His Greatest Mistake (The Neglected Wives #5)

CHAPTER ONE

The Architecture of Absence

The dress I chose was grey, and I chose it because it would not be remembered.

That is a strange thing to know about yourself, standing in front of a wardrobe that costs more than the flat I grew up in.

But I knew it the way I knew most things now — quietly, without drama, the knowledge just sitting there like furniture.

Somewhere in the last two years I had stopped dressing to be seen and started dressing to disappear correctly.

There is a skill to it. You want to be appropriate.

You want to photograph well beside him if it comes to that.

You do not want to be the woman anyone looks at twice, because being looked at twice invites questions, and questions require answers, and I had run out of answers a long time ago.

Six forty-five. The board dinner was at eight. Cal had called at four to say he would meet me there.

"You go ahead," he'd said, the sound of the office behind him — Priya's voice, a printer, the particular hum of a floor that never emptied. "The Mercer numbers came in wrong and I need to sit on someone about it. I'll be there by eight-fifteen."

"All right."

"You don't mind?"

I never minded. That was the arrangement, though no one had ever written it down. He asked, and I said I didn't mind, and the not-minding had become so total that I sometimes wondered if I had any minding left in me at all, or whether it had been used up like a battery you forget to charge.

I found the earrings by accident.

They were at the back of the jewellery box, behind the good diamonds, wrapped in the tissue I'd wrapped them in myself.

Brass, hand-worked, from a designer in Lagos my mother had told me about — a woman who made pieces that looked like they'd been dug up somewhere ancient and important.

I'd bought them two years ago in a fit of something.

Homesickness, maybe. Or the memory of a self who wore things like this without asking whether they suited the room.

I held one up to the light. It caught and threw a small warm shape onto the wall.

Then I put it back, because it didn't go with the grey, and the grey was the point.

The dinner was in a private room at a restaurant near the Park, the kind with no menu and no prices and a sommelier who spoke about wine the way surgeons speak about tumours.

I arrived at seven fifty-five and did the thing I did.

I greeted the wives I knew. I asked after the children whose names I'd memorised.

I told Coralie Voss that her scarf was extraordinary and meant it, because it was, and because Coralie Voss was married to a man who wanted to eat my husband alive and it cost me nothing to be kind to her.

Kindness is easy when you have stopped expecting anything back.

Cal arrived at eight forty.

I felt the room adjust before I saw him.

That is what he does to rooms — the conversation doesn't stop, exactly, it just reorganises itself around the gravity of him.

He came to me first, which people noticed, which was the point of coming to me first. He kissed my cheek.

His hand found the small of my back for exactly as long as the gesture required and no longer.

"You look wonderful," he said, and his eyes were already moving past me, doing the calculus of the room — where was Estévez, where was the Mercer man, who needed to be handled and in what order.

"Thank you."

"Sorry. The thing with the numbers."

"You said."

He was gone within the minute, folded into a conversation with a man whose bridge his company was building somewhere I'd stopped keeping track of. I watched him go and felt nothing I could name, which frightened me more than grief would have. Grief at least is a shape. This was just weather.

Dinner was seven courses. I sat beside a hedge fund man on my left who talked about his divorce with a frankness I found almost restful, and on my right a woman named Petra who ran a foundation and asked me, at one point, what I did.

"I'm married to Caelum Hargrove," I said, and heard it come out of my own mouth, and something in me went very still.

Because that was the answer. That was the whole answer.

Once, the answer had been — I design spaces, I'm with Whitmore and Crane, I did the executive floors at the Hargrove building, actually, that's how we — and now the answer was the name of a man who was, at that moment, forty feet away with his back to me, laughing at something the bridge man had said.

I heard the laugh. I knew that laugh. It was the real one, the unguarded one, the one I used to be able to summon across a dinner table with nothing but a look.

Petra said something kind and moved the conversation on, because she was well-bred and had seen a woman flinch and knew not to press. I was grateful to her. I am grateful, still, to all the strangers who were gentle with me in that period without knowing why they needed to be.

