
Then his hand comes up and closes in the back of my jacket, and he pulls me in with everything he has got and he makes that sound again into my mouth, and it is not gentle and it is not tidy and neither of us is any good at it because we are both shaking, and I have his lapel in my fist and his hand is in my hair and there is chalk dust on both of us and four hundred and twenty two years of building over our heads.
It is not like it was. I want that written down.
It is nothing whatsoever like it was. We were twenty nine and thirty two in a kitchen in London and we were beautiful and we were stupid and we knew nothing at all, and now I am thirty three and he is thirty six and he has lost everything he ever had and I have built everything I have, and he tastes of dust and salt and I am crying and I did not notice starting, and he is holding onto the back of my jacket like a man in water.
He breaks it first, because of course he does. He puts his forehead against mine and he keeps his eyes shut and he holds absolutely still, and he does not let go of my jacket.
“Say it,” I tell him.
He does not move.
“You wrote it in the book,” Adrian says. “It ends the hour.”
“The hour ended nine minutes ago,” I say. “You did not sign out.”
And Adrian Kastellanos, who has not asked me for one thing in four months, who gave away a company and a fleet and his own name and never once presented me with the receipt, opens his eyes on a step in a courtyard in Milan with his hands full of my coat.
“I love you,” he says. “I have never stopped. I said it to a room in Rotterdam in October four years ago with a microphone on the table and nine words of it were cut out before four hundred people heard it, and I have never said it to your face since, and I am saying it now with nothing in my hands and nothing behind it and no company and no name and no way on earth to make you keep it.”
“I know,” I say.
“That is not an answer, Nora.”
“No,” I say. “It is not.”
And I stand up, and I put my hand out to him, and he looks at it for six seconds the way a man looks at a door.
“Sign the book,” I say. “You are still on my site.”