Chapter 9
Chapter Nine
There’s no sign on the door. No website either, no little dot on any map, no number a person could call unless somebody already deemed worthy had first leaned in close and given it to her like a sacrament, and the single time I made the mistake of asking how you even find a place like this, the woman who’d brought me only smiled and told me you don’t, darling. It finds you.
So that’s the kind of salon it is. Three flights up in a building you’d pass a thousand times without once wondering what went on behind its blind windows, one unmarked door, one chair, no name anywhere on anything, and a hush so deep and so deliberate that the whole roar of the city below simply gives up at the threshold and doesn’t follow you in.
I’ve been coming for six months. I never booked it and I never found it; my husband put me on a list I never saw, the way he once put me on every list worth being on, back when putting me on lists was a thing that pleased him.
Right now the chair has me, tipped back, a heavy silk wrap knotted at my throat and a tray of little gold pots and pencils laid out at my elbow like surgical instruments, and Loren is standing over me with a brush gone still in her hand and a look on her face I don’t love.
“You’re a little too pale, Mrs. Flint,” she says worriedly, stepping back to take in the whole of my face, which I’m fairly sure she’s about to give up on after several hopeful layers of blush and who-knows-what-else. “Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine. I’m just?—”
Loren gasps. “Oh my gosh, are you pregnant?”
“What? No, I’m not?—”
But she’s already nodding, already smiling that knowing little smile. “Oh, right, you’re not.” Wink wink. “I got it all wrong.” Wink wink.
“Loren, you did get it wrong.”
“I know. Totally wrong.” Wink wink.
Oh, I give up.
She goes back to my face humming, pleased with herself, certain she’s cracked some lovely little secret, and I let her, because Loren has been painting brides and widows and senators’ wives in this chair for longer than I’ve been alive and I’d trust her with anything, including the very wrong hunch she’s so delighted with, which she’ll carry out of here and tell to absolutely no one.
I don’t correct her a third time. I don’t tell her that there was a test, that there was a cold morning on cold marble not so very long ago, that the only thing my body has managed to produce lately is the particular ringing silence of a thing that didn’t take.
I just close my eyes and let her believe the prettier story while she works, because one of us in this room ought to get to believe a pretty story tonight, and it so plainly isn’t going to be me.
It takes another half hour, and when she finally steps away to admire the whole effect, Loren has done what Loren always does, which is something very close to a miracle.
“You look gorgeous, Mrs. Flint!”
I manage a smile. “Thank you.”
But the smile only has to last as far as the street, and the second the car door seals me into the cool leather quiet of my husband’s limousine, alone, on my way to the Waymakers’ Ball, the whole careful thing slides right off my face.
Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry.
I blink hard at the dark ceiling of the car, fighting it, because I cannot undo in ninety seconds what Loren spent two hours building and I do not have another two hours to spare.
There was a time I loved this part. I used to love it more than the evenings themselves, the long happy ritual of being made beautiful for my husband, the small private thrill of imagining the exact moment he’d turn and find me across a room and go quiet the way he did, that arrested stillness in him that told me, better than any words he was ever much good at saying out loud, that I’d undone him a little just by walking in.
I used to want to be prettier for him every single time.
I used to think he found me lovely, and wanting to be lovelier for the one man on earth who looked at me like that was the easiest, sweetest sum I had ever in my life done in my head.
But tonight isn’t a date. Tonight my husband isn’t the man I spent six months being so sure he was. And the woman in the gold pots and the careful blush, the one Loren just called gorgeous, is on her way to the most important night of her father’s foundation entirely alone.
My stomach ties itself into knots, slow and expert, the way it has taught itself to these last weeks. Why does this night feel so, so wrong?
“We’re here, Mrs. Flint.”
I barely have a second to gather myself.
Chip is too quick, he always is, one moment behind the wheel and the next already out and around and pulling my door open into a solid wall of noise, so that the only thing left for me to do is summon a smile up out of nowhere at all and wear it as I step down onto the carpet.
The bulbs go off in a storm the instant my shoe touches the red, a hundred small white detonations all at once and near enough to blind me, and my stomach pulls itself into smaller, tighter knots.
