Chapter 8
Chapter Eight
This morning is hell, and it’s the same hell it has been every morning for two months running.
I wake wanting my wife. That’s how it begins, the way it’s begun every single day since she carried her things down the hall to the farthest room in my home, my body reaching across the cold expanse of the bed for a warmth that isn’t there, that hasn’t been there in two months and won’t be there again, and the half-second before I remember why is the only peaceful half-second I’m allotted in a day, so of course it’s the one that costs the most when it ends.
She used to be here. That’s the thing I can’t seem to teach myself to stop expecting, no matter how many mornings prove it wrong.
Six months of waking up to her, and the habit doesn’t care in the slightest that the marriage underneath it has rotted clean through.
The showers we used to share, the long ones that made us both late for things that genuinely mattered and left neither of us the least bit sorry, gone.
Breakfast across the small kitchen table while I read her the worst of the sports columns in the worst voice I could put on, just to watch her laugh into her coffee and scold me for it, gone.
Kissing her at the door on my way out. Making her tell me who she belonged to and standing there listening to her say it back soft and shy with the color climbing up her throat.
All of it filed away now under a heading I can’t make myself look at straight on, the life I had before I learned what she was.
Everything is different because she wants another man.
I wake up into that knowledge every morning the way you’d walk face-first into the same wall, and by the time the car has carried me downtown and the express car has carried me up, I’m in a mood the entire floor can read off me from clear across the bullpen.
No one meets my eyes in the corridor. The assistants discover urgent reasons to be on some other floor entirely.
A man learns, running a building this size, that there are days his people quietly widen their orbit around him, and they are never once wrong about which days those are.
There’s a report sitting at the top of my inbox when I drop into the chair, and the sight of the sender’s name does nothing at all to improve the morning.
Nolan. The subject line reads, with his usual economy, Day 1 findings.
I make a mental note to have Bills wire him a bonus, because this is fast even for Nolan, and Nolan is the fastest man I know at this.
Then I open it, and the speed stops mattering at all, because the speed was never the point.
The attachments are the point. High-resolution, time-stamped, more of them than I want and exactly as many as I’ve earned for asking.
My jaw sets, and it stays set.
There she is. My wife, in the soft grey coat I bought her, at a café table with Barrymore leaning in low across it toward her.
My wife on a park bench at his side, her face turned up to his, the same upturned face from Raymond’s folder.
My wife outside the gates of her own father’s cemetery with the golden boy standing a respectful, intimate half-step too close to her in the cold.
The dates run down the corner of each frame in neat white type, and I read them the way I’d read a balance sheet that’s just confirmed in black and white the fraud I’d only suspected, every line another small cold confirmation of the same rot.
She has met him again, and again, and again across these two months.
I never once asked where she went with her afternoons.
I told myself a possessive man always knows where his wife is, and I never thought to turn that possessiveness toward the empty hours she spent away from me, because some last foolish corner of me did not want the answer it has now received.
Well. Here’s the answer. High resolution. Time-stamped.
That settles it. If I’d wanted more proof than a folder Raymond Glasgow had thoughtfully copied in advance, here it is, gathered by my own man on my own order and delivered to my own inbox before nine in the morning.
While I lay awake in a narrow bed among another man’s trophies telling myself the thing clawing in my chest was a grief I had no right to feel, she was out filling her calendar with him.
She has spent more honest hours with Barrymore these two months than with the husband whose name she wears on her hand, and the arithmetic of it is so ugly that I close the file and sit a long moment with both hands pressed down hard against the cool wood of the desk until the worst of the wanting-to-break-something has gone back under.
It doesn’t go all the way under. It hasn’t gone all the way under in two months. I’ve simply learned how to carry it without setting it down where anyone can see.
I carry it home that evening the way I carry it everywhere now, and it remakes me into the man I’ve decided I have to be, which is a man I recognize all too well from a long time ago and had truly hoped never to have to be again.
When she appears in the kitchen doorway in the half-dark, barefoot, and offers in that soft uncertain voice to make me breakfast in the morning, I don’t so much as look up from the documents in my hand.
“No, thank you.”
I make myself ignore what the two cold words do to her face.
What a performer she is, I tell myself. Two whole months of this and she can still produce the flinch right on cue, the small wounded catch of breath, the eyes going wet and overfull as though I’m the one standing here breaking something precious.
