Chapter 16 #2
"Here's what it looks like," Erin said. "You don't live in this house.
Not because of what happened in it — I'm past the house, it's just a house, your grandfather built it and it's cold in the mornings.
Because Wyatt's school is on Union Street and his friend has a deaf dog and I am not moving that child again.
So it's Rockland, and it's my building, and if that means you drive to Boston at half past five three days a week then you drive to Boston at half past five three days a week.
"I keep my name. I already keep my name — I want you to hear how that sentence sounded and know that I noticed it too. Erin Brooks. On the books, on the accounts, on the school forms.
"You never manage me again. Not the press, not your mother, not a room.
If somebody says something about me you don't smooth it.
And if you ever again in your life catch yourself telling me you'll handle something quietly, you're going to stop mid-sentence and say the true version instead, and it's going to be awful, and you're going to do it anyway. "
"Yes," he said.
"I'm not finished." Her voice went down half a step.
"Money. This is the one I've thought hardest about and it's not negotiable.
The trust stays exactly where it is, untouched, and it goes to Wyatt, and I will never spend a dollar of it as long as I live.
Everything we actually live on, we split, out of two accounts, both of them visible to both of us.
And Graham — " she waited until he was looking at her.
"I earn more than you do. Right now, this year, on the last two contracts, and it is going to get worse for you, and there is going to come a day when somebody says something about it at a table in Camden. "
"Erin—"
"You don't get to be gracious about it," she said. "That's the trap and it's the last one. I don't want a man who's fine with it. I want a man who thinks it's funny."
And Graham Lockwood, standing on a path with salt on his coat and his face wet, laughed — cracked and wrecked and real.
"It is funny," he said. "It's the funniest thing that's ever happened to me. Do you know what I did in April, in the hospital, at about two in the morning? I worked out what your books had earned in the year you married me and compared it to what I'd been giving you as an allowance."
"Don't."
"Nine hundred dollars a month," he said. "I set it up myself. I thought I was being generous."
"Graham."
"I want it in the second book," he said. "I mean it. Put the nine hundred dollars in."
Erin laughed, and it turned into something else halfway through, and she put her hand over her eyes for a second and then took it away because she had promised herself she was going to look at him for all of it.
"Is that a yes?" she said.
"Erin." He took one step and stopped, and it was visibly the hardest thing he had done all year. "Can I—"
"Yes," she said. "God. Yes."
He crossed the twenty feet.
He did not grab her. He came up and stopped a hand's width away and stood there, and put one hand very carefully against the side of her face, and looked at her the way you look at a thing you had already finished grieving.
"Say it again," he said.
"I want to be married to you."
"Again."
"Graham—"
"I've had thirteen months," he said. "Let me have it three times."
"I want to be married to you," Erin said, "and I chose it, and nobody talked me into it, and there was another whole life on offer this morning and I turned it down at ten o'clock in a bookshop."
He kissed her.
It was not a good kiss. It was thirteen months and six years of nothing and both of them shaking, and their teeth met somewhere in it, and he made a noise into her mouth that was almost a sob and she took a fistful of the salt-stiff coat and pulled him in until there was nothing between them at all.
They stood in the cold on a path in front of a house neither of them was going to live in.
"Not here," Erin said, against his mouth.
"No."
"Get in my car."
"My car's—"
"Get in my car."
The drive took twenty-two minutes because of the light in Rockport.
Neither of them said anything for the first ten. He had his hand flat on her thigh above the knee, not moving, and she drove with both hands on the wheel and her jaw set and could feel her own pulse in about six places.
At the town line, over the seam in the road she could feel through the wheel, she said, "There's a thing I have to do at the top of the stairs and you're going to have to let me do it."
"Okay."
"You don't ask why."
"I wasn't going to."
They went another mile.
"Erin."
"What."
"I'm going to need you to tell me if I do it," he said.
"The thing. The handling." He was looking straight ahead through the windshield.
