Chapter 3 #2
Eli set the plate down and extended his hand. “Professor of creative writing at Columbia. You played center for Nashville.”
“That’s right.” Cade shook his hand. His eyes went to the ring on my left hand — the small diamond, the one Eli had chosen because he thought large ones were architecturally unsound — and something moved behind his face. Not surprise. He’d known. Of course he’d known.
“I’ve heard a lot about you,” Eli said, which was generous, because what he’d heard was that Cade Calloway was a man who had checked his phone on national television and kept celebrating while his wife bled alone in a hospital bed.
But Eli said it the way he said everything — mildly, precisely, without malice — because Eli competed with no one. Competition was the other man’s game.
“Congratulations,” Cade said. He was looking at the ring. “On the engagement.”
“Thank you.”
“When’s the—”
“Spring,” I said. “April.”
Another silence. Cade drank his water. Eli ate a crab cake. I stood between them and felt the specific vertigo of being in a room with the man I’d married and the man I was going to marry and understanding that they were not the same species of person.
“I should—” Cade gestured vaguely toward the room. “I should let you—”
“Yes,” I said. “You should.”
He opened his mouth. Closed it. Whatever he’d been about to say — an apology, an explanation, some combination of both that he’d rehearsed on the drive here or in the shower this morning or in the three years of silence between us — he swallowed it.
And I was grateful, because I didn’t have the architecture tonight to hold whatever he wanted to put down.
He nodded. He looked at me for one more second — a second too long, the way you look at a house you used to live in when you drive past it and can’t stop yourself from slowing down — and then he walked away.
His shoulders were straight. His hands were steady.
He crossed the room without looking back, and I watched him go because I was the kind of woman who watched people leave. I’d had practice.
“He seems,” Eli said carefully, “like a man who is trying very hard to be something he isn’t sure he knows how to be.”
“He’s always been that.”
Eli touched my elbow. “Do you want to go home?”
“Yes. Give me a minute.”
I walked to the bathroom. It was the kind of bathroom that expensive Manhattan events always have — marble counters, soft lighting, cloth towels instead of paper, a mirror that made you look better than you deserved.
I set my hands on the edge of the sink and looked at the woman looking back at me.
Dark brown hair pulled back. Hazel eyes.
Sharp jawline. A face that looked like another woman’s face — same bone structure, same mouth — because I’d been born sharing it, and the woman I shared it with had stood in a locker room with champagne on her dress and her hand on my husband’s arm while I bled alone.
I breathed. In through the nose, out through the mouth.
The way I’d learned in the year after the divorce, in the apartment Joss found me in Brooklyn, in the mornings when I woke up reaching for a body that wasn’t there and had to remind myself that its absence was a choice, not a loss.
I’d gotten good at this. The breathing. The grounding.
The small, deliberate rituals of a woman who’d rebuilt herself from the inside out and didn’t intend to let one conversation undo three years of work.
But my hands were shaking. That was the truth of it.
My hands were shaking the way they’d shaken in the hospital, in the cab afterward, in the apartment I’d rented with the money I’d saved from managing his endorsement deals — the irony, managing his money well enough to afford to leave him.
My hands shook and I gripped the sink harder and told them to stop.
The door opened. A woman I didn’t know came in, glanced at me, and walked to the far stall.
I ran the water cold and held my wrists under it. The shock of the temperature helped. It always helped. Something concrete, something physical — a cold faucet, a sharp breath, the weight of a pen in my hand. The body was my way back to the present, every time. The mind wandered. The body stayed.
I dried my hands on a cloth towel. I looked at my reflection one more time.
“You’re okay,” I said, quietly, to the woman in the mirror. “You’re okay.”
She didn’t look convinced. But she straightened her shoulders and walked out of the bathroom and found Eli waiting by the elevator with her jacket over his arm and a gentle expression that said I will never ask you about this unless you want to tell me, and she took the jacket and put it on and pressed the button for the lobby.
“Crab cakes were excellent,” Eli said in the elevator.
“You mentioned.”
“Worth the whole evening, honestly.”
I leaned into him. His arm came around my shoulders — not pulling, not claiming, just there. The elevator descended. The string quartet played distantly above us, growing fainter with each floor.
Three years. I’d spent three years building a life that didn’t include Cade Calloway, and it had taken three minutes in the same room to remind me why the building had been necessary.
“Let’s walk home,” I said.
“It’s forty blocks.”
“I know.”
We walked. Midtown to Brooklyn, across the bridge, our breath making small clouds in the September air.
Eli held my hand and didn’t ask questions.
The city moved around us — taxis, strangers, the distant sound of someone playing a saxophone badly on a street corner — and I held on to all of it.
The noise. The cold. The man beside me who had never once made me feel like I was standing in someone else’s spotlight.
On the bridge, with the East River dark below us and Manhattan glittering behind us like something I was walking away from, I thought about the way Cade had looked at my ring.
Not the diamond — the finger. My left hand.
The one that used to wear a different ring, a bigger one, the one I’d left on the kitchen counter of his Nashville condo the morning I walked out with one suitcase and a scar on my right knee from running barefoot out of a hospital.
I’d mailed it back to him. Joss had told me to keep it — sell it, throw it in the river, whatever.
But I’d mailed it back in a padded envelope with no return address because I didn’t want anything of his.
Not the ring, not the condo, not the alimony his lawyer had offered.
I wanted nothing that connected me to the man who had scored a hat trick and celebrated on national television while I bled alone in a hospital bed and called him eleven times and got nothing but voicemail and the roar of a crowd.
“You’re squeezing my hand,” Eli said gently.
“Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Just checking.”
I loosened my grip. We walked. The bridge hummed beneath our feet with the rhythm of traffic and wind and the particular vibration of a structure that holds two things together while keeping them apart.
By the time we reached our block, the shaking had stopped.