15. Solenn
— ? —
Solenn
The fall passes in Tuesdays.
That’s how I measure time now, in the small rituals Liam has built around us.
Tuesday movie nights where he critiques every romance film for tactical errors.
Tuesday morning vitamins at ten sharp, the bottle from the penthouse now almost empty.
Tuesday dinners he still can’t cook and keeps attempting anyway, and I have learned to love the smoke alarm like an old friend.
The paperbacks pile up on my nightstand. He’s read every one, Post-it notes blooming out of the pages like weeds. His annotations have quietly stopped being tactical. Chapter twenty-three of the latest one has a sticky note on it that says The hero finally gets it. Took him long enough. Same.
The rungs climb higher without me noticing.
One cup of tea becomes two. Two becomes dinner. Dinner becomes falling asleep on the couch with his hand on my belly, feeling our daughter kick against his palm. He started calling her Isla after a character in one of the books, and the name stuck before I could get an objection organized.
He stays most nights now. Not for anything physical, not since that first time.
Just holding me while I sleep, curved around the shape of me, his breath at my shoulder.
After the corridor and the gala and all those months of being furniture in my own marriage, being held should not feel like a miracle.
It does anyway.
He says I love you like a standing appointment. Every morning with the tea. Every night before he goes under. Dropped into the middle of conversations about parking, about the printer, about whether anybody has ever successfully cooked rice in this apartment.
I have never once said it back.
I don’t know why. The words are there. They sit up behind my ribs and press every time he looks at me a certain way. And every time I open my mouth to let them out, something old and stubborn shuts the door.
He never pushes. Just keeps saying it, steady as a clock, like a man perfectly content to wait.
Tessa asks me about it once, in her kitchen, over a chicken she is dismembering with real feeling.
“You still haven’t.”
“I know.”
“Sol, the man mops floors for a living now.”
“It’s the opposite actually. He pays them to hire him.”
“Even better.”
She points the knife at me, which she has decided is a conversational device. “So what happens if you say it?”
That’s the exact thing. I sit in her kitchen with a plate on top of my own stomach and I cannot make my mouth produce the answer, because the answer is that the last time I let myself believe a man loved me I ended up standing in a corridor, and some animal part of me has decided that as long as I never say it out loud, the floor cannot come out from under me again.
“Nothing happens,” I say. “That’s the problem. Nothing happens and then everything does.”
Tessa goes back to the chicken.
“He’d wait a year, you know.”
“I know.”
“He’d wait ten.” A joint comes apart under her hands. “That’s not me being romantic. That’s me being annoyed. I’ve had to listen to him not complain about it for four months.”
Angelina’s texts never stopped.
I blocked the number after the photograph.
A new one turned up the next day. I blocked that.
Another bloomed in its place, and another, like some kind of harassment hydra.
Remember when he used to look at me like that.
Does he know you’re not actually special.
And my personal favorite, He’ll get bored eventually. They always do.
I stopped reading them in October.
I did not stop noticing that they arrive at the same times.
Ten past nine in the morning, which is when I walk to work.
Just after six, which is when I walk home.
Whoever is sending them knows my shift, and has known it since the leaves were still on the trees, and that is a thing I have decided not to say out loud to anybody, because saying it out loud would make me somebody who needs protecting, and I have only just finished being that.
***
Week Thirty-Five
I am enormous, swollen. Exhausted in the bone-deep way only the last stretch produces, as though my body has entered a marathon without telling me. My ankles have left. I have not seen my own feet since the leaves turned.
Liam is at the clinic doing a shift he could get out of and doesn’t, because he says the floors have standards now. He’ll be back by dinner. He’s always back by dinner. It’s Tuesday.
The knock comes at two.
I get to the door expecting a delivery. Mendez sent me home early and I’ve been asleep on the couch in sweatpants that have been through things, looking like a woman who has given up on the concept of appearances.
Melanie Sharpe is standing in my hallway.
Angelina is half a step behind her, in an obviously expensive coat because the large luxury logo is printed on the belt, holding her handbag with both hands like the hallway might take it off her.
She’s thinner than she was at the gala. She looks like a woman who has driven a long way for something.
“May we come in?”
“No.”
They come in anyway.
Melanie goes past me the way you go past a coat rack, heels loud on my floorboards, coat immaculate, and settles onto my secondhand couch like a woman taking a throne.
Angelina stops in the doorway. Between me and the way out. Which is a choice.
“We were in the area.” Melanie crosses her ankles. “We thought we’d look in on this little arrangement you’ve made with my son.”
“It isn’t an arrangement.”
“Isn’t it?” Her eyes go over me. The sweatpants.
The unbrushed hair. The belly that enters rooms a full second before the rest of me.
“He proposed out of necessity. You know that. Everybody knows that. He needed a wife to make the pregnancy respectable, and you needed, what. Stability? Security? A wealthy father for your child?”
My hands have started shaking. I fold them over the bump so they’ve got somewhere to be.
“I never asked him for anything.”
“The divorce said as much. Very clever.” She leans forward. “Playing the martyr so he’d chase you. Taking nothing so he’d feel it. Manipulating a decent man into believing he’s in love when all you’ve done is make yourself convenient. Why get half when you can get everything?”
“I’m not manipulating anyone.”
“Aren’t you? He bought you a hospital. He has been living in a motel room.
