16. Elise
— ? —
Elise
Patricia looks like a drowned aristocrat.
Her silk blouse is stuck to her, water running off her clothes onto the floorboards, but her spine is straight and her chin is up and her eyes are sharp as broken glass.
She takes in the scene. The salvaged belongings stacked in the hallway. Simon’s bruised face. Rowan coming up the stairs behind her.
“I didn’t realize rats could swim,” she says, looking at me. “Yet here you are.”
“Mother…” Simon starts.
“Don’t.” She holds up a hand. “I did not get hauled up a washed-out road on a farmer’s truck to exchange pleasantries. My son telephoned me at two o’clock this morning to tell me what he walked in on in this hallway. So spare me the version where everyone is handling things.”
The room goes very quiet.
“Yes,” Patricia says, to nobody in particular. “I thought that might change the tone.”
“It doesn’t change anything,” Rowan says.
“Doesn’t it?” She turns on him. “Your brother stood in a doorway at two in the morning and watched you with his wife. In his grandmother’s house. During a flood.” Her laugh has nothing in it. “You’ll forgive me for thinking that requires an adult in the room.”
“Soon-to-be-ex-wife,” I say.
Her gaze swings to me, cold and assessing.
“You haven’t finalized anything. Legally you’re still a Maine. Which means this reflects on all of us.”
“I’m sorry, did you come all this way to lecture me about appearances?”
“I came to clean up the mess my sons have made.” She moves into the sitting area and takes the best chair without being offered it. “Sit down. All of you. We’re going to discuss this like civilized people.”
Something in her tone makes resistance feel pointless. We sit. Simon on the small sofa, Rowan against the wall, me in the chair furthest from her.
“Now.” She smooths her wet skirt. “Let me be clear about what’s at stake. This family has a standing that took generations to build, and the three of you seem determined to dismantle it in two weeks.”
“Our reputation?” Rowan’s voice is dangerously level. “Or Simon’s?”
“They’re the same thing. When one of you embarrasses this family, all of us bleed.” Her eyes narrow. “People are already talking about the divorce. About the affair. And now I’m going to have to explain why my two sons came to blows in a flooded house over the same woman.”
“I don’t care about your social circles,” I say.
“Of course you don’t. You never did understand how any of it works.” Her smile is thin. “But I’m not here to explain society to you, Elise. I’m here to offer you a solution.”
“What kind of solution?”
“A clean break.” She leans forward. “You finalize the divorce quietly. No public accusations, no details, no dragging the name through it. In exchange you receive a generous settlement. Enough to start over comfortably. Somewhere else.”
“Somewhere else.”
“It would be better for everyone if you weren’t around. After this.” Her voice is perfectly pleasant and perfectly threatening. “A fresh start. A new city. Away from all these painful associations.”
“You’re trying to pay me to disappear.”
“I’m trying to facilitate an outcome that benefits everyone, including you.
” She tilts her head. “Think about it. What future do you actually have here? Even if you pursue this thing with Rowan.” She says his name like something she’s found on the bottom of her shoe.
“How long do you imagine it lasts? He’ll tire of you.
He tires of everyone. And then where are you?
Alone, disgraced, with nothing to show for it. ”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know my sons.” Her voice sharpens. “I know Rowan has never held on to a relationship longer than a few months. I know he collects women the way other men collect watches, always moving on to the next. And I know that whatever the two of you think this is, it’s forbidden fruit and nothing more.
Once the scandal wears off and you’re just another girlfriend, he’ll lose interest.”
The words land like precisely aimed arrows. Not because I believe them, but because they echo the fears I’ve been trying to ignore, the ones that talk to me at four in the morning.
“You’re wrong,” Rowan says. “About all of it.”
“Am I?” She turns to him. “When was your last serious relationship? One that lasted more than a season?”
“That’s not…”
“Three years ago. That woman you took to the spring thing, four months, was it? Before her, the one with the gallery. Two months. Before that, a string of names I can’t recall because none of them were around long enough to bother learning.
” Her smile is triumphant. “You have a pattern, Rowan. Elise deserves to know it before she throws everything away on a gamble that’s almost certain to fail. ”
“This is different.”
“That’s what you always say. It never is.”
The silence goes on too long.
I look at Rowan. Really look at him. At the tension in his jaw, the set of his shoulders, the way he isn’t quite meeting my eyes.
She isn’t entirely wrong, and I’ve known it since before any of this started. I knew his reputation when I was twenty-five and answering his phone. It’s the exact reason I stopped.
He told me two days ago that I was different. That it had never been like this.
I wonder how many women have heard that sentence in that voice.
“Elise.” Patricia’s tone shifts to something almost gentle, which is worse.