"Because I've had a year to think about it and here's what frightens me: I don't think I'll be able to hear myself.
It isn't a decision I make. It's a reflex, it's what that house put in me, and I sat in a room in Portland every Tuesday for a year and the one thing I could not get an answer to was how a man notices himself being reasonable. "
Erin drove.
"You'll do it inside a month," she said.
"Probably."
"Not probably. You will. It'll be something small — the school, or your mother, or a woman at a table saying something about the book — and you'll deal with it before you tell me, and you'll be right about the outcome and wrong about everything else.
" She changed down for the light. "And I'll tell you.
Out loud, in the room, in front of whoever's there if that's where it happens.
And it's going to be horrible, and you're going to want to explain, and you'll have about four seconds to decide not to. "
"And if I explain anyway?"
"Then you explain anyway," said Erin, "and I'll still be there in the morning, because I'm not doing thirteen months again over a bad Tuesday. That's what all-the-way-in means. It means you get to be wrong in front of me now."
Graham put his head back against the seat.
"Nobody's ever said that to me in my life," he said.
"I know. That's the whole family."
"No," he said. "That's the whole world, Erin. Nobody says that to a man with money. Nobody's said a true thing to me since I was about twenty-six, except you, and I married you and put you upstairs with a small lamp."
The light went green.
"Well," Erin said. "I'm loud now."
The outside staircase up the side of Dalton Books had fourteen steps and a rail she'd painted herself in May.
Erin went up them first with her keys in her hand.
At the top she stopped, on the landing, in front of her own door. The one she had changed the locks on at two in the afternoon on the ninth of September, thirteen months earlier, for a hundred and forty dollars, from a man who asked no questions.
Graham stood three steps below her, waiting, because she'd told him to.
She put the key in and turned it and pushed the door open on her own apartment. Two rooms and a kitchen. A chair by the window. A table with four blue notebooks stacked on it and a laptop she had not opened in two days.
Then she turned around on the landing and looked down at him.
"Come in," she said.
And Graham Lockwood came up the last three steps and over the threshold of her house, because she had opened the door and asked him to, which was the only way it was ever going to happen.
He got the door shut behind him and then it was not careful anymore.
She had his coat off him in the hallway and it hit the floor with the weight of a wet sail. He got both hands into her hair and kissed her against the wall by the coat hooks, and she could taste salt on his mouth from the whole morning on the water, and his hands were cold and she did not care.
"Erin—"
"Don't talk."
"I'm going to talk a bit."
"Graham."
"Not much," he said, and got her coat off, and then just stopped for a second with his forehead against hers, breathing like a man who had run somewhere. "God. Thirteen months."
She got her hands under his sweater and up the flat of his back, and he was thinner — she felt it before she saw it, ribs where there had not been ribs — and something went through her at that which was not desire and was not pity and was closer to fury.
"You didn't eat."
"No."
"For a year."
"Not well." He said it against her jaw. "It wasn't a hunger strike, I'm not that stupid. I just kept forgetting."
She pulled the sweater over his head and looked at him and put her hand flat in the middle of his chest, and he shut his eyes.
Then she took his wrist — the left one, the inside of it, the place he touched when he was about to say something he'd rehearsed — and put her mouth on it.
Graham made a sound like he'd been hit.
"Don't do that."
"Why."
"Because I'm going to be about forty seconds and I'd like to be better than that."
"You've got the rest of your life," Erin said. "Be bad at it."
They did not get further than the front room.
He backed her to the arm of the chair by the window — the chair she had sat in for an hour at a time on Tuesdays for two years before she ever slept in that apartment, looking at nothing, being a woman with a gun in a drawer — and got her sweater off over her head, and then knelt down in front of her on her own floor and put his face against her stomach and stayed there.
Erin got her hands in his hair.
"Hey."
"Give me a minute."
"Graham."
"I know." His voice was wrecked. "I know. I'm not going anywhere. Just — I've had a year of standing eight feet away from you."