4. Ursula #2
She would have been proud of me today. She would have stood exactly where I stood and said exactly what I said and then she would have taken me out for wine and told me I deserved better.
I miss her so much it feels like a physical wound.
But I have her things now. Her doorknobs, her watercolors, her sewing box and her jewelry and the little bronze clock that sat on her nightstand for thirty years. Bennett can’t touch them anymore. He can’t use them as leverage. He can’t hold them hostage.
All of it except the one thing I want most.
Her diary. The blue leather journal she wrote in every night of her life, the one I searched for like a madwoman after she died, tearing apart her apartment and her storage unit and every drawer I owned.
I never found it. I told myself it was lost, thrown out by a careless super, gone the way things go when you are twenty-two and drowning and cannot think straight. I made my peace with it. Mostly.
I run my thumb over the jewelry box and let myself grieve the diary all over again, quick and private, the way I do everything. Her voice is in that book. The one piece of her I will never get back.
And under that grief, quieter, is one I have not let myself name.
I am mourning my marriage.
Not Bennett. I don’t know yet how to mourn Bennett, the real one, the man who went to another woman’s room the night before he stood up and married me.
But the marriage. The thing I believed I had.
Thirteen years of Sunday mornings and shared coffee and a warm body in my bed, and here I am in a hotel room grieving it like a death in the family.
Except it didn’t die last week on that boat.
That’s the part that hollows me out, sitting here in the dark.
It died a long time ago, so slowly I taught myself not to feel it.
And I knew. Some quiet, honest part of me always knew.
I felt him leave a room he was still standing in.
I felt the silence at our table and called it peace.
I felt him stop reaching for me in the night and told myself that was just what marriage became.
I spent years explaining the cold away, because the alternative was admitting I was already alone.
I was already alone. I have been for a long time. The boat didn’t end my marriage. The boat just turned the lights on so I finally had to look at the body.
The tears want to come. I press the back of my hand to my mouth and hold them, the way I have held everything for thirteen years, because grief is a luxury and I have a war to fight.
Not for the man. For the girl who married him believing it was forever, and for all the years she spent being lonely in a house she kept calling a home.
I put the box down. I straighten my spine.
And then there is a knock at the hotel room door.
I’m not expecting anyone. Dayana would have called first. The front desk would have called. I open it on the chain, and through the gap I find the last person I expect.
Matteo Salazar. In a dark coat, filling the hallway, holding nothing, looking at me like he has every right to be standing there.
“How did you find me?”
“I’m resourceful.” His eyes move over my face, and whatever he finds there makes his own go still.
“I heard about your building. Vega trucks. A screaming match in your apartment. Your husband threatening to call the police over a dead woman’s furniture.
” A pause. “I wanted to see for myself that you were still standing.”
I should close the door. Instead I slide the chain off, because I am so tired of being alone in hotel rooms.
He steps inside and the room shrinks around him. He doesn’t sit. He doesn’t take off his coat. He looks at the boxes stacked along the wall, the jewelry box on the bed, the careful evidence of a whole life being taken apart into labeled cardboard.
“Are you alright?”
It’s the wrong question. Or the right one. Because the thing I have been holding since the boat, since the closet floor, since the doorman wouldn’t lift his eyes to mine, finally lets go.
“No.” My voice comes out even. That’s the humiliating part.
It stays even while my eyes fill. “This morning I made two coffees. Thirteen years, and my hands just did it, two cups, before I remembered there’s no one to make the second one for.
He wasn’t even a good husband. He was barely a husband at all, by the end.
And I stood in a hotel kitchenette crying into a second cup of coffee for a man who was already gone. ”
The tears come now, and I hate them, and I can’t stop them.
“I don’t know who I am.” I say it to a man I am supposed to hate. “I was Mrs. Rothwell for thirteen years and it turns out that was a role I was playing in someone else’s story, and I don’t know what’s left of me when you take it away.”
Matteo doesn’t move to comfort me. He doesn’t tell me it’s alright, doesn’t reach for me, doesn’t do a single one of the things Bennett would have done to make my crying stop faster because the sound of it annoyed him.
He just stands there and lets me come apart, watching me like it is the most honest thing he has seen in years.
When I finally go quiet, he says, “You want to know what’s left.”
“What?”
“A woman who walked back into that building today and took what was hers while her husband screamed at her. A woman who put his mistress’s name on the side of a ship on live television.
” He takes one step closer. Not touching.
Close enough that I have to tip my chin to hold his eyes.
“You’re not what’s left when you strip Mrs. Rothwell away, Ursula.
You’re what was underneath her the entire time. ”
I wipe my face with the back of my hand. My hands, I notice, have stopped shaking.
“The alliance,” I say. “You still want it.”
“I want more than I have any right to.” The corner of his mouth lifts. “The alliance is the one I can say out loud in a hotel room.”
“Then my answer is yes.”
“I know.” He turns for the door, and stops with his hand on it. “Friday. My office, three o’clock. Bring me your worst idea for making him suffer, and we’ll make it real.”
He’s gone before I can decide whether to be furious that he came, and I stand alone in a room full of boxes with my face wet and my spine straight, and for the first time since the christening it feels like something is starting instead of only ending.