Chapter 31
The master bedroom door opened twenty minutes later, not with the sharp, decisive click of the Tucker Sanderson who controlled boardrooms, but with a slow, hesitant friction against the frame.
Felicity had not changed out of the dark green silk gown. She sat on the chaise lounge by the floor-to-ceiling glass, her uninjured left hand resting loosely on her knee, her uncovered right wrist exposed to the cold, blue reflection of the rainy woods. She wasn't weeping.
Tucker stepped into the room. He had taken off his tuxedo jacket and his shoes, but he was still wearing his pleated dress trousers and his white shirt, the cuffs unbuttoned and dragging against his wrists. His hair, usually immaculate, was wild where he had torn his hands through it in the car.
He didn't stop five feet away this time. He sank.
It was a clumsy, heavy drop, his knees hitting the hardwood floorboards with a dull, flesh-and-bone thud that seemed to rattle the glass windowpane beside them.
He reached out, his large, trembling hands hovering over the hem of her green silk dress, not daring to touch the fabric without her permission.
"Lissy," he choked out. The word was thick, waterlogged with a frantic, desperate grief that stripped twenty years of cultivated posture from his spine. "Lissy, please. Please look at me."
Felicity did not turn her head immediately.
She kept her eyes on the dark silhouette of the pines, letting the silence stretch until the skin on his forehead began to flush with a raw, agonizing heat.
When she finally turned her gaze down to him, she found her husband looking up at her from the floor, his chest heaving under his open shirt, his eyes swollen and spilling over with a violent, unrestrained remorse.
"I didn't see it," he sobbed, his forehead suddenly dropping forward until it pressed hard against her left knee, his entire frame shaking with a terrifying, rhythmic tremor.
"God, Lissy, I didn't see her. I brought her into our house.
I sat across from her at our table while she...
while she planned all this. I stood in that hospital cubicle and I held your wrist under the water and I told the doctor you were losing your mind.
I blamed you. I looked you in the eye and I called it a panic attack because I was too blind, too comfortable, too fucking stupid to see what she was building. "
He reached up, his fingers curling into the carpet on either side of her feet, his voice dropping into a ragged, guttural plea that didn't carry past the glass.
"I am so sorry. I am so, so sorry, Felicity.
I let her turn me into a weapon against you.
I let her make me the jailer in your own home.
Every time you asked me to believe you—every time you showed me a moved mug or a text or that goddamned paperback—I chose the easy lie because I couldn't face the fact that you might be right.
I wanted the compliance. I wanted Brianne to be right.
I wanted you to be the one who was broken because then it was just a medical problem I could buy a pill for. "
He lifted his face, his tears tracking lines through the gray dust of the evening, his lips white and splitting as his teeth clicked together in a violent chill.
He reached out, his hand shaking so hard it looked like a palsy, and gently, with the terrifying reverence of a man handling unexploded ordnance, he slid his palm beneath her bare, scarred right wrist. He just let the heat of his hand hover beneath the raw, blistering crescent of her burn.
"I will give it up," he whispered, his eyes wide, frantic, begging for a fracture in her serene mask. "The firm, the Vanguard asset line, the partnership—I’ll resign on Monday morning. We can sell the house. We can leave the valley. I’ll spend every single day of the rest of my life ensuring you never have to look at a lock or a label again.
Just tell me what to do to make you look at me like you used to. Tell me how to fix us."
Felicity sat perfectly still beneath the weight of his grief.
She looked at his broad shoulders, now hunched and broken at her knees. She looked at the silver watch on his left wrist—the one Brianne had helped her pick out for him for their fifth anniversary—shimmering in the dull light of the bedroom.
She didn't pull her leg away. She didn't offer him the comfort of a scream or the release of an absolute forgiveness.
She reached down with her left hand, her cool fingers coming down to rest on the top of his head, her thumb lightly tracing the line of his hair with that same slow, mechanical detachment she used to audit a logistics manifest.
"You can't fix the this, Tucker," she said softly, her voice a beautiful, level line of data that carried absolutely no hatred, and absolutely no warmth. "The outcome was laid months ago. We just have to live in the space that's left."
He let out a long, ragged wail against her knee—like a dog whining in the dark—and wrapped his arms tightly around her shins, burying his face back into the green silk as if he could crawl back into the skin of the husband he had been before this had come to light.
Felicity let him stay there. She didn't smooth his hair again.
She turned her eyes back to the window, watching the rain wash the salt from the glass, completely unbothered by the weight at her feet.