Chapter 2
Audrey
My sister's sweater smelled of laundry soap.
I concentrated on that while she leaned over me. Not smoke. Not the bitter, electrical taste that seemed to have settled permanently behind my teeth.
“Hello, trouble,” she said.
I tried to answer. My throat objected.
“Don't.” She lifted the cup the nurse had left and helped me take a small sip. “You can insult me later. I've cleared my afternoon.”
Ethan stood on the other side of the bed.
There was a dark stain on his shirtfront. Wine, perhaps. Or something from Vivian's dress. I couldn't stop looking at it.
“How did I get out?”
The words scraped.
“A firefighter brought you down,” he said. “A member of the catering team saw you at the window. Ben Carter. He alerted them.”
Ben Carter.
A stranger had looked up.
“Were you there?”
“Yes.” He moved closer, then stopped. “When they brought you out. I followed the ambulance.”
I watched his face. His eyes were bloodshot, his jaw rough. He looked like a man who hadn't slept, which was easy enough to understand. The harder thing was remembering how safe that face had once made me feel.
“Vivian?”
Claire's fingers stilled around the cup.
“She's being treated for smoke exposure,” Ethan said. “I don't know more than that.”
“You carried her.”
“Yes.”
“While I was upstairs.”
He pulled the chair toward the bed but didn't sit until I looked away.
“She told me you were outside with my mother. She said she'd seen you go.”
I shut my eyes.
For a moment I was back at the window. His dark head bent toward hers. My voice turning into a cough before it crossed the lawn.
“Audrey, I didn't know.”
I believed him.
That was the part I hadn't expected. I believed that he would have gone looking if he'd known I was still inside. Ethan wasn't cruel in that clean, useful way. He would never have stood on a lawn and decided I should die.
“Did you call me?”
“No. I got her outside first.”
“Did you look for your mother?”
“After I handed Vivian to the paramedics.”
“But before that, you just believed her.”
His hands closed together.
“Yes.”
Claire set the cup down. “You need to rest.”
Before the nurse asked them to step outside, Ethan dampened a clean cloth and asked whether he could wipe the soot at my hairline. I nodded. He moved carefully, touching only the places I let him, folding the cloth to find a clean corner.
The detail nearly broke my resolve.
He could remember small things. He could be tender. That was why leaving him was not the simple act people described when they said a woman should know her worth.
I knew what he could be.
I had built too much of my life around waiting for him to become it more often.
After he went out, I touched my damp hairline with my uninjured hand. His careful movements had reminded me of our bedroom before everything became scheduled around somebody else's emergencies.
I let myself miss that room. Then I lowered my hand and asked the nurse when I could speak to someone about the nightmares.
I needed many things. Rest was the one a hospital could offer.
I turned my face toward the window.
The next two days arrived in fragments. A nurse checking the dressing. A doctor listening to my chest. Claire reading messages aloud from people I couldn't manage to answer.
Ethan remained nearby without always being in the room. Sometimes I woke and saw him through the narrow glass panel in the door, speaking quietly into his phone. Once he was standing entirely still, looking at nothing.
On the second afternoon, Claire brought my bag.
“The event staff recovered the things in the ballroom,” she said. “Your phone's alive. Your lipstick has apparently survived a national emergency.”
I almost smiled.
She waited while I unlocked the screen. There were messages from Daniel, my former colleague, and two from an old client. I read the first few words of each, then stopped.
A society newsletter had sent its morning roundup.
There was Ethan on the estate steps, holding Vivian against his chest.
Her face was tucked into his neck.
THE WOMAN HE REFUSED TO LEAVE BEHIND.
I read the headline twice. Beneath it, a paragraph described his courage and called Vivian his longtime companion in philanthropy. It didn't explicitly identify her as his wife. It didn't have to.
The picture did the work.
“Give me that,” Claire said softly.
“No.”
I enlarged it.
His hand was beneath Vivian's knees. I knew that hand. The little scar near his thumb, the square nail, the heat of his palm against my back. I knew how his arms felt when he lifted me, laughing, years ago in a hotel corridor because my shoe had broken.
The memory made me feel foolish.
Ethan entered with a paper bag from the downstairs café. He saw my face and put it down.
“What happened?”
I turned the screen toward him.
He read it. Something tightened in his expression.
“I'll have them correct it.”
“To what?”
“That you're my wife. That you were injured. That this—”
“I don't want my injuries in their newsletter.”
“All right.”
“I don't want a photograph of you holding my hand in this bed either.”
His head came up. “I would never arrange that.”
“You arrange things when you're frightened.”
Claire quietly collected her coat. “I'm going to buy something with actual nutritional value. Neither of you touch that croissant. It's been here since yesterday.”
The door closed behind her.
Ethan sat.
“Tell me what correction you want.”
I took a breath carefully. “My name. That we're married. That emergency crews rescued me. No medical details. No quotes about how grateful I am.”
He wrote it down on his phone and showed me before sending it.
That small act nearly undid me. Four years, and asking to see a message before he sent it felt like being offered something extravagant.
“I've spoken to a place in Vermont,” he said after a while. “Private rooms. A specialist on site. Somewhere quiet until you're better.”
There it was.
“Without asking me.”
“I haven't booked it.”
“You've investigated my recovery holiday.”
“I wanted options.”
“For whom?”
He looked down at his phone.
The room hummed around us. Someone pushed a cart past the door, its wheel clicking once each rotation.
“I don't want Vermont.”
“Then we won't go.”
“We?”
“Audrey.” His voice broke slightly on my name. “I nearly lost you.”
I looked at the dressing on my arm.
He had nearly lost me in September too, though he didn't know it. I had stood outside a restaurant in the rain after my presentation, watching the table inside empty one colleague at a time. He'd called forty minutes late. Vivian was upset. Could we celebrate tomorrow?
Tomorrow had become flowers delivered to the house.
“You've been losing me for a while,” I said.
He reached toward the blanket at my feet, straightening it where it had folded. I had always hated cold toes. He remembered that, at least.
“Thank you,” I said.
He stopped.
Perhaps he heard it. The way I thanked the nurse. The distance politeness could make when intimacy no longer knew where to stand.
“Please go home for a few hours.”
“I can stay.”
“I know. I'm asking you not to.”
He rose slowly.
At the door, he looked back. “There has never been anything between Vivian and me.”
I had heard that sentence in our kitchen, in the car, once in bed with the light already off.
“There's been plenty between you,” I said. “Time. Loyalty. A language you use when you think nobody else needs to understand.”
He didn't move.
“I don't know what name you give it,” I continued. “From where I've been standing, there have been three people in our marriage for a very long time.”
His mouth opened, then closed.
“I didn't see it that way.”
“I know.”
That was all I had strength for.
When Claire returned, she put soup on the bedside table and didn't ask why Ethan had gone.
I ate several spoonfuls. It tasted of salt and carrots. Something ordinary in a day that had become too large.
“Can I stay with you?” I asked.
Her spoon stopped halfway to her mouth.
“Of course.”
“Just until I work out what I'm doing.”
“You don't need an explanation with a deadline.”
I pressed my thumb against the edge of my ring. The skin beneath it was pale.
“I need clothes.”
“I'll get them.”
“And my laptop. The old silver one has my portfolio.”
She nodded.
Beyond the window, late light touched the building opposite. Somewhere people were deciding what to cook for dinner. I wanted that kind of problem again.
“Please don't tell him I'm coming home,” I said.
Claire set down her bowl.
“You're not.”