I used to fall for it. I used to fall for every last bit of it, the shyness she puts on every few nights when she comes and stands in the hall outside my door and asks me, barely above a whisper, whether I’d like to stay with her tonight, doing the exact helpless blushing thing that undid me completely on our wedding night, as though I haven’t seen the photographs now, as though I don’t know full well whose company she would truly rather be keeping.
I walk out on the question every single time.
I don’t dignify it with so much as an answer.
The closed door, the turned back, the silence where the wanted thing used to live, it’s the only language a liar truly understands.
Give her nothing and she has nothing to twist into something.
It’s the one defense I have left to me and I use it without a scrap of mercy, on her and on myself in equal part, because the truth I cannot afford to hold is that every single time I walk away from that whispered question in the dark, some part of me is screaming the whole length of the corridor to turn back around.
And then comes the morning, two months deep into this campaign of mine, when she stands in the cold of the bathroom staring down at a test that’s come back negative, her eyes filling all over again, her whole small body folding down into that breakable shape that has never once, not in all this time, stopped reaching straight into my chest and closing a fist.
I almost believe it. That’s the danger she has always been to me, from the first night.
Even now, even knowing she sat across a café table from Barrymore mere hours before she stood here crying over a piece of plastic, even with Nolan’s photographs burned onto the backs of my eyes, some traitor buried deep in me looks at her tears and wants nothing on earth but to gather her up off that cold tile and tell her it doesn’t matter, that there will be other months, that I never wanted the wretched heir at all, that I only ever wanted her, only ever her.
So I say the cruelest thing I can lay my hand to instead, because the cruelty is the only wall left that holds any weight.
“If this keeps on, perhaps I’ll have to find another woman to give me an heir after all.”
I watch it go into her. I make myself ignore the flinch the way I’ve made myself ignore every flinch for two months, and I walk out before the wanting can get its hands on the wheel, and the door slams shut behind me hard enough to rattle the frame in the wall.
Damn her. Damn the hold she still has on me that two months and a folder full of evidence haven’t loosened by a single inch.
I carry it back to the office, because the office is the one place left where the wanting can be put to some use, and I arrive just in time, as it happens, because Raymond Glasgow has chosen this particular day to be exactly the species of fool I always took him for.
He’s convened a quiet little meeting to plot me off my own board, and he has chosen to convene it inside The Res, in a back room of the building I control right down to the wiring threaded through its walls.
The man tried to unseat me with a folder of photographs, and it seems never to have crossed his mind that a building this size has cameras tucked into every corner of it, and that every last one of them answers to me.
I turn up the volume on the feed from the second-floor laundry room and sit back to listen to my enemies conspire against me in real time.
“I have it on good authority the couple aren’t doing at all well,” Raymond is saying, smooth and enormously pleased with himself. “They’ve been sleeping in separate rooms for weeks.”
My jaw locks. Separate rooms. That is a fact known only inside the walls of my own home, which means exactly one of three things, and not a single one of them is good.
Either Raymond has bought himself a source somewhere in my household, one of my own staff quietly selling him the inventory of my private misery.
Or my wife is feeding it to him herself.
Or Barrymore is, with whatever she pours into his ear across those café tables in the grey coat I paid for.
I file all three possibilities away to hand to Nolan in the morning, and I keep listening, and the cold that started in me this morning at a bathroom door finishes setting at last into something hard and clear that I can actually use.
I call Bills in.
“Tomorrow’s fundraiser,” I tell him. “I need you to send a VIP invitation to one more guest.”
I tell him who. His eyes go wide, and to his lasting credit he gets no further than “Sir—” before he catches whatever is sitting on my face and thinks better of the rest.
“Just do it.”
His shoulders drop the particular way they drop when I’ve handed him something he would rather not carry across the building. “Yes, Mr. Flint.”
Thirty minutes later I have my confirmation, and it comes not from Bills but from the woman herself, because a woman like the one I’ve just had invited does not receive a VIP invitation to an event like the Waymakers’ Ball without telling the entire watching world about it inside the hour.
The video is already climbing the charts by the time I find it, one of the most photographed faces on the planet beaming directly into her own front-facing camera.
“Oh my gosh, you guys, this is the most amazing surprise. I just scored an invite to the Waymakers’ Ball.”
And underneath it, already, stacking up faster than the counter can total them, the thousands of comments doing exactly the work I sent them out to do, every last one of them some version of the same three questions, the whole city’s appetite waking up and stretching right on schedule.
Isn’t that your ex’s company?
Wait, is he separated from his wife??
I KNEW you two would find your way back to each other.