Chapter 10
She did not tell anyone she was going.
Not Shannon, who would have come. Not Colleen, who would have forbidden it in writing. Not Bev. She got Wyatt to school on the Monday, drove to Camden, parked on the street two doors down at twenty past nine in the morning, and sat in the car for six minutes doing nothing at all.
It was the first week of June. The hydrangeas along the front of the house had not come out yet.
She was not angry. That was the part she had not expected and had to sit with in the car. She had been furious for five weeks and it had gone somewhere over the weekend and what was left was flat and clear and slightly cold, like the water off the Point in May.
She had two questions. That was all. She had written them on the back of a receipt on Saturday night and then thrown the receipt away because she did not need it.
She got out and rang the bell.
Blair Chadwick opened her own door, which surprised her.
She was in jeans and a shirt and had her hair up and was holding reading glasses, and she looked at Erin on her step for about two seconds with absolutely no expression at all.
"Well," she said.
"I'd like ten minutes."
"Would you." Blair looked past her at the street, checking it, which told Erin something. "Is anyone with you?"
"No."
"Does he know you're here?"
"No."
"Huh." She stood back. "Then come in, by all means. I've been waiting six years for this and I'd hate to have it on a doorstep."
The house was beautiful and cold and very tidy, and Erin, who had spent five years in houses like it, read it in about four seconds: no children, no dog, no clutter, one coat on the hook, a life in which nobody arrives unannounced.
Blair did not offer her anything. They stood in a front room with a bay window.
"Sit if you like."
"I'll stand."
"Suit yourself." Blair put the glasses down on a table. "You've come about the column."
"No."
"The motion, then."
"No."
That got her. Erin watched a flicker go across a face that had been entirely still, and understood that Blair had two prepared speeches and had just been told she would need neither.
"Then what."
"I have two questions," Erin said. "And then I'll go, and I'm not going to raise my voice, and I'm not going to say anything about your character, because I don't think that's what this is and I haven't got the time."
Blair folded her arms.
"Ask."
"Who told you the due date?"
The room got quiet.
"You sent a message into a hospital room at twenty-two minutes past four in the morning on the day my son was born," Erin said. "Which means you knew the date. There were six people who had it. So that's the first question."
Blair's chin came up very slightly.
"His sister," she said.
"Vanessa."
"Vanessa told me at a lunch in the March.
She did not hand it to me in an envelope, if that's the picture you've got.
She said, June the tenth, apparently, in the tone people use about a dentist's appointment, and she watched me while she said it.
" Blair's mouth moved. "She's been doing that for six years.
She feeds people and then watches what they do with it, and she has never once in her life had to be responsible for any of it. You'll have noticed."
"I've noticed."
"Then we agree on something."
"And the second question," Erin said. "Did he ever tell you it was over?"
And that was the one.
She had known it would be, standing in the car for six minutes on the street outside. She had come with two questions and she had known which one was the hinge.
Blair Chadwick did not answer for about four seconds.
Then she said, "Sit down."
"I'd rather — "
"Sit down," Blair said, "because I'm going to show you something, and you're not going to want to be standing up."
She came back with a phone and a tablet, and she sat on the arm of a chair and did something with her thumb, and she handed the tablet across.
"Six years," she said. "All of it. I've never deleted a single thing, and you can scroll back to the beginning, and I would like you to, actually. I would like you to see the whole of it. Take as long as you want."
Erin took the tablet.
And she scrolled.
Here is what she found.
It went back six years, to a July, and the first stretch of it was ordinary — the tail of a long relationship winding down, then a woman getting angrier, then a woman going quiet.
There were long messages from Blair in that first year that Erin skipped, because reading them felt like the one genuinely wrong thing she could do in that room, and because she did not need them.
She went to the replies.
Blair. I'm sorry, I've got a thing at 4.
Yes — that's fine. Whatever's easiest.
I'm not going to talk about that.
Thank you. Yes, he's well.