I have done this carpet plenty of times before. Never once like this, though. Never once alone. And the press knows it, every last one of them banked behind the velvet rope knows it, and it’s the only thing in the world any of them want to ask me about now.
Where’s your husband?
“He’s um?—”
Why isn’t Mr. Flint with you?
Is it true Trey Flint is now back in a relationship with Ronna Roswell?
“That’s because?—”
“Sorry, I have to go inside.”
I go down that carpet fast, chin lifted, wearing the smile like borrowed armor and pretending with everything in me that I can’t hear a single syllable of it, because honestly, the truth is the plainest and most humiliating thing there is.
I don’t know how to answer any of their questions.
I really did think he’d be here tonight.
I want to be fair to myself about at least that much.
This is one of the most important nights of the entire year for the company, for my father’s foundation, the ball he built up out of nothing with his own name and his own stubbornness, and not once in six months of marriage did Trey let me walk into a single Waymakers function on anything but his arm.
So I dressed the way a wife dresses to stand beside her husband.
And then, an hour before the car was due, my phone rang, and it was Bills, and Bills is far too decent a man to have enjoyed one word of what he’d been sent to say.
I could hear how little he enjoyed it, the careful apology threaded through every pause.
He was sorry, he said. So sorry to be the one calling.
But Mr. Flint thought it best that I come to the ball on my own this evening.
On my own. As though I were a coat he’d thought better of bringing.
Inside, the tall doors swing shut behind me and the whole shrieking circus of the carpet falls away at once, and I let myself breathe, finally, four in and six out the way Dr. Meyers taught me a lifetime ago, because at least in here there is no press.
In here I’m free of the questions, free of the bulbs and the rope and the shouted name that isn’t mine.
But I’m not free of her.
Ronna Roswell.
Everyone knows who Ronna Roswell is. You would have to have spent the last decade at the bottom of the sea not to know that face; it’s sold perfume from the side of every bus in this city and looked down forty feet tall from the billboards over the bridges, and in person, across the whole gleaming length of a crowded ballroom, she is somehow even more than all of that, tall and bright and laughing in a column of deep crimson that the entire room keeps quietly arranging itself around without seeming to notice it’s doing it.
And worse, so much worse, everyone also knows she used to date my husband.
Whom she is standing beside right now.
They’re talking, the two of them, close, her bright head tipped up toward his dark one the way a flower turns toward the thing it wants, and she’s laughing at whatever he’s just said to her, and she keeps touching him while she laughs.
That’s the part I can’t stop watching, the part that gets in under my ribs and turns.
Her hand on his arm. Her palm pressed to his chest, spread over the lapel I happen to know the cost of because I was there in the quiet little shop the morning it was fitted.
Her fingers light at his jaw, brushing away something that was never there to begin with, touching him and touching him and touching him with the careless, fluent ease of a woman who has touched him a thousand times before and has decided, tonight, in front of all these watching people, to remind the entire room that she still might.
She is acting like my husband is hers.
And somewhere high above us the band finds the first low notes of something slow, and all around the bright edges of the room couples begin drifting out toward the open floor, and Ronna Roswell slides her hand into the crook of my husband’s arm as though it had been built to fit there, and turns him, gently, toward the music.
And that’s when I feel it begin, the very thing Dr. Meyers warned me about, my own heart picking up a rhythm it was never built to carry, the careful four-in, six-out of it coming quietly apart in my chest. The room tilts a half-degree.
I must lose a little color, because that’s the moment I feel someone arrive at my side, and I turn, and it’s Troy.
The room notices him before I’ve finished turning.
It always does. A woman near us touches her husband’s sleeve and says something behind her hand; two girls by the champagne go still and bright the way girls do; an older man I half recognize from the foundation board straightens out of his slouch and lifts a hand in a small salute, the kind men give to other men they’ve privately decided to be impressed by.
Troy Barrymore walks into a room and the room rearranges itself to make him the center of the story it’s telling tonight, and he does it without appearing to know he’s doing it at all, which I’ve come to understand is the entire trick of him.
But right now he isn’t looking at any of them. He’s looking at me, and his gaze narrows.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” he says.
No, not a ghost, but…am I seeing it right? Is my husband about to dance with his ex?
When he’s never even looked my way?