5. Adrian #3
Nina’s hand finds mine under the table. Her fingers are ice cold, trembling slightly. I squeeze back - I’m here, I’ve got you - and feel her grip tighten in response.
“Well,” I say, pushing back from the table. “I think we’ve had enough dinner-party interrogation for one evening. Nina, shall we?”
“Adrian.” Vivienne’s voice is silk over steel. “The main course hasn’t even arrived.”
“Send our apologies to your chef.” I stand, helping Nina to her feet. Her hand is still clutched in mine, and I can feel her shaking. “We have an early morning.”
“How convenient.”
“Isn’t it.” I meet Vivienne’s eyes, letting her see exactly what I think of her little ambush. “Thank you for a lovely evening. We’ll see ourselves out.”
I guide Nina toward the door, past the staring faces and the whispered speculations, out into the cool night air where we can finally, finally breathe.
***
In the car, Nina falls apart.
She makes it to the end of Vivienne’s driveway before the first sob escapes - a harsh, broken sound that tears out of her chest like something dying. I pull over immediately, throwing the car into park, and gather her into my arms as best I can across the center console.
“I’m sorry,” she gasps. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry-”
“Don’t apologize. You have nothing to apologize for.”
“Vivienne - and your mother - and everyone looking at me like-” She can’t finish the sentence. The sobs overtake her, her whole body shaking with the force of them.
I hold her. I don’t ask questions. I don’t demand explanations. I just hold her while she cries, stroking her hair, murmuring nothing-words against her temple, feeling my heart break with every sob that wracks her body.
“I’m not having an affair,” she says finally, her voice muffled against my chest. “I need you to know that. Whatever you’re thinking, whatever they’re all thinking - it’s not that.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” She pulls back, her face streaked with tears and ruined makeup. “Because you’ve been looking at me like... like you’re waiting for me to confess something. Like you’ve already decided I’m guilty and you’re just waiting for the evidence.”
The accusation lands like a blow. Because she’s right. She’s absolutely right.
“I’m scared,” I admit. “I don’t know what’s happening. You disappear for hours. You come home crying. You won’t tell me anything, and I’m-” My voice breaks. “I’m terrified, Nina. I’m terrified that I’m losing you and I don’t even know why.”
“You’re not losing me.”
“Then what is happening?”
She opens her mouth. Closes it. Opens it again. And I watch it happen - the words rising in her throat, the decision assembling itself behind her eyes, the truth so close to the surface I can almost see its shape.
“Adrian, Cole is-”
Her phone rings.
The sound detonates in the quiet car, and we both flinch like guilty things. She looks at the screen. I look at her face, and I watch the war happen there - one second, two - before she answers, because of course she answers. She always answers.
“Hey.” Her voice changes. Gentles. Becomes the voice that used to be mine at the end of hard days. “Slow down. Breathe. What happened?”
I stare through the windshield at Vivienne’s hedges and listen to one half of a conversation conducted in careful pronouns.
“No. No, that’s normal, remember? They said it might feel like that.
” A pause. “You don’t have to apologize.
You never have to apologize for calling me.
” Another pause, longer. “I know. I know you are. Monday’s going to come and go, and I’ll be right there, and it’s going to be the start of things getting better. I promise.”
Monday. One more word for the collection. One more piece that fits nowhere.
“Do you want me to-” She stops. Glances at me. “No. Okay. Try to sleep. Call me if it gets worse. I mean it.”
She hangs up. The silence afterward has a texture, thick and useless.
“He’s having a hard night,” she says.
“Clearly.”
“Adrian-”
“You were about to tell me something.” I keep my eyes on the hedges. If I look at her I’ll beg, and Moretti men don’t beg, which is possibly the stupidest rule in a family with no shortage of stupid rules. “Before the phone. You were about to say something.”
She’s quiet a while. When I finally turn, she’s looking at her hands.
“Trust me,” she says. “Just for a little while longer. I’ll explain everything. I promise. But I need you to wait.”
“For how long?”
“Soon.” She reaches across the console, takes my hand. Her fingers are cold. “Can you do that?”
Every instinct I have screams no. Wait for what? Trust what? But she’s my wife. The woman who knows my coffee order and my childhood fears. The woman who held my hand through six rounds of IVF and never once blamed me for wanting to stop.
“Okay,” I say.
“Really?”
“I’ll try.”
She squeezes my hand and doesn’t let go, and I drive us home through the dark with her cold fingers laced through mine and a stranger’s phone call sitting in the car between us like a third passenger.
When we get inside, she kisses my cheek and disappears upstairs, and I stand in the foyer listening to the water run.
“Nothing,” I say out loud, to no one.
I mean everything.