Chapter 13
Elise
By morning, the internet has decided my marriage is a triangle.
I know because my name trends beside Maren's for three hours.
Not globally. Thank God for small mercies. But enough that a student texts me, Mrs. Hale are you okay?? with six question marks and a heart.
I do not answer.
The photographs are worse than the speech because photographs invite people to write their own story.
Bennett and Maren laughing onstage.
Bennett touching her elbow as they step down.
Maren leaning toward him at the anniversary wall.
Me in the audience, smiling like a woman auditioning for the role of Graceful Wife Number One.
A gossip account posts them side by side with the caption:
HALE & VALE: THE REAL POWER COUPLE?
I close the app.
Open it again ten minutes later.
Close it.
I hate myself a little.
Bennett has been in the kitchen since six. I hear cupboards opening and closing as if he can organize his way out of this.
At seven thirty, he knocks on the guest-room door.
"Coffee."
"Leave it."
He does.
No argument.
That makes me cry.
Not because it is enough.
Because it is different.
I sit on the edge of the bed with my phone in my hand and open a blank note.
At first I intend to write what I want from Bennett.
Instead I write what I have stopped wanting out loud.
A husband who knows when I perform.
Dinner that is not provisional.
A weekend that does not belong to whoever calls loudest.
To be the first person he tells when he is afraid.
To play music without arranging it around his life.
To stop being proud of needing nothing.
The last one makes me stare.
I think of my mother.
She loved Bennett from the beginning. Not because he was successful. Back then, he wasn't. She loved that he looked at me like I had invented music.
When Halcyon began consuming him, she told me marriage had seasons.
"Sometimes one person carries more," she said.
I believed her.
The problem is no one told me a season could last six years if you kept calling it temporary.
I take off my wedding ring.
Not because I am done.
Because I need to know what my hand feels like without proof of being chosen on it.
The pale band of skin beneath the diamond looks vulnerable.
I put the ring in the bedside drawer.
Then I call Tessa.
"I need the apartment."
She goes quiet.
Tessa leaves for a three-week tour tomorrow. She offered her place once, after the anniversary dinner. I told her she was being dramatic.
"How long?" she asks.
"I don't know."
"Okay."
"Don't say I told you so."
"I wasn't going to."
"Don't sound kind either."
"That is a very demanding friendship request."
I laugh through tears.
After we hang up, I open my email.
There is a message from the Chicago Chamber Residency program.
Tessa must have sent my name weeks ago.
Ten-week artist residency. Substitute principal cello. Rehearsals begin Monday. Touring option to follow.
I read it three times.
My first thought is Bennett.
His schedule.
The gala fallout.
Whether he will think ten weeks is excessive.
The reflex is so automatic it frightens me.
I press reply.
Yes. I am available.
Only after I send it do I realize my hands are shaking.