2. Adriana #2
“I’ll let Sir William know you came by, Miss Adriana.” She answers with the same bright smile.
“Thank you, Blythe.” I touch her arm on the way past. “Don’t work yourself to the bone.”
In the elevator, the doors close on her bright little wave, and I let the smile fall the moment the metal seals me in.
There’s one easy way to truly know whether William is across town earning his keep.
Guess I’ll surprise my husband with lunch after all.
***
For years, the Ardmores pick the same place for business. The restaurant is busy at midday, and I’ve barely cleared the entrance when a man rounding the corner nearly walks straight into me.
“Adriana!” Gerald Ardmore pulls up short, his face breaking into a genuine grin, both hands already reaching for mine. He’s silver at the temples now, a little older than when I saw him last. “As I live and breathe. Tell me you’re the one I’m actually here to see and salvage my entire afternoon.”
“Gerald.” I let him fold my hands into his. “It’s good to see you. I heard you’d be in today, and I was nearby, so I thought I’d steal a moment with my husband over lunch. Is he treating you well?”
“Your husband, my dear, would have to be present to treat me at all.” The grin holds, but it tightens at the edges.
“I’ve been keeping his chair warm the better part of an hour.
His assistant tells me he’s held up. I’ve stopped quite believing her, I’ll confess, but I’m too old and too fond of your family to make a fuss of it. ”
So William isn’t here either. The chair across town and the chair across this room, both of them empty as I’ve suspected.
“I’m sorry, Gerald. That isn’t like him.” The lie tastes of nothing now, I’ve told so many today. “Let me at least keep you company until he turns up.”
“I was hoping you’d say that.” He brightens, tucking my hand into the crook of his arm, steering me toward the back of the room. “Come, sit, you’ll do my afternoon a great deal more good than he would have. We were just getting started on the wine.”
We?
Rounding the partition toward a table set for three, the third chair is occupied, and everything in me goes still.
“Oh, I should have said.” Gerald pats my hand, oblivious. “Your mother’s joined us for this one.”
The floor I’ve been bracing tilts another degree as I stop frozen in my tracks.
Her gaze holds mine the way it has my whole life, taking note of my every flaw. I feel myself go from a woman in motion to a girl standing very straight for inspection, and I hate how fast it happens, how my spine remembers her before the rest of me does.
I don’t look away. It’s the one small rebellion I’ve ever managed in front of her.
“Mother.”
“You’re thin,” she says, in place of hello, her eyes never leaving mine. “Sit. You’re embarrassing Gerald by hovering.”
“She’s doing no such thing.” Gerald chuckles, pulling out the chair beside him, unaware of the whole silent transaction. “It’s nothing, Idriana. The girl’s a welcome sight.”
I swallow, gather the scattered pieces of myself, and sit, smoothing my skirt with hands I keep very still. Gerald pours me wine I won’t drink and tries valiantly to carry us through the pleasantries.
“We miss you at the table, Adriana. Sorely.” He leans in, warm and chuckling. “You were always the clever one of the pair, sharper than your husband by a mile, God love him. I keep hoping you’ll return one day.”
It shouldn’t undo me, a kind word from an old man over bad wine. But it lands in a place that’s been empty so long I’d forgotten it had a shape. I give him a polite smile and I have to look at the tablecloth a moment before I can reply.
But my mother answers for me. She sets her glass down with a small, final click that ends the subject more effectively than shouting would.
“Adriana has different priorities now, Gerald.” Her voice is pleasant even if her eyes are not. “Her place is at home, managing her household, as a wife’s should be. Cleverness is a fine thing in a girl. It is considerably less useful in a marriage.”
She lets that settle, then turns the full weight of her attention on me.
“Speaking of which. Where is your husband?”
There is an old urge rising in me, to make myself small enough to slip under her disappointment. But I hold still against it instead. I will not give her the satisfaction of watching me shrink at her table.
“I’m not sure.” I manage it level, though it comes out closer to gritted than I intended. “Held up at the office, I’m told.”
“You’re not sure.” She repeats it the way you’d repeat a child’s excuse back to them. “Your husband is an hour late to a meeting that bears this family’s name, in front of an associate we have kept for twenty years, and his wife is not sure where he is.”