At some point during the dessert course I needed him.

It was nothing. A woman from the arts council had approached, someone I'd been trying to get in a room with for the Foundation's spring programme, and she wanted to meet him, and this was the kind of small joint act that a marriage is supposed to be able to perform — the wife catches the husband's eye, the husband comes, they do the two-minute thing together and the woman goes away feeling important. I caught his eye across the room.

He looked at me. He understood the request; I know he did, because I saw him understand it.

And then his expression did the thing it had learned to do, the small apologetic tightening that meant not now, and he turned a quarter-turn back into his conversation, and the arts council woman waited another moment beside me and then said she'd email, and drifted off, and did not email.

Not now. Not unkindly. That was the cruelty of it, if you could even call it cruelty.

There was no unkindness in him to point to.

If I had said, later, in the car, you humiliated me tonight, he would have been genuinely bewildered, and he would have been right to be, because he hadn't.

He had simply been busy. He was always simply busy.

You cannot divorce a man for being busy.

You cannot even properly complain about it, because busy is what buys the flat and the diamonds and the seven-course dinners, and to complain about the busyness is to complain about the life, and everyone knows what the life is worth.

I looked away first. I always looked away first. I had a rule about it, that I never let anyone catch me searching a room for my husband, and I kept the rule that night too.

The car home was silent in the particular way our silences had become, which was not hostile, only full.

He answered three emails. I watched the Park go by, the black shapes of the trees, the lamps making their small pools on the paths where people I would never be walked their dogs and lived their loud, ordinary, present lives.

"Good dinner," he said, once, without looking up.

"Mm."

Upstairs, the flat received us the way it always did — beautifully, indifferently, five thousand eight hundred square feet of choices I had made myself.

I had designed this kitchen. The copper over the range, the open shelves, the island where I had once imagined we would stand together at midnight eating cold things out of the fridge and being married.

I stood at that island now and made a pot of tea for one, because Cal had gone straight to the study, and the study door had closed with its soft expensive click, and under it the light came on.

I took my tea to the window.

There is a journal I keep. Kept. I keep it still, actually, though it holds different things now.

That night it held numbers, though I had never told anyone that, not Jade, not my mother, not the version of myself I looked at in mirrors.

I opened it and I wrote the date and beneath the date I wrote, in the small neat hand my father taught me, the only entry I made that night.

Day 847.

I looked at it for a while. I did not let myself think too hard about what it counted — I had a rule about that too — but I knew, the way you know a thing in the body before the mind will hold it.

It counted the days since he had last asked me a question about myself and waited for the answer.

I had started counting on a night I could no longer remember the shape of, which is its own kind of horror, that you can begin grieving something and not even mark the grave.

Eight hundred and forty-seven.

The tea went cold. The study light stayed on.

Somewhere below me the city did its enormous ongoing thing, and I stood in my beautiful kitchen in my forgettable grey dress and I did not cry, because I had stopped crying about this a long time ago, and the not-crying was the worst of it, if I am honest. Crying would have meant I still expected something.

The not-crying meant I had made my peace with a life, and the life was this: a light under a door, and a number in a book, and a woman at a window holding a cup she'd forgotten she was holding.

I rinsed the cup. I put it on the rack. I did not knock on the study door to say goodnight, because we had stopped doing that too, at some point, on some night I hadn't marked.

I went to bed on my half of it.

I did not know, lying there in the dark with the city light coming in cold through the blinds, that I had a number in me that was smaller than eight hundred and forty-seven.

That some counts run down instead of up.

That there is a day — you cannot always see it coming — when the whole architecture of your accommodation, every quiet adjustment, every I don't mind, every earring returned to its tissue, simply gives, all at once, without a sound.

I closed my eyes.

In the morning the study would be dark, and the space beside me warm where he had come in without waking me, and I would open the journal and write, for the first time in all those days, not a number but a question.

But that was the morning. This was still the night, and in the night I only slept.