8. Liam
— ? —
Liam
The penthouse has gone strange. Sixty floors of very expensive nothing with me rattling around inside it like a coin in a tin.
Her vitamins are back in the medicine cabinet.
I brought the bottle home from the office the night I fired Angelina and put it on the second shelf where she left it. Now I check on it every morning. Her name on the label. Refill two weeks overdue.
The gala dress is still in the kitchen bin.
Nobody empties the bins when the man of the house has stopped being a functioning adult. The housekeeper gave notice after I put a glass through the wall above the sink, which I’d like on the record was one glass, one time, and I apologized in writing. But she never came back anyway.
I drink for four days.
My father’s whiskey, the bottles he kept for occasions and left behind with everything else.
It works right up until it doesn’t, and then it’s five in the morning and I’m on the bathroom floor holding a new phone that has just rung exactly once somewhere five hundred miles away before I hung up on her.
That’s the bottom. I’d like to report I found it with some dignity.
I got up, poured four thousand dollars of Scotch down the sink like an idiot, and started making calls.
The one genuinely useful thing about being who I am is that I can buy almost anything, and that includes a search. Actually, just two trusty investigators. Keeping it low-key so my mother won’t intercept.
The first investigator quits after three days. “She covered her tracks, Mr. Sharpe. New phone, new address, nothing under the married name. No cards, no accounts, no forwarding order at the post office. She’s either off the grid or using a name I can’t reach.”
The second is sixty, wears a cardigan to a meeting on the fortieth floor, and is visibly unimpressed by the view. He calls twelve days after the divorce.
“A nurse recognized her. Worked with her before she ever met you, then saw the courthouse coverage.” Paper moves on his end. “Front desk at a medical clinic. Five hundred miles north of you. Small town. Everyone knows everyone.”
“Twelve days and two firms, and it’s a nurse.”
“It’s always a nurse, Mr. Sharpe. Two men with computers and one woman with eyes.”
I take down the address.
“One thing.” He says it the way you say a thing you’ve decided to say. “I’ve done nine of these. Wives who left. The ones who go quiet and take nothing, they’ve usually thought about it for a long while before they did it.”
“She had almost three months.”
“Then she’s quick.” A pause. “Good luck, Mr. Sharpe. You’ll want it.”
Then I go into the bathroom, open the cabinet, and put her vitamins in my coat pocket.
***
“Clear my week.”
Marguerite has kept my calendar for six years and has never once asked why. “Which items are moving?”
“All of them.”
“The Halvorsen dinner is Thursday. You’ve moved it twice.”
“Move it a third time.”
A short silence with a great deal in it. “And what shall I tell people you’re doing?”
“Tell them I’m out of town.”
“For how long?”
I look at the address written on the back of an envelope in my own handwriting, which is worse than I remember it being.
“Marguerite. I genuinely don’t know.”
“Very good.” And then, because she’s known me since I was twenty-two, “Shall I hold your Friday, or shall I stop pretending you have Fridays?”
“Stop pretending.”
I drive it myself.
There’s a plane on the ground forty minutes away with my name on the manifest, and I take the car instead, which Marguerite receives as evidence of a small stroke.
Nine hours. Past the state line the towns start shrinking.
Diners with hand-painted signs. A high school marquee advertising a bake sale.
A hardware store with the same family name on it since 1931.
I have flown over this part of the country several hundred times and have never once been on the ground in it.
She went home. It’s the one place I would never have thought to look, because in three months I never once asked her where she was from.
I rehearse for about three hundred miles. Then I catch myself doing it out loud to a windshield, in the voice I use for board presentations, and I stop. There’s no version of this that works as a pitch.
I stop for gas an hour out and the pump won’t take the card without a zip code I have to look up, because I have not personally bought fuel since I was nineteen years old.
Inside, a kid behind the counter charges me for coffee that tastes like a road, and there’s a rack of paperbacks by the door, spinning, sun-bleached, three dollars each.
I stand in front of it for longer than a grown man should.
Her book had a cracked spine and a bookmark she made out of a drugstore receipt, and it lived on the nightstand for three months, and I could not now tell you the title of it or one single thing that happened in it.
I buy the coffee. I don’t buy a book.
***
The town has one hotel, and the one hotel is a motel.
Two floors, an ice machine, a sign out front with a letter missing from it, and a woman at the desk who looks at my car and then at me.
“How many nights?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“We do weekly.”
“Then weekly.”
She takes the card, looks at the name on it for one long beat, hands me a key on a plastic diamond, and says the words I will be hearing in my sleep for the rest of my life.
“Room ten. Ice is out. Sorry.”
Room ten has a bed, a chair, an old television bolted to a dresser, and a window that looks at the parking lot. I stand in the middle of it holding a plastic diamond and consider that this is the first room I’ve slept in since I was twenty-two that I did not either own or have booked for me.
I put the vitamin bottle on the nightstand where I can see it.
Then I drive four minutes to the clinic.
