Chapter 3
Chapter Three
Igo to The Res first thing in the morning, before I’ve even finished deciding whether I’m allowed to be this frightened.
He didn’t come home. That alone has never happened, not once in six months, and I could almost have built a story around it if that were the whole of it.
Meetings run long. Men like my husband keep hours that don’t bend themselves around a dinner going cold on the counter.
I could have forgiven the empty cold half of the bed if he’d only answered one of the calls I made into the dark all night, or one of the texts, or the single small message that’s still sitting unread on my screen this morning with that one gray word underneath it. Delivered.
But he didn’t answer any of them. And a man who needs to know where I am every hour of every day, who has me say the words to him each morning like a small sweet tithe at the door, does not go dark for an entire night unless something has gone very wrong somewhere.
So I come to find him, because I could not sit in that too-quiet apartment one more minute pretending I wasn’t afraid, listening to the refrigerator hum and my own pulse counting itself out in my ears.
The Res takes me in the way it always has, like I’m something it grew from seed.
It’s early enough that the lobby’s still half empty, the floors carrying that just-buffed shine, and Gus at the security desk breaks into a grin the second the revolving door spits me out.
“Mrs. Flint! We don’t see you near enough these days.
” A girl from the front office I’ve known since she was a summer intern in an ill-fitting blazer comes around her desk and hugs me without asking whether I want to be hugged.
Two of the equipment guys wave from across the lobby with their arms full of taped sticks, and one of them calls me by the name every single person in this building has called me since I was small enough to ride the ice resurfacer around the rink on my father’s lap.
Princess. I learned to walk in these corridors.
I learned to grieve in them too, eight months ago, and every face I pass this morning is honestly, uncomplicatedly glad to see mine, and I pull all that gladness around me like a borrowed coat, because underneath it I am shaking so hard I’m surprised it doesn’t show.
The elevator smells the way it always does, rubber and cold metal and somebody’s coffee, and I watch the floor numbers climb and rehearse the good version.
I know exactly where he’ll be; it’s the morning Bills and Trey have their weekly report, the same hour they have it every week, in the glass-walled conference room two doors down from the office that used to be my father’s.
The whole length of that last carpeted corridor I’m building the version where this is fine, where I knock and he glances up annoyed at the interruption and then registers that it’s me and the annoyance folds itself into that private softness only I ever get to see, and he explains, and whatever it is turns out to be a thing I can hold in two hands and carry.
The conference room door is ajar. Not much, only a hand’s width, but enough that his voice reaches me through the gap before I can lift my knuckles to knock.
“She can say whatever she likes. I have no interest in hearing it.”
His voice is wrong. It’s the cold I’ve heard him aim at other people across that very office, board members and rival owners and once a contractor who’d cheated him, but never, not once in six months, anything to do with me, and some old animal part of me understands a full beat before the rest of me catches up that I should not be standing in this corridor, that I should knock right now or walk away right now, anything at all but stand here and let myself hear the next of it.
“I married her to own the Waymakers. That is the beginning and the end of the arrangement.”
And I don’t make a sound. That’s the strange thing I’ll keep coming back to afterward, that a person can be taken so completely apart and still not make a single sound, that I can turn on the buffed floor and walk back the way I came, past my father’s old office with his name still on the door, down the long quiet corridor while the building that grew me goes on being warm and proud of me as though nothing at all has happened inside it.
I married her to own the Waymakers.
The past six months come walking down the corridor with me, every memory arriving uninvited and turning itself over to show me its other side.
The four blankets he had delivered before I’d even finished saying I was cold; I’d taken it for tenderness at the time, and now I wonder if it was only maintenance, the way you’d see to the upkeep of a thing you mean to keep in working order.
The mornings he read me the sports pages in that lazy cutting voice until I laughed into my coffee; an arrangement, I understand now, a small daily performance for an audience of exactly one who was always, always going to believe it.
The nights after Dad, when he held me in the dark and never once told me to stop.
The beginning and the end of the arrangement.
Every one of these used to make me smile.
I used to take them out and turn them over on the hard days the way other people worry a lucky coin between their fingers.
And now every single one of them only wants to make me cry, because if the words I just heard through that gap in the door are true, then not one of them ever meant the thing I built my whole heart on believing it meant, and I have spent six months loving a man who was only ever, the entire time, balancing an account.
Has all of it been a lie?
My chest pulls so tight I can’t get a full breath in around it, and I keep my eyes down on the carpet and keep walking, because the walking is the only thing holding me upright, and I can feel it coming the way you feel weather coming, the exact moment I’m going to come apart right here in the middle of the corridor where anyone at all can stop and watch their princess fall to pieces?—
“Cams?”
Troy, turning up at the worst possible moment the way he has his whole life, with that uncanny big-brother instinct for materializing at the exact instant I’d give anything in the world to go unseen.
He’s dressed like the thing he is now, retired sports royalty in a charcoal coat that probably carries its own insurance policy, the golden boy a year out of the jersey and somehow even more photographed for it.
Whatever he reads in my face wipes the easy warmth clean off his own in an instant.
But before I can get a single word out to him?—
“Camilla.”
The other voice comes from somewhere behind me, and I don’t have to turn around to know it. I’d know it anywhere on earth. I knew it through a gap in a door not ten minutes ago, telling the truth about my marriage to a man it pays to keep quiet.
Trey.
So now I’m caught in the middle of the corridor with one man in front of me and one behind, wanting to laugh and wanting to cry and managing to do neither, and so I do the very worst possible thing, which is nothing at all, while both of them start toward me at once.
