Chapter 12 #2
"Yeah." He looked at the second cup in his hand like he'd forgotten why he had it. "He's not going to know I did this, by the way. I'd have told you that as reassurance a year ago. Today I've noticed it's the worst part."
Thursday's conference room felt smaller than she remembered, though nothing about it had changed — the same gray walls, the same box of tissues she didn't touch, the same long table that had held two very different documents the last time she'd sat here.
She wore what she'd worn to work. That had taken some deciding.
She'd stood in front of a closet for six minutes on Wednesday night and then closed it, because a woman who showed up in something considered was a woman who had considered, and he'd have known, and she wasn't giving that away for free.
Julian arrived on time, dressed simply, none of the practiced polish she'd watched him deploy at a hundred galas. He looked at her the way you look at something you're afraid to want too badly in case wanting it goes wrong.
"Thirty minutes," Priti said from the doorway, unnecessary but grounding. "I'll be right outside."
They sat across from each other, and for a long moment neither of them said anything at all.
"I don't know how to start this," Julian admitted finally. "I've rehearsed about a dozen versions on the drive over and none of them felt honest the second I actually looked at you."
"Then don't perform one," Elena said. "Just say something true. That's all I'm here for."
He was quiet a moment, gathering something, and when he spoke again his voice had none of the polish she remembered from a hundred boardrooms and galas — just plain, careful honesty, a man picking his way across ground he knew could give out under him at any step.
"I'm not going to ask you to forgive me today.
I know better than that now." He looked down at his hands, then back up at her, steady.
"I just wanted you to see me without an audience, without a gesture, without anything I could point to later and say look what I did for you.
I wanted you to see whatever's actually left of me, and decide for yourself whether it's worth anything. "
"I have a question," Elena said. "You get one honest answer and then I'll decide what to do with the rest of the time."
"Okay."
"When did you decide to stop?"
He looked up.
"Not when I found out," she said. "Before that. Fourteen months, Julian. At some point in fourteen months you must have had a night where you thought about ending it. I want to know what stopped you."
The silence in that room went on long enough that she watched him consider lying — actually watched it, the fractional pause where the old machinery came online and offered him three good answers.
"August," he said. "Your cousin's wedding. You wore the blue thing and you danced with your uncle and I stood by the bar and thought, I'm going to end this on Monday."
"And on Monday?"
"On Monday there was a call at seven and a thing at eleven and by Wednesday it had gotten easy again.
" He said it flatly, without any attempt to make it land softly.
"That's the answer. It wasn't a struggle.
I want to tell you there was a war going on in me and there wasn't. It was a Monday, and then it was a Wednesday, and I let it be a Wednesday for six more months. "
Elena sat with that.
It was the first thing he had said to her since October that she couldn't argue with, poke a hole in, or find the self-serving angle inside. It was just ugly and true and offered without any softening at all, and it hurt considerably more than an apology would have.
"Thank you," she said.
"For what?"
"For not making it a war." She stood up, and her hands were steady, and the thirty minutes had eleven left in them. "Everybody wants their bad year to have been dramatic. You just told me you were bored and comfortable, which is worse, and true."
"Elena—"
"I want a second conversation." She said it clearly, because she'd decided in the car and had been waiting to see whether he'd do anything to change her mind, and he hadn't, which was the point.
"Not here. No lawyers. My choice of where, my timeline, and I'll tell you when.
It might be three weeks. It might be longer. "
Something in his face — relief, gratitude, a fragile, unguarded hope he clearly hadn't expected to let himself feel — broke through for just a moment before he caught it and folded it carefully away again.
"That's more than I was hoping for."
"Don't read too much into it." She needed the last word to be hers, needed to walk out of this room the same way she'd walked into it — on her own terms, holding the gate, deciding exactly how much ground he got to have and when. "This isn't forgiveness. It's curiosity. There's a difference."
"I understand the difference," Julian said. "I'll take it anyway."
She left him there, in the gray conference room, and walked out past Priti with her spine straight.
In the elevator, alone, she let out a breath she'd been holding for about nine minutes, and put her hand flat against the wall, and laughed once, quietly, at absolutely nothing.
Then the doors opened onto the lobby, and she went back to work, and did not let herself examine too closely, all the way downtown, the small stubborn warmth she'd carried out of that room, which refused, despite every instinct she had, to fully go away.