Chapter Ten
Nobody warns you about the waiting.
The plan was built. The file was complete. Twenty-nine days out from the twelfth, there was nothing left to gather, nothing to verify, nothing to do except live inside my marriage like a woman who didn't know it was condemned. The revenge was the easy part. Playing wife was the work.
Mark was in a wonderful mood. The fund had a good quarter, or he said it did, and good quarters made him expansive, affectionate in the lazy way of a man petting a dog he's had for years.
He'd squeeze my shoulder passing through the kitchen.
He'd call me from the car for no reason and talk about himself for nine minutes and hang up saying, love you, in the tone you'd say, roger that.
Twice a week his hand would start moving at night, easy, entitled, half asleep, a man reaching for something that had never once not been there, and twice a week I became a woman with an early meeting, a headache, a bad back from the gym.
The excuses were beneath both of us. He never noticed a pattern, because noticing me had left his repertoire years ago, and every time I turned away from my husband in my own bed I lay there afterward with my heart pounding out a strange mix of relief and fury, thinking, four more weeks. Three more weeks. Just hang on.
The dinner was a Thursday in the middle of August, his idea. "Date night," he announced, pleased with himself, as if producing a rare vintage. "Just us. I feel like I haven't seen you all summer." He had no idea how true that was.
He took me to our favourite restaurant and ordered for me without asking a single question, the halibut, she'll love it, and for two hours I sat across a candle from the man I married and conducted an experiment I couldn't stop running, which was: how long until he asks me anything.
Anything at all. A question with me in it.
The answer was one hour and forty minutes, and the question was whether I'd remembered to pick up his jacket from the tailor.
The rest was broadcast. The quarter. Then the Hallorans' boat.
A long story about squash. At one point a woman in pink crossed the dining room and Mark's eyes tracked her, casual, cataloguing, and he leaned across the candle to me, wife of five years, and murmured, "Seven, but she knows it's a seven," and winked, sharing the joke, inviting me in, and I laughed.
I made myself laugh at the live demonstration, at the machine running right in front of me, and inside the laugh I thought about a phone in Chicago and a phone in London lighting up with my name over the years, and what number he'd filed me under for his friends, and I picked up my wine and drank to keep my mouth busy.
He paid the check and squeezed my hand across the table.
"This was great," Mark said, with total sincerity. "We should do this more. You're so easy, Lil. That's what nobody gets about marriage. You find someone easy."
Easy. I smiled at my husband, and the smile held, and in the car he sang along to the radio, buoyant, a man for whom the evening had been a complete success, because I'd been there and required nothing, a lamp that laughed.
He was asleep by eleven. I lay next to him until his breathing went long, and then I did the thing I'd started doing that month, the thing I'd stopped pretending wasn't the key hour of my day. I took my phone out to the garden bench in the dark, and I called Chris.
He answered on the second ring. He always answered on the second ring, and there was always a beat of quiet first, and I'd come to understand the quiet was him setting something down, a book, a pen, whatever the object was he used to keep his hands from dialing me first.
"Well?" he said. "How was Luigi’s?"
"He ordered me the halibut."
"Did you want the halibut?"
"Nobody's asked me that in five years," I said, and meant it as a joke, and heard it land in the dark garden as something else entirely. Chris was quiet a moment.
"Duck," he said. "You'd have ordered the duck. You order it everywhere it appears, and then you eat all the cherries first and pretend you haven't." A pause. "I notice things. It's the whole of my personality. Eleanor used to say I'd have made a fine spy if I could lie, which I can't."
I sat on the bench with my knees pulled up and the sprinklers ticking somewhere and grinned like an idiot at a hydrangea.
The duck. Four dinners at his house all summer and the man had my order memorized with commentary, and my husband of five years had just watched me eat a fish I don't like and called the evening a triumph.
We talked for an hour. This was the real center of that month, the beating heart of it, and none of it was strategy.
Strategy we did in daylight at the drafting table.
The garden calls were something else, and they'd developed their own territory, and it kept expanding.
His father's bricks. My mother's garden, and how she'd taken the news of my "rough patch," which was all I'd told her, and how she'd offered to drive up with a casserole and a shovel, no questions, in whichever order I needed them.
What I was going to do after, which he asked about often, and deliberately, a man holding a door open to a future and standing well back from it.
I told him that night about the auction house, the jewelry department, the three years I'd spent cataloguing dead women's diamonds before Mark plucked me out of that life like a man choosing a tie.
How I'd loved the loupe and the ledgers.
How every piece had a paper trail if you knew how to read one, and provenance was just gossip with receipts.
"That's where you learned it," Chris said. "The whole way you've run this. Provenance." He sounded satisfied, like a man finding the stud in a wall. "You should go back. After. Not for the money."
"For the ledgers."
"For the ledgers," he agreed, and then, quieter, "and because you're better at wanting things than you've been letting yourself know, Lily Potts."
My maiden name. He'd taken to using it lately, rationing it, one per call, always placed where it would do the most damage, and it did its damage, and I sat in my dark garden twenty feet from my sleeping husband and let the warmth of it go all the way through me.
Here is where I have to write the honest paragraph, the one I'd been redrafting in my head for two weeks.
I was falling for him. Not gratitude, which is what I'd been calling it, gratitude has a floor and I'd gone through the floor somewhere in August. Falling, present tense, active, a thing happening nightly on a garden bench, and I'd done what I do, I'd taken it out under a work light and inspected it from every angle, looking for the fault lines.
The age, twenty-seven years, I turned that over and found I didn't care, and went looking for shame about not caring and couldn't raise any.
What I found instead was that every quality I'd spent seven years waiting for Mark to grow into had been sitting at the head of the family table the entire time, finished, corners knocked off, wasted on a widower's solitude.
I hadn't fallen for someone new. I'd fallen for the original of the man I thought I was marrying.
I thought a lot about what people would say.
His son's wife. I dwelled on that one longest, because it was the one the world would hold, the one Penny would spit across a lawn eventually, the one strangers would type.
And standing in my dark garden I found it had no weight I recognized, and I worked out why.
A family is a set of promises. Mark had broken every promise in the set, to me, to Sasha, to Theo, to the mother whose bracelet he'd stolen off my shelf.
I owed Mark Duke nothing. Not loyalty, not appearances, not the courtesy of grieving him in an approved direction.
Whatever happened next in my life was happening after him, and after was mine.
"You've gone quiet," Chris said.
"I'm here. I'm thinking."
"I know," he said. "I can hear it. It sounds like a woman filing something under done.
" A breath of a laugh, then his voice changed gear, went lower, careful.
"Go to bed, Lily. It's late, and you're twenty feet from a complication, and I'm an old man who looks forward to these calls more than I've looked forward to anything in six years, which we're also not discussing. Twenty-nine days. Go."
"Goodnight, Chris."
"Goodnight." A pause, the line open, neither of us moving to close it, and then, roughly, just before it went dead: "Duck. Honestly. It's not complicated. A man just has to look at you."
I sat in the garden a while after, phone warm in my hand, husband asleep in the house behind me with his good quarter and his easy wife, and I looked up at the bedroom window and felt the two counts running in me side by side, and for the first time I let myself say the second one out loud, quietly, to the hydrangeas.
Twenty-nine days until the microphone.