Chapter 4
Roslyn Ashworth’s office was three rooms over a bakery on a street Celia had walked down a hundred times without looking up.
It smelled, faintly and permanently, of bread. There was a radiator that knocked. The chairs were good chairs, old ones, and somebody had reupholstered them badly and recently, which told Celia more about the practice than the diplomas did.
“You’re the wedding,” Roslyn said.
“I’m sorry?”
“Three people have told me about a wedding this weekend.” Roslyn was fifty-five and gray-blonde and had the unhurried manner of a woman who had stopped needing to impress anybody around 2004. “I didn’t connect it until you sat down. You gave a toast.”
“I did.”
“Was it as advertised?”
“I don’t know what was advertised.”
“That you were extremely calm and that a man from a bank cried.”
“That part’s new to me,” Celia said.
Roslyn made a small noise that might have been approval and opened a legal pad. “All right. Let’s start with the ugly one. What do you want?”
“Out.”
“Everybody says out. Out is not a number.” She clicked a pen.
“You’ve been married nine years to a man with — I looked, forgive me — approximately what he has.
There is a version of this where you spend three years and get a great deal, and a version where you spend six months and get less, and a version where you sign what’s in front of you tomorrow because you cannot stand to be in the room.
I need to know which woman I’m working for. ”
Celia looked at the window. Below it a delivery truck was blocking the whole street and nobody was leaning on a horn about it, which she found she liked.
“I want it fast,” she said. “And I want it to not cost me anything I’d be ashamed of.”
“Those two are usually in tension.”
“I know. Fast wins.”
“Fine.” Roslyn wrote something. “Now the practical part, and I want you to listen to this like a professional, because you are one. From this morning, you don’t speak to him.
Not a text, not a call, not five minutes in a driveway.
Everything comes through me. That is not because he’s dangerous.
It’s because you’re the kind of person who is reasonable in a room, and reasonable people give away things in rooms without noticing they’ve done it. ”
Something in Celia’s chest went very still.
“Say that again.”
Roslyn looked up. “Reasonable people give things away in rooms.”
“Yes,” Celia said. “All right. Everything through you.”
* * *
He tried money first.
It arrived on the Thursday as a proposal Roslyn read out over the phone in a flat voice: a number, an accelerated timeline, both houses, the boat Celia had never once been on.
“That’s a serious number,” Roslyn said. “I want to be clear that it’s serious. If you took it this afternoon I’d have no professional objection.”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing’s wrong with it.”
“Roslyn.”
A pause on the line. “It’s four days after a wedding,” Roslyn said.
“It’s a man solving a problem at speed with the only tool he’s ever been good with.
If you take it you’ll have the money and you’ll have been bought out in four days, and I’ve watched women sit with that particular arithmetic for twenty years. ”
“No,” Celia said.
“No to the number, or no to—”
“No to the whole thing. Tell him I don’t want the boat.”
“That’s not a legal position.”
“Then find me the words,” Celia said. “That’s what he’s paying you for.”
“He’s not paying me for anything,” Roslyn said, and Celia laughed out loud for the first time in three weeks, and was surprised by the sound of it in the car.
Then he tried flowers.
Not a bouquet — that would have been almost bearable. Forty arrangements, delivered to Frankie’s apartment on a Tuesday because he did not know where Celia was staying, filling a hallway and a stairwell and part of a landing, with a card that said I am not asking for anything. L.
Frankie sent a photograph of the stairwell with the caption I have to get past these to leave my house.
Celia typed I’m sorry and deleted it and typed give them to the hospital and sent that instead.
Then he tried people.
That was worse and it went on longer. A board member called.
A woman Celia liked from the foundation called and cried.
Gerald sent a letter — an actual letter, on paper, three pages, in a hand like wire — which Celia read once standing up and which said, in substance, that these things happen in every marriage of consequence, that Lawrence’s mother had been a woman of great forbearance, and that Celia had always struck him as a person of sense.
She put it in the trash. Then she took it out and put it in a folder, because Roslyn had told her to keep everything, and because somewhere in the back of her mind a small cold voice had said not yet.
Margaret called from Portugal on her honeymoon.
“I’m not going to ask you anything,” Margaret said. “I want that on the record. I’m calling to say I’m not asking.”
