Chapter 2 #2
"You walked in here with a plan. Deny first. Minimize second. Offer concessions third. I've watched you close deals for eight years, Gavin. I know the pattern."
He flinched. A real flinch, the kind that moved his shoulders and not just his face. She filed it away — the first genuine reaction she'd gotten from him since he sat down.
"I don't know what to say," he said.
"That might be the most honest thing you've said this morning."
She stood. Took her bag from the seat beside her. Placed a twenty-dollar bill on the table for the coffee she hadn't finished — not because she needed to pay her own way, but because she did not want to owe him the price of a cup of coffee.
"Iris." He didn't stand. He looked up at her from the booth like a man watching a plane leave without him. "Don't do this."
"You did this." She put the strap of her bag over her shoulder. "I'm just responding to it."
She walked out through the lobby. Past the concierge desk, past the gold coffered ceilings and the grand piano that someone was playing badly, past the revolving door and into the gray Seattle morning.
She did not look back. She did not need to.
She knew he wasn't following because Gavin Rogers did not chase anyone across a public lobby.
It would look desperate, and looking desperate was the one thing he feared more than losing her.
The valet had her car waiting. She'd tipped him an hour ago to keep it close.
The Volvo's leather seat was cool against her back and she sat for a moment with both hands on the wheel before she started the engine.
Her hands were shaking. They'd been steady the entire conversation and now, alone, they trembled like they were trying to shed something her body no longer wanted to carry.
She pressed her forehead against the steering wheel. Counted to ten. Then she put the car in drive and pulled out onto University Street.
#
The houseboat on Lake Union belonged to her grandmother.
Had belonged. Constance Oakes died two years ago and left it to Iris in a will that Gavin's estate lawyer had called "charmingly informal," which was Gavin's world's way of saying it wasn't worth enough to litigate.
Iris had come once after the funeral to close the windows and turn off the water heater and had not been back since.
She parked in the narrow lot at the end of the dock road and walked down the gangway with the key she'd kept on a separate ring from the house key she'd left on Gavin's nightstand.
The lake was flat and gray under the overcast sky, and the houseboats along the dock sat low in the water like sleeping animals.
Constance's was at the end — a squat, cedar-shingled box on a concrete float, with a studio above the main level that Constance had used for painting and Iris, as a teenager, had used for hiding from the world.
The lock stuck. She worked it with the patience of someone who'd opened it a hundred times before and knew its rhythms — lift the handle, push in, turn.
It gave. The door swung open into a smell she wasn't ready for: turpentine and cedar and the particular staleness of enclosed water air. Constance's smell, minus Constance.
She didn't turn on the lights. The gray light from the lake came through the front windows in long flat planes, illuminating dust motes and the shapes of covered furniture.
The kitchen was to the left — a galley barely wide enough for two people, the countertops still holding Constance's ceramic canisters labeled FLOUR, SUGAR, COURAGE.
That last one had always held bourbon. Iris checked. Empty.
The stairs to the studio were narrow and steep, more ladder than staircase. She climbed them with one hand on the rail and pushed open the hatch at the top.
The studio was exactly as Constance had left it.
An easel folded against the far wall. A drafting table beneath the north-facing window.
Shelves of paint tubes, their labels faded, organized by some color logic only Constance had understood.
A daybed with a wool blanket that smelled like mothballs and lavender.
And the light — the studio light that came off the lake and through the window and filled the room with a diffuse silver glow that made everything look like it was waiting to be painted.
Iris stood in the center of the room. Below her, the float rocked gently, and she could hear the water against the hull, the creak of the dock lines, the distant drone of a floatplane banking toward Kenmore.
She was fifteen miles from the Fairmont.
She was a universe away from the woman who had sat in that lobby booth and spoken in complete, controlled sentences while her husband's face came apart.
Her phone buzzed. She looked at it. Gavin. She silenced it without reading the message.
Then she set her bag on the drafting table, sat on the edge of the daybed, and let the shaking come.
Not crying — she wasn't ready for that yet, and she suspected she wouldn't be for a while.
Just the shaking. Her hands, her shoulders, the muscles along her jaw that she'd been holding tight for fourteen hours.
She let all of it go, alone in the dark studio above the water, in the one place in Seattle that had never had anything to do with Gavin Rogers.
After a while, the shaking stopped. She lay back on the daybed and stared at the ceiling, where Constance had painted a constellation map in glow-in-the-dark paint that no longer glowed.
She could still trace the shapes from memory.
Orion. Cassiopeia. The Big Dipper tilted at an angle that was astronomically wrong but aesthetically perfect, because Constance believed the sky should look the way it felt, not the way it was.
Iris pulled the wool blanket over her legs and listened to the water. Tomorrow she would call Elena Vargas and make the consultation official. Tomorrow she would tell Cleo. Tomorrow she would start dismantling the architecture of a life she had built with a man who had treated it as optional.
Tonight, she would stay here. In the dark. In the quiet. In the one room where she didn't have to be anyone's wife.