He fired Angelina, he stopped speaking to his family, and he is currently mopping floors for fourteen dollars an hour.
His company is failing.” Her mouth tightens.
“All because a girl in a cheap dress let him feel sorry for her.”
“He used to send a car for me by midnight.” Angelina, from the doorway, and her voice has been sharpened on something. “Every time. Did he tell you that? How he couldn’t wait. The things he used to say.”
The baby rolls hard under my ribs.
“Did he tell you where he learned all those things he does?” Her smile is a small cruel thing. “All the moves that make you feel special. I taught him those. Every single one.”
I want to take this woman by her beautiful hair and put her out of my apartment, and then come back for the other one, and then lie down for about nine hours.
Instead I crack a joke.
“Does this work?” My voice comes out steadier than any part of me. “The ambush. The ex-girlfriend backup. Because I have to say, the coordination looks exhausting.” I look between them. “Did you carpool, or did you just happen to arrive at the same time?”
Melanie blinks. Angelina’s mouth comes open. Neither of them expected funny.
“I’m serious,” I say, staying on my feet against the wall, because my back is screaming and I am not sitting down and giving either of them the height.
“This is very rehearsed. Did you run lines in the car? You take the sexual history, I’ll do the gold-digging, we’ll meet in the middle on general emotional devastation.
OMG, I feel like a part of the Mean Girls. ”
“This is not a joke.”
“It’s a bit of a joke. You flew or drove five hundred miles to tell a pregnant woman her ex-husband doesn’t love her. During my nap. Like I don’t already know that you hate me.” I shake my head. “I have had better-organized attacks from my own bank.”
“He is not your anything. He is my son.”
“Those really aren’t mutually exclusive.”
“He belongs with somebody appropriate. Somebody who understands what he is. Somebody who-”
The door opens.
Liam takes it in one sweep.
His mother on the couch. Angelina in the doorway. Me against a wall in three-day sweatpants, white around the knuckles, making jokes.
Something in his face goes out like a light.
“Mother.”
“Darling.” Her smile holds. “We were only just-”
“Leaving.”
“Now, there’s no need for theater. We came a very long way to have a conversation with-”
“I said leaving.”
Melanie rises, smooth as anything, and plays her last card straight into his face.
“You never loved this girl, Liam. You told me that at the gala.” Her chin lifts.
And the room does nothing. Liam doesn’t move, doesn’t look at me to see what it’s done.
Because it hasn’t done anything, and he already knows it hasn’t, and after a second I understand that the only person in this apartment who doesn’t know that is the woman who just said it.
“I was there,” I say.
Melanie turns.
“In the corridor. Outside the study.” My hand is flat on my own wall, and I can feel exactly how it felt to have it flat on that one.
“I was about six feet from you. I had come out because I couldn’t cry in front of a few hundred people.
And I stood there and I heard every word your son said, including the ones you’re quoting. ”
Nothing in her face moves. Nothing at all. Which is how I know I’ve got her.
“I told him,” I say. “In a hospital bed. Took me about twenty minutes to get through it and he sat in a chair and didn’t defend himself once.
” I shift my weight off my bad hip. “You’ve been carrying that around for five months like it was a loaded gun, and the whole time it’s been sitting on our kitchen table. ”
The silence goes on a beat too long for her.
“That’s…” Melanie’s mouth works. “That is not the point.”
“No,” I agree. “It really isn’t.”
And Liam turns to Angelina.
“I never loved you.”
She flinches like he’s swung at her.
“I know that now, because I’ve spent months relearning the word off a woman who made me start again.” Loud enough that the neighbors get it too. “You were convenient. You were suitable. You were everything my mother told me I was supposed to want.”
“Liam-”
“And I felt nothing.” He puts himself between her and me. “I thought that was what it was. I thought the empty part was standard. Then I married somebody else and ignored her and lost her, and it turned out I’d never felt one single thing in my life. Turns out, you were just an obligation.”
He turns to his mother.
“You’re done.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“No contact. No dinners. No relationship with this baby.” He doesn’t raise his voice at all, which is worse. “Not until the day you apologize on Solenn’s terms. Not mine. Not yours. Hers.”
“You cannot be serious.”
“She’s mine.” Something goes through his voice and doesn’t quite get out the other side. “She has been since the day I was too stupid to notice. And you will not touch her again. And Angelina, if ever I catch the person you sent stalking Solenn, I will make sure you go to jail with him.”
Melanie looks at her son like a woman looking at a stranger wearing her child’s face.
Then she smooths her coat and collects her bag. Puts herself back together with the ease of somebody who has never once in her life been made to sit with a loss.
“You’ll regret this.”
“I regret a great many things.” Liam holds the door open. “This isn’t one of them.”
She goes without another word. Angelina follows, and gives me one look on the way past that I will think about later, when there’s room.
The door shuts.
The quiet afterward should feel like winning. It doesn’t.
Liam turns to me and his whole face has gone soft with worry. “Are you all right? What did they say to-”
“Liam.”
It comes out strange. Far away. Somebody else’s voice being used badly.
“What is it?”
I reach for the doorframe.
My hand comes away wet.
Warmth going down the insides of my legs, more of it than there should be, five weeks earlier than there should be, and the joke I was building dies somewhere behind my teeth.
“Liam.”