CHAPTER 5
Sebastian
The afterparty spilled up into the sky lounge on the fortieth floor, and I let it carry me, because a man who has just made four hundred million dollars is not permitted to look like a man who has just done something he cannot name.
Chloe stayed at my elbow the whole night, close enough that her perfume kept reaching me: not éternel, something older, powdery and expensive and wrong.
I found myself cataloguing the difference the way Ada had taught me without ever meaning to: this one sat on top of the skin, announced itself, left.
éternel didn’t announce. éternel got inside you and stayed, the way the field in Grasse had stayed, the way certain nights in Vienna had stayed.
I put my glass down. I picked it up again.
“You were magnificent,” Chloe said, her hand light on my sleeve. “You didn’t even flinch.”
“Vale men don’t flinch,” I said, and it came out flatter than I intended.
My mother found me by the windows with the city burning gold under us. She took my face in her cool dry hands like she’d done when I was seven and had won something, and she smiled the smile she saved for closed deals.
“There he is,” she said. “My son. You finally cut the anchor loose.” She lifted her champagne. “To Sebastian, who learned, at last, that sentiment is a tax the successful stop paying. She was dead weight in a pretty dress, darling. You’ll thank me by Christmas.”
Around us the board laughed and drank to it, and I laughed too, because that is what the Blade does, and somewhere far down and out of sight my thumb was moving over the inside of my jacket pocket, over the small hard circle of a ring I had told myself I was keeping to give back later, when she was calmer, when we could be reasonable.
I left before midnight. Reasonable. That was the word I rode home in the back of the car, rehearsing it, sharpening it.
Ada would be waiting. Ada always waited to fight; she wound herself tight and let it out in that low even voice that was worse than shouting, and I would let her, and then I would explain the market logic the way you explain arithmetic to someone clever enough to have understood it the first time, and by morning she’d have her ring back on and her pride intact and we would go on. We always went on.
The penthouse was dark.
Not sleeping-dark. Empty-dark. I knew it the way you know a room is empty before you turn on the light: the air had gone still and unbreathing, the particular deadness of a space no one is angry in.
I stood in the foyer and listened to nothing and told myself she was in the bath, on the terrace, anywhere.
I went to the bedroom. The closet stood half open, and half of it was gone.
Not ransacked. Chosen. A single bag missing from the matched set.
Her side stripped of the things a person actually wears and the rest left hanging like a diagram of a marriage.
Her scent organ, the little travel case of blotters she never went anywhere without, gone from the dresser.
The room smelled of her and of her absence at the same time, sandalwood thinning out into cold air, and my chest did a thing it had no permission to do.
There was a note on the pillow. One line, her hand, that upright unhurried script.
You kept the wrong thing.
I read it once. Then I read it again, standing there in my dinner jacket with a ring in my pocket, and the certainty that had carried me from the stage to the toast to this room simply wobbled.
Not fell. Wobbled, the way the floor of the atrium had seemed to tilt when I’d caught her eyes across it and shown her nothing, because showing her something would have cost me more than I was willing, in front of my board, to spend.
She was punishing me. That was all. A hotel somewhere, a bottle of something, the satisfaction of making me wonder. Fine. I could wait too.
I called her.
Straight to a dead tone: not ringing, not voicemail, just the flat nothing of a line that has stopped being a line. Off, then. Deliberately off, on the anniversary of the day I married her, to make me stand here at one in the morning feeling the thing I was feeling. I almost admired it.
I typed instead, because typing was calm, typing was reasonable, typing was a man in control of his household.
Come home so we can talk like adults.
I hit send.
It didn’t go green. It didn’t say delivered. It sat there, grey and stalled and refusing, the little wheel turning and turning against nothing.
I stared at it. I sent it again. Grey.
And slowly, standing in the airless dark of the home I had built to keep her in, I understood what the grey meant. What it always means.
She hadn’t gone to a hotel to make me wonder.
She had blocked me.