Chapter 6
Audrey
The first night in my apartment, I heard a delivery truck reverse beneath the window at five in the morning.
I lay awake listening to its warning beep and tried to decide whether freedom should come with better insulation.
By six, I had made coffee. By seven, I had discovered that the cupboard beside the sink required lifting before pulling. By eight, Claire had sent a message asking whether I had survived my first night of independent luxury.
The cupboard has declared war, I wrote.
Hit it with your husband's credit card.
I laughed into my mug.
The apartment was furnished, but I had brought enough of myself to make it feel less borrowed. The little ceramic bowl sat on the desk. My drawings leaned against a wall. There was nobody else's calendar on the refrigerator.
I had arranged my first site visit for ten.
At the Ashby, Ruth handed me a hard hat and pointed toward the auditorium.
“Mind the third step. It's been threatening people since 1978.”
“Then it has seniority.”
“It also has a repair scheduled. We don't romanticize the dangerous bits.”
The theatre smelled of timber dust and cold fabric. Work lights hung above rows of faded seats. Somewhere beyond the stage, two people argued about a delivery in the comfortable tone of colleagues who expected to keep liking each other.
I stood at the rear of the auditorium and looked toward the ceiling.
For several seconds, I forgot to be careful with my breathing.
Not because I couldn't breathe. Because I was interested.
The plasterwork curved around a series of shallow panels. Later repairs had flattened parts of the original pattern, but enough remained to guide us. I took photographs, made notes, and asked questions about the roof above it.
Daniel let me finish before saying, “That's forty-five minutes. Break.”
“I can do another room.”
“You can do it after the break.”
I wanted to protest. Instead, I sat in the foyer with tea from a chipped mug and realized my hands were shaking.
Competence did not require pretending my body had received no injury.
That lesson was irritatingly slow to learn.
Before leaving the theatre, I signed the site visitor sheet and checked the next meeting date with Daniel. He asked whether I wanted him to present the plaster proposal while I built up my hours.
“I want to present it,” I said. “But I'd like you to take the scheduling section afterward.”
“Done.”
No argument. No suggestion that asking for a smaller part meant surrendering the whole.
On the way home, I stopped at a hardware shop and bought a tape measure I didn't need because all my old ones were still in Ethan's boxes. The cashier asked what I was working on.
“A theatre.”
“Big job.”
“Yes.”
I didn't add that I was only doing part of it. I didn't explain who had hired me or whose wife I was. I paid, put the receipt in my bag, and carried the small ridiculous pleasure all the way upstairs.
At the apartment, I measured the wall beside the desk and began planning shelves. My first instinct was to send the dimensions to someone else and ask what they thought.
I stopped.
The wall could hold what I wanted. The landlord had already agreed to properly installed shelving. I could make this decision without a committee, and if I disliked the result, I could change it.
For a woman who had managed a large restoration, choosing three shelves felt surprisingly daring.
I drew them anyway.
Ethan was due at my apartment at five. He had asked before bringing the last of my work materials. I had specified the boxes and told him I didn't want anything else.
At five exactly, the buzzer sounded.
I opened the door to find him carrying two cardboard boxes. No flowers. No jeweler's bag. His coat was unbuttoned, and his hair had suffered slightly in the wind.
“Where would you like these?”
“Beside the desk.”
He stepped inside and looked around without making the assessment I was braced for.
“It's bright,” he said.
“In the morning. By afternoon, the building opposite takes everything personally.”
He smiled.
I hated how readily my body recognized that smile. My pulse lifted as though we were beginning a familiar evening, as though he might pull me close and ask what I wanted for dinner.
He set the boxes down.
“I checked the labels. I didn't open the folders.”
“Thank you.”
We stood several feet apart in a room that didn't have several feet to spare.
“Tea?” I asked, because I had manners and apparently no instinct for self-preservation.
“Yes. If you're having some.”
At the sink, the cupboard stuck. I lifted, pulled, and muttered something unkind.
Ethan moved automatically.
“I can adjust that.”
“Please don't.”
He stopped with his hand halfway toward the hinge.
“I meant the screw. It would take—”
“I know what you meant.”
He lowered his hand.
The kettle began to hiss. I watched steam rise from it, ordinary and harmless, and concentrated on the blue mug I had chosen that morning.
“I'm not trying to make everything a fight,” I said.
“I know.”
“Do you?”
He looked at the cupboard, then at me. “I'm trying to work out when help becomes taking over.”
“When I say no and you keep explaining why I should say yes.”
He nodded slowly.
We sat at the small table. His knee nearly touched mine. I moved my chair an inch, which felt theatrical and necessary.
“How was the theatre?” he asked.
I gave him a practical answer. Plaster. Access. Roof records. He asked about the ceiling pattern, and I nearly relaxed before remembering how many times he had asked a question while reading something else.
His phone remained in his coat.
“Ruth doesn't want the building turned into a museum nobody can use,” I said.
“Do you?”
“No. I want people to enjoy it without needing a lecture about why they should.”
“That's how you talked about the hotel in Cambridge.”
I looked up.
He remembered that.
Then, because the memory hurt, I said, “You left before my presentation finished.”
His expression changed.
“September.”
“Yes.”
“Vivian called about a donor.”
“I know who called.”
The room went quiet.
“I had your chair reserved,” I said. “I kept looking at it. Every time the door opened, I lost my place.”
He put his mug down.
“You said it went well.”
“It did. Those aren't opposite facts.”
He absorbed that without answering.
“And the cabin,” I continued. “You promised no calls. Then you said she was alone and overwhelmed, and I should understand because she didn't have what we had.”
“I remember.”
“Did you understand what I heard?”
“No.”
“That having married you meant I should need less of you than she did.”
His face tightened.
I hadn't planned to say any of this. The words had waited years and apparently decided my cheap kitchen table was adequate accommodation.
“You didn't just miss dinners, Ethan. You made me feel unreasonable for noticing.”
“I did.”
The agreement stopped me more effectively than a defense would have.
He looked at his hands.
“I thought if I wasn't lying about where I was, I wasn't doing anything wrong.”
“Were you in love with her?”
“No.”
The answer came without hesitation.
“Were you attracted to being the person she always wanted?”
He took longer with that.
“Yes.”
There it was. Not the affair I had imagined at three in the morning, but something real enough to have occupied its place.
“I liked being necessary,” he said. “With you, I thought necessary was permanent.”
I looked at the window until I could speak without my voice breaking.
“I don't know what to do with that.”
“You don't have to do anything tonight.”
Outside, a bus sighed at the curb. Somebody laughed beneath the window. My tea had gone cold.
Ethan glanced toward my desk. A pencil lay beside the drawings.
“You've got another one in your hair,” he said.
I reached up and found it behind my ear.
“Professional camouflage.”
“You used to accuse me of stealing them.”
“You did steal them.”
“I returned some.”
“An admission.”
We smiled at the same time.
For one dangerous moment, I could feel the easy shape of us. The conversation after dinner, his fingers at the nape of my neck, the private jokes nobody else understood.
I wanted to cross the room.
Instead, I stood.
“I need to rest.”
He rose immediately. “Of course.”
At the door, he paused.
“There's a contradiction in Vivian's account. A message about the dress. I've given it to the people handling the records.”
My hand stayed on the door.
“Find out what happened,” I said. “Even if I never come back.”
His eyes met mine.
“I will.”
After he left, I sat beside the unopened boxes.
I took the new tape measure from my bag and put it beside the drawings. Tomorrow I would buy the shelf brackets myself.
The cupboard still stuck.
For tonight, I preferred it that way.