Chapter 16 #3
The front room had a gap on the low shelf where twenty years of notebooks had been.
She went up the stairs slowly, holding the rail, and stood in the door of their bedroom.
It was exactly as she had left it at midnight on the twenty-eighth of September.
Not preserved — she would have hated preserved, and she thought he probably knew that.
Just unchanged, in the way of a man who had been sleeping somewhere else.
Three books on his side that had not moved.
A water glass from a week in the summer, which had at some point been emptied and put back.
"Where've you been sleeping?"
"Barn," Shane said, from the landing.
"Since when?"
"September."
Jenna stood in the doorway of the room where she had been happy about ninety percent of the days she had woken up in it.
Then she went to the chest of drawers and opened the small top one.
It was all still there. Thirteen years of somebody else's taste on velvet — the bracelets, the watch, the three necklaces, and now, on top, still in its matte box, the thing from Melrose that had sat on a kitchen counter for four minutes in September before she told him to put it down.
She stood there and looked at it for a while.
"I never wore any of it," she said.
"I know."
She turned around. He was in the doorway now, with his hands at his sides.
"You know?"
"Jenna, you're a woman who's worn the same silver hoops since 2006." Shane rubbed the back of his neck. "I knew about the fourth year in. I kept doing it because it was a thing I could do that took ten minutes, and because if I'd asked you what you actually wanted I'd have had to hear the answer."
"Which was what?"
"Nothing," he said. "You'd have said nothing, and you'd have meant it, and then I'd have had to sit down and work out what a person does for a woman who doesn't want anything."
Jenna Bishop closed the drawer.
"Sell it," she said.
"What?"
"All of it. Every piece. Put it toward whatever Marbury takes off you." She came past him onto the landing. "I'm not being noble. I've never liked one item in that drawer and you've got a lawsuit."
Shane made a sound that was almost a laugh.
"That's the coldest thing you've ever said to me."
"I've got about nine colder ones in the truck," Jenna said. "You'll hear them over the next thirty years."
At four in the morning she woke up the way she always did.
She lay there for a second in a bed she had not slept in since September, in a house with every light off, and then she got up carefully and put on his shirt because it was nearest and went down the hill in the dark.
The barn light came on behind her about ninety seconds later.
He came in with two coffees and did not say anything about her being there, and she did not say anything about him coming, and he sat down on the amp with his hands around his cup while she got the pencil.
The second song — the one they had started in April and gotten nowhere with — was still on the music stand where they had abandoned it.
"It's the second verse," Jenna said.
"It's the second verse," Shane agreed.
"You know what's wrong with it."
"I've known what's wrong with it since April. I've been waiting three weeks for somebody to be in here so I could say it out loud."
"Say it out loud."
So he said it, and he was right, and Jenna wrote it down on the pad in the handwriting he had once photographed in secret, and put her name at the top of the page and his underneath it, in that order, and neither of them commented on it at all.
Outside, over the ridge, it started getting light.
At six she called Angela Mackey, who picked up on the second ring because Angela Mackey had never in her life not been awake.
"You're up early."
"I'm at the house."
There was a pause of exactly one beat.
"Alright," Angela said.
"The papers in the drawer in Charlotte."
"What about them."
"Destroy them," Jenna said. "Not hold. Not shelve. I don't want a version of that document existing in a building anywhere with my name typed on it."
"You understand I'm required to tell you to take a week."
"Take a week yourself if you like. My answer's going to be the same on Friday."
Angela Mackey laughed — a short, dry, entirely unprofessional sound that Jenna had never heard out of her in eight months.
"Jenna," she said, "I've done this since 1999 and I've torn up four sets of papers in twenty-six years, and every one of those four marriages went straight back into the ditch inside two years."
"And?"
"And not one of those four women ever once, in a single conversation, told me what she wanted before she told me what he'd done." Paper moved. "You've done it in that order every time since October. I'll have them shredded this morning and I'll send you the certificate."
"Thank you, Angela."
"Send me a picture of the baby," Angela said, "and then don't call me again for ten years," and hung up.
Jenna put the phone face down on the console.
Then she picked the pencil back up, because there was still a second verse to finish, and outside the high window the whole ridge had gone gold.