20. Cass
CASS
It’s been three days since the Pierre, and I’ve spent every one of them in the same panic loop. On each of those nights, I’ve found myself curling under the duvet next to Raymond’s snoring carcass, burning up with the knowledge that he is supposed to be dead, and it’s my fault he isn’t.
In all of those many lonely hours, there’s been not a peep on the burner cell.
I checked again around two in the morning, when Raymond’s hand landed on my hip in his sleep and I thought I might combust on the spot.
I eased out from under him, made for the closet, and powered the burner up.
The little M.S. sat at the top of the inbox where I’d left it.
No new bubbles underneath. I powered it down and tucked it back behind the hatbox, then stood there in the dark in my bare feet and tried to keep myself from falling apart.
He has nothing to say. Why does that sting so badly?
The Pierre keeps playing on a loop behind my eyelids. Mat’s face went so scarily still when I said I’m pregnant . I thought he might’ve frozen there forever, a statue, a testament to my real shitty sense of timing.
I keep getting caught on one specific moment, though. Not the part where I told him, but the part right before, when I grabbed him.
If I’d kept my hands in my lap and let the universe do its thing, Raymond would be a chalk outline by now, and some Daily News editor would be salivating over the headline: BOURBON-SOAKED BIG SHOT BUMPED OFF IN BOUJEE BATHROOM . He’d be done, Giana would be avenged, and I’d be free.
But did I save Mat from a complication he hadn’t accounted for?
Or was I supposed to let him walk straight into it?
I’ve thought about it endlessly, and I still don’t know.
It would be one thing if Mat had texted afterward to say Good catch or Thank fuck you stopped me.
I’d even accept something along the lines of What the fuck were you thinking, Cass?
We were thirty seconds out! Either of those I could make sense of and move on from.
What I can’t move on from is nothing .
But the burner stays dark, so here we are.
Instead of a body in a body bag, I’ve got a man in the bed next to me who keeps reaching for my hip in his sleep.
Which brings me to the other unsettling development of these three days: Raymond is in a mood.
It’s not like his usual ones. Not the eggs-aren’t-runny-enough mood, nor the my-secretary-is-an-idiot grouse. Something different, and in so many ways, worse.
He’s being pleasant.
He kissed the top of my head at breakfast yesterday and called me Cassie . Cassie. He hasn’t called me Cassie since the early days of our engagement. But yesterday, his hot lips on the part in my hair: Good morning, Cassie.
The day before that, he brought me flowers. Yellow tulips, which he carried in himself instead of palming the job off on the doorman. He arranged them in a vase, then stepped back to admire his handiwork like a kindergartner with a finished macaroni portrait.
And the touching.
God, the touching is what really has me ready to chew my own arm off.
His palm at the small of my back when we pass in the hall. A finger drawing a lazy line down the side of my neck last night while Anderson Cooper droned on about Davos, and then, the one that did me in: a tender pat on the cheek when I handed him his nightly scotch.
I’d take a beating any day of the week over this. I know how to be hit; I’m very, very good at that aspect of this marriage. There’s a rhythm to the whole production. Bruise, lie, ice, repeat. The blocking is choreographed. The script is dog-eared. We all hit our marks, no pun intended.
This new thing gives me that pins-and-needles feeling of waiting for bad news to arrive.
What kind of news that might be, I don’t know yet.
But I do know it’s coming.
He’s noticed I’m off my food, for starters.
I caught him eyeing my plate at Le Bernardin last night.
I’d taken three bites of the halibut and quietly given up because the smell of the beurre blanc had my stomach doing back handsprings.
He didn’t comment on it, though. He just refilled my water glass and asked for the check to come early.
My body isn’t making things easy. For a microscopic dot, this baby is being a brat. It’s like, now that Matvei knows, the little one feels free to start tormenting me, way ahead of schedule.
I’m tired in a way I didn’t know I could be.
Sleep-tired plus brain-tired plus a third, secretive, developed-in-an-underground-CIA-lab kind of tired.
My boobs feel like they’ve been filled with concrete.
I cried in the elevator yesterday because someone’s perfume in the lobby smelled like a gingerbread cookie, which reminded me of Christmases with my sister growing up.
This is going to be a long eight months.
If I get eight months. Which is a big if.
Dani has been calling, but I haven’t answered. The last thing I need is my cousin’s bloodhound nose and prying questions. Never one to be ignored, she followed up with a text yesterday that just said DO U EXIST . I’ll call her back when I’m a person again. Whenever that is.
It won’t be for a little while, though. Because the annual firm retreat is in eleven days.
That’s the number I’ve started running my life by.
Eleven days until Raymond drags me and his entire staff upstate to some Tudor mansion-slash-hotel-slash-hunting-club in the Hudson Valley for two nights of golf, pheasant shooting, and old-money camaraderie.
In that time, I need Mat to come up with a Plan B now that I royally screwed him out of our first window of opportunity.
I would love a hint about how he’s doing. A mere breadcrumb would suffice, anything at all. Instead, the burner stays dark behind the hatbox, and I have to make my peace with the fact that he’ll write when he writes and not a millisecond sooner.
In the meantime, I trust him.
I have to. It’s not like I have a whole lot of other choices.
Tuesday morning, Raymond announces he’s working from home. I’m staying in today. Got a stack of paperwork to slog through. Conference call at ten. Then he kisses my temple and disappears into his study with the coffee pot.
So now, I’m getting ready for a day I had not planned to spend under the same roof as him. Which is its own special hell, because the apartment becomes his apartment with him in it, and every move I make has to be calibrated for a highly temperamental audience.
I take my time in the shower because the shower is the safest room in the house. The water gives me a sound buffer, behind which nothing I murmur to the blueberry-sized person living rent-free in my abdomen gets overheard by prying ears.
Lately, I have been murmuring a lot.
Hi, you. I know, I know. But Mama’s working on it.
I turn my face up into the spray and try to turn into a houseplant. Heat. Lavender. Steam. Those are safe thoughts. Totally neutral objects to meditate on. I’ll take anything other than a dead burner or the still-living man across the hall.
I wash my hair and shave my legs, then just sit on the floor for a while and zone out. When the water finally goes lukewarm, I shut it off. I wring out my hair and wrap up in the big white towel, then stand on the bath mat and eye the tile like I’m walking off a pirate’s plank.
I do not want to leave this bathroom. But sooner or later, I have to move. With a sigh, I pad out to the bedroom and round the corner of the dressing area toward my closet.
Then I stop.
Because Raymond is standing in my closet.
He’s in his white undershirt and pajama pants, barefoot. His thinning hair is still mussed from bed. His back is half to me, facing the little built-in shelf where I keep my purses lined up by color, and his hand is closed around something small and orange.
His timing is so unbelievably, biblically bad that I almost wonder if I’m hallucinating him. Maybe three days was really enough to drive me completely batty. But, as it turns out, I’m not hallucinating. Every sensation is way too amplified to be anything but painfully, horrifyingly real.
There’s water sliding down the back of my neck. I can feel each drop in turn. The rug is thick and lush under my heels. Raymond’s eyes find mine. His face is contorted into that furious, purple rage of his.
He holds up the little orange bottle so the label catches the morning light from the closet window. Even from here, I can read the text printed on it.
Prenatal Multivitamin with Folate, 90 capsules.
“Cassandra,” he snarls. “Care to explain these?”