1. “Tuesday Morning” #2
Gray sweater under his suit jacket. His glasses on. He was reading something on his desk with the small focused stillness of a man who read four hours a day and probably more. His hand held his pen like it might run away. His face was the face I’d been practicing not looking at for four years.
He had a book on the shelf behind him. I could see the spine from the doorway. Something old. Something leather-bound. He collected old books. My father had mentioned it once. He said Atlas had filled three walls of his apartment with first editions.
I wondered if he ever thought about the fact that most books were about people not getting the things they wanted.
I watched him for a count of five.
One Mississippi. Two Mississippi. Three Mississippi.
Four Mississippi.
Five.
Then I pushed the door open.
The room smelled like leather and bourbon and the specific kind of quiet that wealth manufactures.
Atlas Cain was sitting at his desk like he’d been sitting there since the beginning of the world.
He looked up.
Time did something strange in that moment.
It didn’t stop, exactly, but it shifted sideways, the way it sometimes did when you were reading a book and a sentence suddenly made the whole story different.
I had known Atlas Cain my entire life.
He’d been at my christening.
My high school graduation.
At hundreds of Sunday dinners.
He’d never once looked at me like I was anyone other than my father’s daughter.
He was gray at the temples now.
Silver-edged in the places where he used to be brown.
He wore his suits like they’d been tailored to the specific architecture of his body.
He had cold eyes.
Gray-green, like water over stone.
I’d never seen them focus on me before.
He was focusing on me now.
“Eden,” he said.
Just my name. Two syllables.
But the way he said it made my chest do something that felt like jumping without moving.
I came in and closed the door behind me.
“I need a divorce,” I said.
He looked at me for a long moment.
Not moving. Not reacting. Just looking.
His fingers were steepled on his desk. His reading glasses were on. He looked like a man who’d been interrupted from something important and had decided to make the interruption matter.
“Sit,” he said finally.
I sat in the leather chair across from his desk.
The chair was expensive. Everything in this office was expensive. The room was designed to make you feel the weight of money and competence in equal measure.
“Date of marriage,” he said.
His voice was professional. Clean. The voice of someone who’d asked this question a thousand times.
“Three years ago. June fifteenth.”
“Grounds for divorce?”
“Infidelity.”
“His infidelity or yours?”
The question hung in the air between us.
“His,” I said.
He wrote something on a pad in front of him.
“How long ago did you find out?”
“Six weeks.”
“How long was the affair?”
I didn’t know the answer to that. I realized I didn’t know if it was an affair or a single incident or months of deception.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “At least two years.”
“Do you have proof?”
I thought about Camilla. About the way her hands had been on his chest.
“Yes,” I said.
He nodded.
“Property holdings. What did you bring into the marriage?”
I answered. My apartment. My trust fund income. The jewelry my mother had left me.
He asked about children. We didn’t have any. He asked about joint bank accounts. We had two. He asked about property held jointly. The house in the Hamptons.
Each answer felt like I was handing him pieces of my marriage and he was examining them and putting them in order the way someone would organize receipts.
“You need someone else,” he said, after a long moment. “My associate James is very good. He specializes in these cases.”
I’d been waiting for the rejection.
This was it.
This was him telling me gently that he couldn’t take my case. That it would be a conflict of interest. That my father wouldn’t approve.
All the things I’d known coming in and chosen not to think about.
“No,” I said. “I want you.”
He looked at me.
“Why?”
The word wasn’t casual. It was a lawyer’s question. Designed to get to something underneath.
“Because my father trusts you,” I said.
It was the answer I’d prepared. It was also a lie.
The truth was: because no one will believe I’m not using my father to get an advantage in this divorce. Except they won’t believe I’m not using you either. At least with you it’s the truth.
The truth was: I had to know if I was the only one feeling this.
But I said: “Because my father trusts you.”
He looked at me for a very long time.
His gray-green eyes didn’t move from my face.
I could see him thinking.
Processing.
Deciding.
He leaned back in his chair and folded his hands in his lap.
“I can’t,” he said finally.
The words landed exactly where they were supposed to.
“I understand,” I said, and I did. Of course I understood. This was insane. I was insane. I’d walked in here and asked him to help me dismantle my marriage while simultaneously asking him to participate in the fantasy that I wanted him for his legal expertise and not for any other reason.
I stood up to leave.
“Wait,” he said.
I turned back.
“Your father,” he said. “He knows you’re here?”
“Yes.”
“And he’s okay with you choosing me specifically?”
I nodded.
He stood up and walked me to the door.
He told me to schedule a consultation with his secretary.
I felt something break in my chest as I turned to leave.
I walked back down the corridor without looking at the names on the doors.
The mahogany doors blurred past. The frosted glass with the names of partners who made more money than I would ever make. The quiet that seemed to hold the whole building together.
The elevator came immediately.
I got in and watched the floors tick down.
Forty-three. Forty-two. Forty-one.
I could feel my heart in my throat.
The elevator was moving too slowly. Or maybe it was moving normally and I was just aware of every second it took to put distance between me and the man in the corner office.
The lobby looked exactly the same as it had when I came up.
The doorman opened the door for me. His face was kind. He probably pitied me. The senator’s daughter, getting a divorce at twenty-six.
I stepped out onto Park Avenue and the world was still moving the same way it always moved.
Cars. People. The particular hum of money making more money.
I didn’t catch the cab right away.
I stood on the sidewalk for a full minute trying to remember which direction the imprint office was in.
The ring caught the morning light.
Three carats. Emerald cut. Platinum.
A monument to poor decisions.
My phone buzzed in my bag.
Text message. Unknown number.
I stood there staring at the screen for what felt like the entire elevator ride, almost dropped it twice. My hands were shaking. My hands never shook.
Then in the lobby I opened it.
Two words.
Come back.
My stomach did the thing my stomach had not done since I was twenty-three and Tristan was first. The thing that felt like free fall. The thing that felt like yes before I’d even had the thought.
I turned around and walked back to the elevators.