***
The clinic is exactly what I expected and nothing like what I hoped for.
Low brick building, quiet street, the sort of block where a car like mine announces itself two streets early. I park across from it and manage to sit there twenty full minutes without opening the door.
People go in and come out. A man on crutches. A woman with two kids and enormous patience. Nobody hurries anywhere. There’s a sign about flu shots taped inside the window and a planter by the step with something dead in it.
She comes to the glass once, reaching past the blinds to take a package from a courier, and I stop breathing for the length of it.
Then I go in.
Small waiting room. Plastic chairs along the wall, magazines fanned on a low table, antiseptic under everything.
An old man by the window with a folded newspaper.
A mother in the corner with a toddler who takes one look at my suit and hides behind her knee, which is the most sensible reaction anyone has had to me in weeks.
And there she is. Behind the desk, eyes on a screen, hair pulled back the way she wore it the first time I ever saw her.
I stop in front of her.
“Do you have an appointment?”
She doesn’t look up. Her fingers keep on moving, the voice she’d use on anyone who came through that door.
“I’m here for my wife.”
The typing stops.
Her hands stay where they are, just above the keys, for one second. Then she raises her head and looks at me.
Nothing in her face moves at all.
“We’re divorced.”
“I’m aware.”
“If you’re not here for a medical reason, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“Solenn-”
“Next patient, please.”
She goes back to the screen.
That’s the visit. That’s all of it. The mother in the corner glances up and thinks better of it, the old man turns a page, the phone rings somewhere behind the desk, and my ex-wife answers it while I stand three feet away, no longer a thing that is happening.
“Sir.” Kind, and completely immovable. “There are people waiting.”
***
There is a bench outside the clinic and I sit on it, in a suit, in a town where nobody wears one.
I try Tessa’s number, which I know is dead, and listen to the three tones telling me so all the way to the end, like a man pressing a bruise.
A woman in scrubs comes out for a cigarette, clocks me, clocks the car across the street, and works the whole thing out in about four seconds.
“You’re the husband.”
“I was.”
“Mm.” She lights it. Takes her time. “She’s good at that desk. Everybody likes her.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” Smoke, and a look that costs me more than the drive did. “Because she’s been here for weeks and nobody in this building knew she was married when she first came here.”
I don’t have anything to put against that.
“Maria on billing thought you were a boyfriend who left.” She taps ash into the dead planter. “Miranda thought you’d died. Miranda’s very dramatic.”
“And you?”
“I thought whoever it was hadn’t earned an explanation.” She looks at the car again. “Nice car.”
“Thank you.”
“Wasn’t a compliment.”
She finishes the cigarette, drops it in the planter with the rest of what’s dead in there, and goes back in.
The steps are cold through my shoes. I stand at the bottom of them in the afternoon sun and take stock, which is the one thing I’ve been reliably good at my entire life.
The facts are these. She won’t talk to me. She won’t take a call, a letter, or a lawyer. Every door I know how to open, she has personally locked, and she did it in a few words without raising her voice.
Which leaves the thing I have never once failed at.
I take out my phone. The realtor picks up immediately, delighted, because I am the best quarter she’s ever had.
“Mr. Sharpe. What can I do for you?”
“I need a house.”
“Wonderful. Which market? Are we thinking coastal?”
“Here.” I give her the name of the town.
A pause of exactly the wrong length. “I’m sorry, could you spell that? That sounds… quaint.”
I spell it.
“Of course, it’s a small town. Lovely location, quiet, away from the hustle and bustle of the city. And what are we looking for?”
“Something good. Fully staffed, ready to live in, as fast as money makes it happen. Bedrooms. Room for a nursery.” Through the front window, Solenn reaches for a ringing phone. “And the deed goes in her name.”
“Her name. Solenn Alston. I’ll send the details.”
“Understood.” I can hear her deciding not to ask, and then not managing it. “Mr. Sharpe, forgive me. Will Miss Alston be viewing?”
“No.”
“Will she be aware of the purchase before it completes?”
“No.”
“Ah.” Keys, somewhere. “And if she declines it?”
I watch a woman with two children come out of the clinic and stop on the step to zip the smaller one’s coat, and behind her, through the glass, my ex-wife is holding a phone against her shoulder and writing something down.
“Then I’ll have bought a house,” I say.
“Yes, sir. You will have.”
I hang up.
Through the glass she’s laughing at something the person on the other end of that call has just said. One hand over her mouth, trying to keep it professional and losing badly.
It’s a real laugh. I never heard it once. Three months in my own home, and some stranger with a sore throat got it inside a minute.
Fine. I’ll take that as a target.
She hangs up. Straightens a stack of forms. Presses one hand into the small of her back the way pregnant women do, and there she is under a cheap cardigan, the first time I have ever seen my child with my own eyes.
I dial David Howard.
“Mr. Sharpe.”
“Two things,” I say, watching her through the clinic glass. “A house. And find out who owns St. Brigid’s.”