My hands curl into fists in my lap, below the table where she can’t see them, nails digging crescents and the burn flaring where the skin pulls. I keep my face smooth and let my hands do the screaming for me.
“I had hoped, by now, you’d have learned that a man requires managing every bit as much as a household does.” She gave me a thin smile. “They do not simply behave on their own, Adriana. Left unattended, they wander.”
“You’re right,” I hear myself say, because it’s the only sentence that ends this. “I’ll do better.”
The room holds very still. Gerald has found his cuff fascinating. And the cruelty of it, the thing that closes my throat around a breath I can’t quite take, is that the obedient eight-year-old still living somewhere inside me hears every word and believes it.
Believes that if I’d been warmer, smaller, more wife and less myself, William would be in this chair right now.
As if I haven’t already made myself small enough.
My mother nods, satisfied, and returns to her wine. The waiter drifts close, sensing a lull, and she lifts two fingers to summon him.
“Shall we order, then? Gerald’s been more than patient.” She glances at me, the matter of my husband already filed away, settled to her satisfaction. “Sit properly, Adriana. You’re slouching.”
“I won’t be staying.” I rise before the waiter reaches us. “You’ll have to forgive me. It seems I have a husband to manage and a household to keep, and apparently I’ve been neglecting both. I wouldn’t want to give anyone the wrong impression.”
Gerald has the grace to look amused. My mother does not.
“Adriana.”
“It was lovely, Mother. Gerald, always a pleasure.” I press a kiss to the air beside her cheek, because a Rosewood does not make a scene, not even leaving one. “Enjoy your lunch.”
And I go, before she can find the sentence that would make me sit back down.
Outside, the afternoon light hits my face and I pull in a full breath, then another. I hadn’t realized how little I’d been breathing in there until I was out of it.
“Let’s go home,” I tell the driver, sinking into the back seat.
The afternoon has wrung me out, and all I want is the quiet of my own house before I have to decide what to do. We’re three blocks from the restaurant, idling at a light, when I see it.
William’s car, in the next lane over, one turn ahead of us.
For a moment I just stare at it, certain I’ve made a mistake, that exhaustion has me seeing his car in every dark sedan on the road. But I’d know it anywhere.
My exhaustion burns off in an instant.
“Don’t go home,” I say to the driver. “Follow that car.”
The driver’s eyes dart to me in the mirror, but he’s been with the family long enough not to ask. We hang back, two cars between us, and I watch my husband signal and turn until the road curves down into the mouth of a hotel parking garage and swallows his car whole.
We follow him down into the dim garage ticking with the sound of cooling engines, and I have the driver stop us in the shadow of a pillar two rows back. Ahead, William’s car sits with its lights just gone dark.
I tell the driver to wait, get out on silent feet, and keep the pillars between us as I move closer, close enough to hear, far enough to stay hidden.
He’s out of the car now, and he isn’t alone.
A woman stands close to him in the shadow between the cars, her back half to me, the dim light keeping her from being recognizable. He’s leaning in toward her with that loose, satisfied posture and his voice carries across the concrete.
“I’m telling you, it’s handled. We left it twenty minutes apart. I covered my tracks.” He tips his head. “You worry too much.”
The woman says something back, her voice muffled.
“Adriana wouldn’t suspect a thing, I’m sure.” William’s voice carries. “She wouldn’t know how to. She was raised not to ask questions.”
My own name in his mouth stops my breath. A year of marriage rendered down to a punchline, the wife as the manageable thing in the corner, too dull to ever look up.
The woman laughs at that, warm and pleased, and steps into him. His hands find her waist with the ease of a thousand times before.
“So stop worrying.” He murmurs it into her hair. “She’s already halfway gone. Once she’s out of my life for good, we won’t have to sneak around at all.”
She tips her face up to him, and he bends to her. They come together there, her back still to me, his hands sliding up to hold her face the way he used to hold mine.
I should look away but I can’t.
And then they turn, slow, still wrapped in each other until the dim light finally slides across her face.
The scarf at her throat is deep blue-green silk. Her cheek and her smile belong to a familiar face.
The girl I found, the girl I taught, is my husband’s other woman.
Blythe.