Sorry — travelling. Back Thursday.
That's kind of you.
I can't do this today.
Yes.
Four a year. Sometimes five. Never more than about nine words. Never a question asked. Never once a don't, never a please stop, never a do not contact me again, and — this was the thing that made Erin's hands go cold on a stranger's tablet — never once a delay of more than about ninety seconds.
Six years of a man answering the phone the way you flinch.
And Erin sat on a stranger's sofa in Camden with a stranger's tablet in her lap and found that she could date every single one of them.
That was the horror of it. Not the messages — the messages were nothing, that was the whole point of the messages. It was that her ledger was upstairs in a drawer in Rockland and she did not need it, because five years of Tuesdays were in her hands already and she could put a room to every one.
Sorry — travelling. Back Thursday. That was the March of the second year.
She could tell because of the Thursday; he had been in Zurich and had come back a day late and had brought Wyatt a wooden train that was too old for him, and Erin had sat up that night and written a thousand words and gone to bed at five.
That's kind of you. That one had a date on it she recognized before she'd finished reading the line, and it took her a second to place it, and then she placed it: it was two days after the christening.
Blair had presumably said something gracious.
He had thanked her. Erin had been downstairs at the time, thirty feet below him, being told by a woman in a hat that she looked wonderful for four months out.
I can't do this today. The fourth year. Erin did not know what that day had been for Blair Chadwick and did not care.
She knew what it had been in her house: it was the week Graham's deal in Providence went wrong and he came home gray and did not speak for two days, and Erin had made soup and asked nothing and had written it in the ledger as G. home Tues, low, no explanation offered.
He had had nothing for her, that week. Nothing at all. And he had found six words for this woman inside ninety seconds.
That was what the ledger had never been able to catch, because the ledger only recorded what happened. It had no column for the size of the thing.
Nine words, four times a year. It was not the volume. If it had been volume she could have used it — volume is an affair, volume is a thing with a name that a court and a columnist and a woman at the market all understand.
This was smaller than that and worse than that.
This was a door he would not close because closing it would have required one difficult sentence, and Graham Lockwood had spent six years deciding, four times a year, ninety seconds at a time, that his wife's peace of mind was worth less than the discomfort of writing it.
Erin scrolled on with a completely steady hand.
She got to the day Wyatt was born. There was Blair's message, at 4:22, the one Erin had known by heart for five years and had never seen from this side.
Underneath it, at 4:31 — nine minutes later, from a corridor forty feet from her bed:
Don't.
That was all. One word, no punctuation beyond the period.
And then nothing for four months.
Erin looked at that single word for a long time.
Don't.
It was the closest he ever came. It was the entire five years in five letters — a man who could get himself all the way to don't and could not get to never again, could not get to lose my number, could not do the one clean brutal sentence that would have ended it, because ending things was the one thing on this earth Graham Lockwood could not do.
She handed the tablet back.
"Thank you," she said.
Blair took it. She was watching Erin's face with real attention.
"You expected worse."
"I expected an affair," Erin said. "I've never once thought there was one. I want to be clear about that, because I think you may have spent six years hoping I did."
Blair went white around the mouth.
"That's what I came for," Erin said. "The rest of it is just — " she looked for the word and found it and did not enjoy it.
"It's small. That's all it is. It's a small man being polite four times a year for six years because being polite is easier than being kind, and I built a marriage out of the gap. "
"Don't do that," Blair said. Her voice had changed. "Don't make him pathetic in my front room."
"I'm not making him anything."
"You've come in here to take him off me by making him smaller, and it is — " she stopped and started again, and there was something coming apart behind her face.
"He was going to marry me. Do you understand that?
There was a house picked out. Not by him, by his sister, and there was a note at the back of a folder with my name on it, and I know that because Vanessa read it to me on a telephone in the October, and then three days later he — "
She stopped.
The clock in the hall ticked.
"He said no," Erin said.