“Why are you crying?” Trey says.
I hadn’t known that I was.
Troy gets to me first, one hand already coming out toward my arm. “Cam, what?—”
Trey is between us before Troy’s fingers can reach me, smooth and fast and absolute, a wall arriving out of nowhere. “Don’t touch my wife.”
Troy goes very still. When he speaks again all the easy warmth has drained out of his voice. “I’ve known her a great deal longer than you have, Flint.”
“And yet she married me.” Trey doesn’t raise his voice. He never has to raise his voice, and that is exactly the thing about him that frightens people. “Not you.”
Troy looks past my husband’s shoulder to me, and whatever he finds in my face sets his jaw like concrete. “What’s wrong, Cam? Did this jerk do something to you?”
Trey is watching me too now, and there’s a question in his eyes I don’t understand at all, something dark and cutting and somehow turned accusingly on me, of all people. “Did Barrymore do something?”
“I would never hurt her.” Troy bites each word off like he’s spitting out a threat.
“And you imagine that I would?” Trey says it very softly, almost pleasantly, and the air in the narrow corridor between the two of them goes thin and electric and dangerous.
I can’t believe this is happening. They are actually squaring up to come to blows over the top of my head, my husband and the nearest thing to a brother I have ever had, and I am the thing they’re planted on either side of like two dogs over a bone.
I have to stop it. I have to make my voice work in my throat.
“I’m o-okay,” I tell Troy, and the stammer gives me away before the words are even all the way out. “I was just thinking about something. That’s all it is.”
“Don’t lie to me,” Troy says, and he says it gently, which is so much worse than if he’d shouted it.
“Don’t tell my wife what to do.” Trey’s hand closes around mine, warm and sure and absolutely certain of its welcome, the same hand I’ve held across a hundred breakfast tables, and I hate, I hate, that even now my own traitor fingers want to curl themselves into his. “We’re leaving.”
He draws me with him toward the elevator, and I twist to look back over my shoulder, trying to send Troy some signal that I’m all right, that this isn’t what it looks like, even though I no longer have the first idea what anything is.
“Are you serious?” Trey grits out, pitched low enough that only I can catch it.
I don’t get the chance to answer. The elevator doors are already sliding shut on Troy’s worried face, and then it’s only the two of us and the soft mechanical hum of the car starting down, and before I’ve found a single word to say my husband has turned me and put me back against the brushed-steel wall, both his arms braced on either side of my head, caging me in without quite touching me.
“You’re mine,” he says. “Remember?”
It isn’t a question, and it’s nothing at all like the soft ritual of our mornings. There’s something underneath it I’ve never once heard in his voice before, something that sounds, impossibly, almost like pain wearing the costume of a command.
Before I can answer him, he’s kissing me.
And I kiss him back. That’s the unbearable part, the part I’ll be ashamed of and helpless against in the very same breath for a long, long time afterward.
My heart is lying in pieces on the floor of a corridor one story up and my mouth still answers his without bothering to ask my permission, because my body learned the whole language of him months before my mind learned the truth this morning and it doesn’t yet know it’s supposed to stop.
I rise into him. My hands find the front of his jacket and fist there the way they always do.
And for one ruinous, shameful moment I let myself simply have it, the heat and the certainty and the beautiful lie of it, because it feels exactly the way it has always felt, and nothing, nothing in the way he’s kissing me tells me it was ever only ever a line on a contract.
I can never say no to him. I understand that now with a clarity that frightens me worse than the silence in the apartment ever did.
I am his. I will always be his. Not because of any contract my dying father signed in a room that smelled of medicine, not because of any words he makes me whisper to him each morning, but because somewhere in these six impossible months I fell in love with my husband, completely and without a single condition, and I went right on loving him up to and straight through the moment I heard him call me a means to a hockey team.
From the very beginning I’ve been in love with him. While he?—
I married her to own the Waymakers. That is the beginning and the end of the arrangement.
The words come back the way a wound reopens, sudden and cruel, bleeding straight up through the kiss, and I push him off me with a small broken cry I don’t even recognize as having come from my own throat.
He stares at me, his jaw set hard, his breath coming as ragged as mine.
And he’s looking at me as though I’m the one who’s done something unforgivable. As though I’m the one who stood hidden behind a door this morning and quietly reduced a whole marriage to a line item in a ledger. Why is he looking at me like that, when he’s the one who?—
“We need to talk,” he says.
The doors slide open before I can get a word out.
And instead of taking my hand the way he has every single time we’ve ever walked anywhere together in six months, the way I’d long since stopped even noticing because I’d let myself believe it would simply always be there, he steps out of the elevator without me and leaves me to follow on my own.
So I follow him. The way I already know in my bones I’m going to keep following him, because I’m still learning, minute by awful minute, exactly how much I’ll forgive a man I’m no longer sure ever wanted me at all.
He’s already standing at the long window when I reach the office, his back to me, a dark unmoving shape against the gray morning hanging over The Res and the river beyond it.
“Shut the door,” he says, without turning around.
I shut it gladly. If he’s going to say more terrible things to me, I would rather no one else in this building hears them, would rather the whole place go on holding its picture of their princess and her perfect marriage just a little while longer.
“I want you to give me an heir.”
The words arrive so far outside anything I’d braced for that for one full second I’m certain I’ve misheard him, that the night without sleep and the morning without mercy have finally cost me my grip on my own mind.
Then he turns from the window, and his face is a stranger’s face, and he finishes it.
“And then we can go our separate ways.”