2. Delphine #2
Get it together, I told myself. Whatever this is, whatever is happening between Heath and his mother and that woman, you can handle it.
You have handled worse things than a difficult houseguest. You have survived nine years in this world of money and manners and careful cruelty. You can survive this too.
But I wasn’t sure I had ever faced anything quite like this. Watching my marriage dissolve in slow motion, unable to stop it, unable to even name what was killing it.
I opened the powder room door.
The hallway stretched before me, empty and dim, the wall sconces casting pools of golden light on the antique wallpaper. The voices from the dining room were clearer now. I could hear Montana’s sharp tones, Kendall’s musical laughter, but not Heath’s voice. He was silent, as always.
I took a step toward the dining room, then stopped.
Kendall was speaking. Her voice was lower now, pitched for intimacy, and I found myself pressing closer to the wall to hear.
“When are you going to tell her?”
My heart stopped. Actually stopped, for a long terrible moment, before lurching back into an uneven rhythm.
“Soon.” Heath’s voice. Low and rough, the way it got when he was stressed beyond endurance. “Let me handle it. Don’t say anything to her.”
“Heath...” Kendall’s tone was gently reproachful, the way you might speak to a child who was avoiding an unpleasant task.
“She deserves to hear it from me.”
I couldn’t breathe. My lungs had forgotten how to work, my chest tight with what felt like panic and grief and the terrible certainty that I had been right all along.
It can’t be what I’m thinking. The thought circled through my mind like a prayer. He wouldn’t. We’ve been together for eleven years. Married for nine. He wouldn’t do this. Not Heath. Not my Heath.
But my Heath had been a stranger for three months now. Late nights at the office that stretched into late nights away from home entirely. Conversations that died before they could begin. The way he looked at me sometimes, when he thought I wasn’t watching, with what looked almost like guilt.
“You need to tell her soon.” Kendall’s voice had dropped even lower, but I could still hear it through the doorway, every word a small knife sliding between my ribs. “Before Christmas. Before this goes any further. She deserves to know the truth about everything.”
She deserves. As if Kendall knew anything about what I deserved. As if Kendall had any right to sit in my dining room and discuss my marriage with my husband while I was being sick in the bathroom down the hall.
I pressed my palm flat against the wall, feeling the texture of the wallpaper beneath my fingers, trying to ground myself in anything solid and real.
He’s going to tell me. There’s a truth he’s been keeping from me, a truth Kendall already knows, a confession he needs to make before Christmas.
The possibilities scrolled through my mind, each one worse than the last. An affair. A decision to leave. Some betrayal I couldn’t even imagine, one so terrible he had been hiding from it for months while I lay awake in our empty bed and wondered what had happened to us.
“Fine.” Kendall’s voice was petulant now, a child denied a treat. “But don’t wait too long. These things have a way of coming out on their own, and it’s always worse when someone else reveals the truth.”
“I know what I’m doing.”
“Do you? Because from where I’m sitting-”
Montana’s voice cut in, sharp and impatient, announcing that coffee would be served in the drawing room. The conversation shifted, the moment of intimacy broken, and I heard chairs scraping back from the table.
I couldn’t let them find me here. Couldn’t let them see my face and know that I had heard.
I turned and walked quickly, quietly, back to the powder room. I closed the door behind me and locked it, then gripped the edge of the sink and stared at my reflection in the mirror.
She deserves to hear it from me.
What did that mean? What truth was he planning to tell me? What had he been discussing with Kendall, plotting with Kendall, while I smiled and played hostess and pretended everything was fine?
My stomach turned again, the nausea returning with renewed force. I barely made it to the toilet before I was retching again, my body trying to purge what couldn’t be expelled with bile and stomach acid.
When it was over, I sat on the cold floor with my back against the wall and my knees drawn up to my chest. I wrapped my arms around my legs and tried to make myself small, small enough to disappear, small enough that none of this would be real.
This can’t be happening. The thought played on repeat in my mind. Heath loves me. He chose me. He married me against his mother’s wishes, against everyone who said I wasn’t good enough, against every door Newport tried to close in my face.
But people changed. Marriages ended. Love died.
I had watched it happen a hundred times in this world of yachts and summer galas and careful, practiced smiles.
The wives who discovered second families in other cities.
The husbands who came home to empty houses and divorce papers on the kitchen counter.
The couples who stayed together for the money and the name and the perfect photograph in the society pages, their mutual hatred visible to anyone who knew what to look for.
For a long time I had believed Heath and I were different. That what we had was real and solid and built to last.
I wasn’t sure I believed that anymore.
I stayed in the powder room until my breathing steadied and my hands stopped shaking. Then I stood, washed my face again, reapplied the lipstick I kept in my pocket for emergencies. I looked at myself in the mirror and practiced the smile until it looked almost genuine.
When I walked back into the dining room, they were all exactly where I had left them.
Montana was discussing the Christmas gala coming up in two weeks, her voice sharp with opinions about the decorations and the guest list. Kendall was nodding along, adding comments here and there. Heath was staring at the wall.
None of them looked up when I returned to my seat.
“Feeling better?” Montana asked, though her tone made clear she wasn’t actually interested in the answer.
“Fine.” I smoothed my napkin across my lap. “Just a bit of an upset stomach. The pheasant, probably.”
“You should be more careful about your diet.” Montana’s eyes swept over me with leisurely contempt, cataloging every flaw.
“I noticed you’ve put on weight since summer.
It shows in your face. The Delanos’ daughter had the same problem, and she ended up having to buy an entirely new wardrobe. Terribly expensive.”
I didn’t respond. I couldn’t. My throat was too tight, my chest too hollow. Across the table, my husband was studying the wall as if it held the answers to questions no one had asked.
Kendall leaned close to Heath and whispered, too low for me to hear. He nodded. Barely. Just the slightest incline of his head.
He had rolled his sleeves. He always rolled his sleeves at dinner, had done it every night for eleven years, pushed them to the elbow before he touched a fork like the act of eating required forearms. And there they were.
Right there. Across the table from me, catching the candlelight, the tendon standing up in the back of his hand every time he turned his wrist.
I looked at them for exactly as long as it took to hate myself.
Ninety-one days. That was how long it had been since my husband had touched me with any intent whatsoever, and I knew the number without counting, the way you know your own address.
Ninety-one days of a man sleeping four feet away with his back to me.
Ninety-one days of lying there in the dark listening to him breathe and being too proud to reach across and too hungry to sleep.
There had been one night in November, wordless and quick and finished before I understood it had started, and I had not counted it, because being taken is not the same as being wanted.
And that was the joke of it. That was the part I could not tell a single living soul, not Blair, not my mother, not the priest my mother would have suggested.
My husband was possibly fucking the woman on his left, and I still wanted him.
Not in a poetic way. Not in a longing, tragic, violin sort of way.
I wanted him the way you want water. Ugly and specific and completely without dignity.
You would think it would go. You would think betrayal came with an off switch, that the body was decent enough to lose interest the moment the mind did. It’s not decent. It’s never once been decent. My mind was building a legal case and my body was watching his hands.
So I sat there with my hands folded in my lap, and my smile fixed in place, and my thighs pressed together under two hundred years of Fairchild mahogany, and I wondered if this was what drowning felt like. The water rising slowly, inch by inch. And no one reaching down to pull you out.