7. Charly
— ? —
Charly
I didn’t sleep.
I kept seeing those three words on his phone and the photo under them, taken right there on the porch while it was happening, his hand over mine on the cold step.
Somebody had been close enough to take that and neither of us felt it.
One second before, his eyes had been on my mouth and mine on his and we’d been an inch from leaning into each other.
Then the phone, and Adam, and that question, and the whole night went cold.
So no. I didn’t sleep. I lay there all night turning it over. Does she know what? What is there about my own life that I don’t know, that Adam knows, that Clarence apparently knows too.
By the time the sun comes up I’m done waiting for somebody to decide I’m allowed to know what everyone’s been keeping from me.
I’m still wearing the ring. That’s the thing nobody tells you.
Six days, my whole life on fire, and I never took it off, because taking it off made it real and I wasn’t ready to face my reality yet.
I twist it around my finger in the dark and I look at it, the ring he saved three months for, a promise that turned out to be a lie, and I don’t cry.
I just take it off and put it in my pocket, and that small thing feels like the first honest decision I’ve made all week.
Then I get in the car and I drive to our apartment.
***
The one on shift today knows me, because for three years this was my building too, and he gives me the same easy nod he always has. That’s the part that gets me. He has no idea.
Whatever happened at that church got smoothed over so fast that the man who used to hold the door for me on my way to work still thinks I’m the future Mrs. Carrington popping up to see her fiancé. He waves me to the elevator without calling ahead, like I still belong here.
I let him think it. It’s easier than the truth, and I don’t have it in me to correct him anyway.
Six floors. My heart is pounding hard the whole way up and my hands, for once, are completely still.
I knock, and I hear footsteps on the other side, and then the lock turns and the door opens.
And it’s Rebecca, in my robe. The sage green silk one Adam gave me two birthdays ago. She’s got it wrapped around her, barefoot, hair down, and there it is, the small round curve of her stomach that wasn’t there the last time I saw her smile at me across a dinner table.
We stand there looking at each other. Same face. Same everything, except she’s wearing my robe in my fiancé’s apartment with my fiancé’s baby inside her.
“Charly.” She says my name like she’s afraid of catching something. “What are you doing here?”
“I need to talk to Adam.”
“He’s busy.”
“I don’t care.”
She doesn’t move out of the doorway. Her hand goes to her stomach, like I’m the dangerous one here, like I’m the thing she needs to protect the baby from.
“You shouldn’t be here,” she says. “This isn’t healthy.”
“Healthy?” I almost laugh. “You’re standing there in my robe, pregnant with his baby, the baby you made while he was my fiancé, and you want to talk to me about healthy?”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Then tell me what it was like. Go ahead. I’d love to hear the version where what you fucking did is redeemable.”
Her chin comes up. It’s so strange, fighting with someone who has your exact face. “We fell in love. You can’t help who you fall in love with.”
“You can help whether you sleep with your sister’s fiancé.
That part’s actually pretty easy. Most people manage it their whole lives.
” My voice goes wobbly and I have to stop and get it back, and when it comes out again it’s quieter, which is worse.
“I’m your twin, Rebecca. Your twin. You couldn’t pull him aside and tell him to stop?
You couldn’t call me one time, in all those months, and go, Charly, don’t, he’s not who you think he is?
You let me try on dresses. You stood there and let me cry because I was so happy.
You watched me build a whole life around a man you were already fucking, and you didn’t say one word. ”
“I didn’t know how to.”
“You figured out how to get into his bed. You couldn’t figure out three words for me?”
“Keep your voice down.”
“Or what? You’ll tell Adam I’m causing a scene? Good. Go get him.”
And then he’s there. Adam slides into the doorway behind her with one hand on her shoulder, easy, like he’s been listening the whole time and enjoying it.
“Charly.” That smile. The one I used to live for. “This is a surprise.”
“I want my money.”
The smile doesn’t even flicker. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“The money for the house. Everything I had. You talked me into putting it all in one place, you told me to trust you, and then you emptied it.”
“You signed for that. Willingly.” He leans on the doorframe like we’re chatting about the weather. “You didn’t even read it. You just signed wherever I pointed, because you trusted me.” He tips his head. “You made it so easy, Char. You always did.”
I want to come apart. The rage is right there, hot, but I think about the floor of the guest house and I keep my voice flat and cold and I don’t give him one inch of what he’s fishing for.
“Give it back.”
“It’s gone, sweetheart. Spent. We’ve got a family coming.
Families are expensive.” And for the first time the charm slips and something underneath shows through, something that needed my money and isn’t even a little sorry.
