10. Izzy #2
I wait for him to step back. To move her hand. To say the one sentence any husband alive could manage, not tonight, Sabrina, leave us, the sentence that costs nothing and would mean everything.
His mouth opens.
Nothing comes out of it.
He looks from her hand to my wet face and back, and he stands there, frozen on a terrace between his wife and the woman the whole world thinks he chose, exactly the way he stood at my gala.
He can’t do it. Even now. Even after everything he just swore into the dark. He cannot tell her to leave.
Sabrina’s smile spreads, one slow degree at a time. She’s read the whole terrace in a single sweep and she likes the numbers.
The last patient part of me burns off right there in the wind.
What’s left is done being quiet.
***
Sabrina’s fingers are still resting on my husband’s sleeve when I find my voice.
“Get out.”
The words rip out of me before I can second-guess them, before I can swallow them down the way I’ve swallowed everything else for years.
Sabrina turns her head, one perfectly arched eyebrow rising. Diamonds catch the ballroom light at her wrist.
“Excuse me?” She tilts her head, the patient smile never moving. “I’m not sure I heard you.”
“I said get out.” I step toward her, my whole body trembling with a fury I didn’t know I still had room for. “This is a private conversation between me and my husband. Leave. Now.”
Her eyes slide past me to Wilson. She doesn’t answer me. She doesn’t even register me. She just looks at him with a calm, expectant expression, waiting for him to handle his hysterical wife.
“Wilson?” Her voice is sugar-coated. “Should I give you two a moment to finish up, or would you prefer I stay?”
I turn to look at him too.
My husband. The man who just swore into the dark that he’d do all the work, every day, for as long as it takes. The man who stood on this terrace and confessed he was terrified of losing me.
He opens his mouth.
Nothing comes out.
His eyes bounce between us. His jaw works but nothing comes out. His hands hang at his sides and his feet won’t move toward me or away from her.
Tell her to leave. That’s all I need. Four words. Just say them.
The silence stretches out until I can hear the hedges rustling below. I watch him look at her hand on his sleeve, then at me, then somewhere in between.
I can see it. He’s weighing it. Me against whatever her father can give him. Right here in front of me, he’s doing the math.
He doesn’t say them.
A laugh comes out of me that doesn’t sound like me, wet and broken and nowhere near funny.
“You still can’t do it.” I press my hands over my mouth but the laugh keeps coming. “Even now. Even after everything you just said to me.”
“Izzy, it’s complicated, I just need a second to…” He runs his hand through his hair and takes a step toward me.
“You’ve had years!” My voice cracks and I hold my hand up to stop him from coming closer. “Years of me waiting. Making excuses. Telling myself you’d change.”
I press my hand against my chest because my heart won’t slow down.
He reaches for me and I stumble backward, my heel catching on the stone.
“Maybe we’re not meant to be together.” It’s the first time I’ve said it out loud and I have to wrap my arms around myself to stay standing. “Maybe this is the universe finally showing me what I’ve been too stupid to see.”
“Izzy, please don’t say that.” He isn’t crying.
That’s the weird part. Every other time he’s begged me this year his face has been a wreck, and tonight he’s just standing there, white and dry-eyed and stuck, like he doesn’t know what room he’s in.
“Say anything else. Scream at me. Hate me. Just not that.”
“I hate that I needed this.” I wipe my face with the back of my hand but the tears won’t stop. I can barely see him anymore. “I needed you to fail me to my face, in front of her, just so I’d finally believe it.”
My voice drops, quiet and tired. My shoulders sag like all the fight just left my body.
“I’ve been making excuses for you for so long.” I shake my head slowly. “I stopped trusting my own eyes.”
My voice drops to a whisper.
“I don’t want to make excuses anymore. I can’t.”
I turn for the doors and suddenly he’s there, both hands raised, putting his body between me and the exit for the first time in his life.
“Don’t leave like this.” His voice comes apart on every word. “I’ll fix it. I’ll have Isaac kill whatever’s left of the Burnham deal tonight, I’ll get her name taken off every guest list that has mine on it, just tell me what you want and it’s…”
“You’re negotiating.”
I’m too tired to shout anymore, and the quiet lands harder than the screaming did.
“I’m walking out of your life and you’re offering me terms.” I shake my head. “You already offered me the empire once, Wilson. I asked you for a Tuesday.”
His hands come down. Everything in his posture comes down with them.
I step around him, and he lets me, the way he has let me go every time it counted.
I push through the terrace doors.
Behind me I hear him say her name, hers, sharp, the beginning of a sentence I waited our whole marriage to hear him start.
The doors seal shut on it. I don’t stop walking.
The ballroom is exactly as I left it, every face turned my way, every conversation suspended mid-syllable. The silence is so absolute I can hear ice settling in the champagne buckets.
I keep walking.
My sneakers are silent on the thick carpet. My chin is up. My shoulders are back.
Tears keep coming and I let them, because there’s no point fighting a flood I’ve been saving up for years.
Don’t stop. Don’t look back. Don’t give them one more frame of your pain.
I can feel him watching me go.
A marriage spent learning his attention the way other wives learn a language, and I know exactly what his eyes on my back feel like. Tonight is the hardest he has ever looked at me, and it took me leaving to earn it.
I push through the double doors into the lobby with both hands, harder than I need to.
My phone buzzes in my pocket. WILSON. I silence it and shove it back into my jeans.
The lobby stretches out in marble columns and gilded mirrors and flower arrangements taller than I am. A few couples near the concierge desk study their shoes rather than look at the mascara-streaked woman in jeans crossing their five-star hotel.
“Mrs. Carter?”
The voice catches me two steps from the doors.
I turn, swiping at my eyes.
A silver-haired man in his sixties stands near the elevator bank, immaculate in his tuxedo, with the easy posture of a man who has never been unwelcome anywhere.
I know his face from the business pages.
Richard Burnham. Sabrina’s father. The man whose signature has owned my husband for a year.
“I don’t believe we’ve properly met.” He approaches with his hand extended, pleasant and entirely unaware of the wreckage upstairs. “Richard Burnham. Wilson speaks so highly of you.”
I take his hand, because years as a society wife trained me too well to stop now. His grip is firm and dry.
“Mr. Burnham.” I sound like I’ve been crying, because I have. “I wish I could say he’s told me all about you. That would require him to talk to me about his life.”
His brow creases. “Are you quite all right? You seem rather…”
“Daddy, there you are.”
Sabrina appears at his elbow without a sound.
Her arm slides through his. Her body settles against his side, chin lifting.
She leans in and murmurs at his ear with her eyes locked on my face the entire time.
I watch Richard Burnham change.
The pleasantness hardens over. His gaze travels down me with fresh assessment, cataloging the jeans, the ruined makeup, the failure to belong in his world.
“Mrs. Carter.” His voice has gone cold. “I understand you’ve been making things rather difficult for my daughter this evening. Creating scenes. Making accusations.”
My spine stacks itself straight.