“Thank you.”
“Roman says hello. Roman also says, and I’m quoting, ‘she gave the best toast I’ve ever heard in my life.’”
Celia put her hand over her eyes and was glad to be on a phone.
“He’s not okay, Celia,” Margaret said, more quietly. “I’m not saying it to work on you. I know that’s not — I’m saying it because you’re the only person I can say it to, which is a stupid thing about this whole situation that I’ve only just noticed.”
“I know.”
“Yeah.”
“Margaret.” Celia opened her eyes. “Go and be on your honeymoon.”
* * *
She found the apartment on the first of November.
It was above a hardware store in a river town twenty-five minutes north of the estate, up an outside staircase with a rail that wobbled, and it had four rooms and a bathroom with a window in it, and the whole of it would have fit inside the long room with space to walk around the edges.
The realtor apologized for it twice.
“It’s small,” she said. “It’s honestly quite small.”
“It’s four hundred and ten square feet,” Celia said, “and the ceiling is nine-six, which is why it doesn’t feel it. Who did the windows?”
“I’m sorry?”
“Somebody replaced these. They’re wrong for the building and they’re too good to be builder’s grade.” Celia ran her thumb along the sash. “Whoever owned this loved it and ran out of money.”
The realtor stared at her.
“I’ll take it,” Celia said.
She signed a twelve-month lease under her own name — Celia Keswick, which she wrote wrong twice, the pen going automatically toward the H — and she paid the deposit out of an account that had been hers since before the marriage and had sat there for nine years accruing nothing but time.
There was no furniture. She bought a bed, a table, two chairs, a kettle, and a lamp, and she got the lamp wrong and bought a second lamp.
On the fourth night she sat on the floor with her back against the wall — the floor again; she noticed it this time — and ate noodles out of the pot and listened to the man downstairs closing up the hardware store, the shutter coming down, the two-note whistle he did, the truck.
It was the quietest she had been in nine years and it was not lonely yet. That would come. But that night it was just quiet, and the radiator worked, and the windows were good.
* * *
She had known for twelve days.
She had known the way you know a thing you are not looking at directly: she had been late, and then she had been very late, and there had been a morning in the week before the wedding when the smell of the caterer’s stock had sent her out onto the terrace with her hand over her mouth, and she had thought nerves, and she had gone back in and dealt with the seating.
She bought the test on a Tuesday. It sat in the bathroom cabinet, in the bag, for two days.
She took it on the Thursday evening at seven o’clock, with the shutter coming down downstairs.
Then she sat on the tile floor of a bathroom with a window in it, in an apartment above a hardware store, and looked at it for a long time.
The arithmetic was simple and she did it anyway, twice.
Late September. It would have been the Sunday they came back from the lake, the one weekend in four months he had not looked at his phone, and she had thought at the time — she remembered thinking it, standing in the kitchen the next morning making coffee for two — oh. There he is.
He had been six weeks into Sienna by then. She counted that too. She was very thorough about it.
Celia sat on the floor and waited to feel something enormous, and what arrived instead was small and specific and entirely her own: a hard, bright, uncomplicated flare of mine.
Not ours. Not his. She turned the word over and looked at it and did not apologize to herself for it.
Her phone was on the edge of the sink.
She could call Frankie. Frankie would be here in fifty minutes with the wrong food and the right opinions and would be so fiercely, immediately on her side that Celia would not have to think for three days.
She could call her mother, who would go very quiet and then ask two questions that were the correct two questions.
She could call Roslyn, which was in fact the thing a sensible woman would do, because there was a settlement being negotiated and there was no version of this that did not eventually become a legal fact.
She could call Lawrence.
She looked at that one longest. Because he would come. That was the thing about him — for this, he would come, immediately, that night, and he would be good at it, and for about a week she would not have to be the one holding anything.
And she would spend the rest of her life knowing she had walked back into that house carrying a reason.
Celia stood up. Her knees had gone stiff on the tile.
She put the test in the shallow drawer of the table she had bought, under the drawings, and closed it, and went back out into the four rooms that were hers, and finished unpacking a box of books.
Nobody in the world knew.
She was surprised, at midnight that night, lying in a new bed in a small room with the streetlight coming through a good window, by how much she liked it that way.
* * *