Chapter Thirteen
I woke at six in a strange bed with a heavy arm over my waist and no panic anywhere in me, which was how I knew everything had changed.
Gray early light. Water sounds through an open window.
Chris slept on his back the way he did everything, solidly, committed, one arm keeping me filed against his side, and I lay there in the quiet and took inventory of myself like a woman checking for injuries after a crash, and found none.
No guilt. I went looking for it, honestly and thoroughly, in all the places it should have been sleeping, and the rooms were empty.
What I found instead was hunger, and I was reaching for him before I'd finished deciding to, and he woke the way he'd fallen asleep, all at once and sure of where he was, and we were quieter this time, slower, morning-slow, my name said low into my shoulder, and afterward he held me against his chest and neither of us moved for a long time.
"I need to tell you about the Wednesday," Chris said, into my hair.
His hand traced up my spine and back down, absent and steady.
"You'd just told me all of it, standing on that path with the wind on you, fourteen months of his garbage, delivered level as a surveyor, and I remember thinking, she's remarkable, and that was fine.
Admiring you was allowed. Then in the truck you cried, and I gave you the handkerchief, and I made the crack about revenge being work, and you laughed.
" He was quiet a second. "You laughed with your whole face, wet and wrecked and real, and something went through me that had no business going through me, and I spent that whole drive home glad, Lily.
Glad of the worst afternoon of your year, because it had put you in my truck.
I pulled into my own garage and sat there and said out loud, to nobody, well, that's a problem.
And it has been ever since, and this morning it stopped being one.
That's the whole confession. Six weeks. I never stood a chance. "
I lay against his chest and let that settle into me, warm and enormous.
"A Wednesday," I said. "I fell in a truck on a Wednesday and didn't know it for a month."
"We're not fast learners," Chris said. "We're thorough. Different trade entirely."
He made eggs, not duck. I came downstairs in one of his shirts to find him at the stove in the early sun, and I said, "I was promised duck," and Chris pointed the spatula at me without turning around.
"I thought about it. Duck is a dinner. Duck is a table set properly and a bottle worth the name and a woman with no other house to go back to.
The first night you walk in that door free, I'll make you the duck, and it'll be the best thing you've ever eaten, because of the duck slightly and the freedom mostly.
" He slid the eggs onto two plates. "Until then, eggs. Sit."
I sat. And over that breakfast, in his shirt, at his island, we did the adult thing.
"Here's my term," I said. "One term. This, us, it stops this morning and it starts again after.
Not because of guilt, I checked, there isn't any.
Because of a technicality that isn't a technicality, so don't look at me like that.
" He'd smiled into his coffee. "I'm still legally married to your son.
On the twelfth I stand up in front of a hundred and ten people as an honest woman, that's the entire engine of it, every word out of my mouth lands because I'm the one who didn't lie.
I won't hand him a single thread to pull.
When it's done and the papers are served, I'll walk into this kitchen and you'll make the duck and we'll begin, in the open, at whatever speed we like.
But between now and then, I sleep at my post. Can you live with that? "
Chris set down his fork, and thought about it the way he thought about everything, actually thought, none of the theater of consideration, and then nodded once.
"I'd have argued for it if you hadn't," he said.
"It costs me, I'll say that plainly, this kitchen's going to be very quiet for three weeks knowing what it's missing.
But you're right on every count, and a man who can't hold a line for twenty days didn't deserve the woman who drew it.
" He picked the fork back up. "Two amendments.
The calls continue. I'll go without your body until the papers land, I'm not going without your voice, that's not negotiable. "
"Accepted. Second?"
"After the twelfth, I'm not hiding this.
" His eyes came up, level and gray. "I want you to know that now, so you can plan for it.
There'll be talk, the kind that peels paint.
She left the son for the father, they'll say, and worse, and they'll say it for a year, and I need you to hear my position on it.
" He shrugged, one big shoulder. "I'm fifty-eight.
I've buried a wife I loved and raised a son who breaks things, and I know to the dollar what other people's opinions cost, which is nothing, and what six years of quiet in this house costs, which is everything.
Let them talk. I intend to take you to dinner in town, at a table by the window, with the lights on. "
Five years with a man who was proud of me the way you're proud of a car. And now this one, promising me a window table like other men promise diamonds. My eyes went hot over the eggs, and I let them, because it was allowed in this house.
"A table by the window," I said. "Deal."
The lawyer came from Walt. Her name was Dana Miller, she practiced out of an unmarked floor in Stamford, and she'd been sitting across from women like me for twenty years, and the first thing she did after reading my file was look up over her glasses and say, "Well.
This is the most organized heartbreak I've ever been handed.
You've done my first month's work for me.
What is it you want, Mrs. Duke, and don't say what's fair, everyone says what's fair and nobody means it. "
"I want the petition drafted, signed, and sitting in a drawer," I said, "ready to be served at a moment I choose.
I want the jewelry, all of it. It's documented and insured in my name and he stole it, and I want that word available to us, theft, even if we never fire it.
Beyond that, the prenup is what it is. I didn't come to get rich.
I came to get out clean, on a schedule, holding the pen. "
Dana looked at me for a long moment, and then she took her glasses off, and something behind her professional face folded its arms and grinned.
"The fifteenth of September," she said, when we'd finished the details. "You're sure about the date of service. Not the thirteenth, not the morning after whatever it is you've got planned that Walt alluded to, and don't tell me what you've got planned, I want deniability."
"The fifteenth," I said. "He has a hotel reservation that evening. It might be cancelled by then, but either way I want him to have the reminder on that day."
Dana wrote it down. "Mrs. Duke," she said, "in twenty years, I have wanted to applaud in this office four times." She capped her pen. "Go finish your September. Everything on my end will be sitting in the drawer, warm and ready."
Mark came home Friday evening, kissed the top of my head, and asked what smelled so good.
I'd made his favorite, Wagyu steak, because the performance had a schedule and I intended to run it to the wire, and I stood at my own stove being complimented by my husband on my cooking and my easiness. It turns out that happiness is harder to hide than grief.
Grief I'd hidden without a slip. But that Friday night, Mark looked at me twice across the food with something faintly puzzled moving behind his eyes, some animal instrument registering something it couldn't name, and I understood the warning Chris had given me at his door that morning, holding my face in both hands.
The hard part starts now. Sad women are invisible in that world, Lily. Happy ones get investigated.
So I dimmed it. For two more weeks, I banked the fire down low where it warmed me and showed nothing, and I passed my husband the salt, and he told me about the city, and outside the window August turned its last corner toward September.
The drawer in Stamford was warm and ready.
So was I.