“You were always the one with the savings. I just stopped pretending that didn’t matter. ”
“You used my money to build a life with my sister.”
“I used our money.” He smiles wider. “But sure. If you want to chase it, go ahead. You really want to know where it went, though? How it got moved around so clean?” He pauses, and something mean and pleased comes into his face. “Ask Clarence.”
The name lands like a hand around my throat. I don’t let it show.
“Ask my brother how that account got set up,” Adam says, soft, almost kind, which is worse.
“He’s the one with the head for money, always has been.
Ask him whose name is on the paperwork that made it all so easy.
You’re living in his place, aren’t you?” He leans in.
“He’s not there because he’s a good man, Charly.
He’s there because he’s cleaning up a mess he helped make.
You’re not a person to him. You’re a problem he’s managing. ”
“You’re lying.”
“Am I?” He shrugs, like it costs him nothing, like he’s already won. “You’ll get over this. It’s what you do. You’re a survivor. It’s honestly one of the most admirable things about you.”
My hand is already in my pocket.
“You’re right about one thing,” I say. “I am going to survive it.”
I take the ring out and hold it up so it catches the light from the hall, the promise he saved three months for, and his eyes go to it, and for one second he actually looks unsure.
“I just won’t forget who did it.”
I throw it at his face as hard as I can.
It catches him right above the eyebrow. He jerks back swearing, hand flying up, and when he takes it away there’s blood, a thin red line sliding down toward his eye.
“Jesus, Charly, what the f...”
“I’ll get back every cent. Watch me.”
I turn and I walk, down the hall, into the elevator, and I don’t look back once. The last thing I see before the doors close is the two of them in the doorway, my sister and the man I almost married, her in my robe and him with my blood promise opening up over his eye.
***
I make it to the car before my hands start shaking again.
I sit in the parking garage with the doors locked and the engine off and I let myself hear it, the thing I wouldn’t let land upstairs.
Ask Clarence whose name is on the paperwork.
And all of it comes back at once. Clarence in the hotel room, taking my phone, his face going tight when he saw the balance.
The way he said it, like he already knew what was going on before I even told him.
The way he wouldn’t look at me when I asked what Adam did to him.
The way he shut down the second that text came through.
I drive back with the radio off. The whole way, I argue with myself.
Adam lies. Adam lies about everything, Adam would burn down every good thing in my life just to watch me flinch, and Clarence has been nothing but steady, Clarence caught me on those steps, Clarence sat on the floor with me and didn’t make me talk.
But Clarence also never answered the question.
The house comes up through the trees and his truck is parked outside and the lights are on, both his and the little place out back. He’s there. He’s waiting up for me, probably, because that’s what he does, he waits.
I park next to his truck and turn off the engine and I sit there in the dark looking at those warm windows, trying to decide who I’m about to walk in on. The man who’s been holding me together. Or the man who helped take me apart.
I’m still deciding when the front door opens.
He’s standing in the light with his phone in his hand, and his face is wrong.
Gray. The face of a man who already knows exactly where I’ve been and what got said there.
He comes down off the step toward the car, fast, and before I’ve even got my hand on the door he’s already talking, and through the glass I can just make out the shape of it.
I’m reading his mouth.
I can explain.
Two words. The exact two words a guilty person says. The two words that mean there’s a thing that needs explaining in the first place.
I don’t get out. I sit there with my hands at ten and two on a wheel that isn’t even turning, and I make him stand out there in the cold and say it to a closed window, because some part of me isn’t ready to let him into the same air as me yet.
He stops a foot from the door. Doesn’t grab the handle. Doesn’t tap the glass. Just stands there with his hands loose at his sides, letting me decide, the way he always lets me decide, and God, I hate how much I’ve come to count on that in six days.
I roll the window down halfway. Not the door. Just the window. A few inches of cold between us.
“Whose name is on the paperwork, Clarence.”
It hits him. His whole face changes as he understands, in real time, that I already know there’s paperwork at all, that the question’s been handed to me and there’s no walking it back into the dark.
“Charly.” My name comes out of him like it costs him to say it. “Where do I even start?”
“The beginning’s good. The part where my life savings moved through an account with your name on it, and you sat in that hotel room and watched me find out I was broke and said nothing.
” My voice is doing the flat, cold thing again, the one I learned this week, the one that scares me a little. “Start there.”
He braces both hands on the roof of the car and drops his head, and for a long second he doesn’t say anything at all, and that silence tells me more than any answer could.
Then he lifts his head, and he looks me dead in the eye through the gap in the glass.
“Okay,” he says. “But you’re going to want to be sitting down for it. And you’re going to hate me a little when I’m done.”