“I’m not trying to be cruel. I’m trying to help you see clearly.
This thing with Rowan feels real now, in the middle of everything.
But feelings fade. And when they do, what will you have?
A ruined name, a broken family, and nothing. ”
“What do you want from me?” My voice comes out quieter than I intend.
“I want you to be sensible. Take the settlement. Move on. Build a life somewhere that isn’t full of all this.” She reaches into her bag and produces an envelope. “I’ve had papers drawn up. Very generous. Enough that money would never be a concern again.”
I look at the envelope.
At what it represents. Security. Freedom. A clean exit from the wreckage of a marriage and the complicated tangle of whatever this is with Rowan.
It would be so easy.
It would also mean letting this woman set the terms of my life. Running, instead of finding out whether the thing I’ve got might be real.
“No.”
The word comes from Rowan, not me.
“I beg your pardon?” Patricia’s eyes narrow.
“No.” He comes off the wall. “She isn’t taking your money and she isn’t disappearing, and you don’t get to buy her off like an inconvenience.”
“Rowan, be reasonable…”
“I’ve been reasonable my entire life.” His voice is rising.
“I did everything you wanted. The right schools, the right clubs, the right women. I watched Simon get away with everything while I colored inside every line you drew. And the first time I want something for myself, you come up a flooded road to take it off me.”
“I’m trying to protect you…”
“From what? From being happy?” He laughs, and there’s nothing in it. “You’re not protecting me. You’re protecting Simon. You always have been.”
“That’s not fair…”
“Fair?” His voice cracks like something breaking. “Was it fair when you called her after it all came out and told her men make mistakes, like he’d forgotten to collect the dry cleaning? Was it fair when he put his fist through your door at nineteen and you told the neighbors it was a burglary?”
Patricia goes white.
“Was it fair,” Rowan says, quieter now, “that you spent thirty years teaching him that nothing he does will ever land on him? Because that’s the man who cheated on his wife for a year and still can’t say the word out loud.”
“I held this family together.”
“You held a story together. There’s a difference, and Elise is the one who paid for it.”
“And you have? You, with your history?” Patricia stands, matching him. “You’re not a romantic hero, Rowan. You’re a man who has never committed to anything, and you expect me to believe this woman is special enough to change what you fundamentally are?”
“Yes.” Simple and certain. “Because she is.”
“You’ve said that before…”
“I have never said that about anyone.” His voice cuts straight through her. “Not once. You can list every woman I’ve walked away from and I promise you I never told one of them she was different. Because none of them were her.”
He turns to me, and the look on his face makes my breath catch.
“I’ve loved you since you walked into my office,” he says. “And my mother is right about my past. I have been the man who leaves. The one who can’t commit, who always has a foot out the door.”
He takes a breath.
“That was before you. Before I knew what it was to want something so much it frightened me.”
“Rowan…”
“You already gave me my chance, and your terms with it. Nothing she says changes that.” He glances at Patricia and back to me. “But don’t let her make this decision for you. Whatever you decide, about me, about the money, about any of it, make sure it’s yours.”
Nobody says anything.
Then Simon lets out a breath from the sofa.
“Well,” he says. “That was something.”
Patricia picks up her bag. She looks at Rowan, and then at me, and whatever she finds in my face makes her mouth tighten.
“The offer stands until the end of the month,” she says. “After that I imagine we’ll all be living with the consequences of everyone’s choices.”
She goes to the top of the stairs and stops.
“I’ll be down the road at the neighbor’s, since apparently that’s the only dry roof I can reach until this water goes down. When any of you is ready to discuss damage control, you know where I am.”
She descends the flooded stairs and wades out into the storm. Through the window we watch Ed’s truck crawl back toward the white house with the blue shutters, taillights swallowed by the gray.
The silence after she’s gone feels different from the silences before it.
Heavier. More final. Like a door closing on a version of my life I can’t get back into.
Simon retreats to his room without another word. I hear the door shut, hear him moving around in there, and I don’t follow. We said everything there was to say at two o’clock this morning, and neither of us said very much.
Rowan stays where he is, leaning against the wall, watching me with an expression I can’t quite read.
“You didn’t have to do that,” I say finally. “Stand up to her like that.”
“Yes, I did.”
“She’s going to make your life very difficult.”
“She’s been making my life difficult since I was six.” He pushes off the wall. “Elise. What she said about my history. It’s true. All of it. I’m not going to stand here and tell you she made it up.”
“I know.”
“So I need to know what you’re going to do with that.”
I look at him.
And the honest answer, the one I don’t say, is that I have absolutely no idea.
That the envelope is still sitting on the arm of that chair where she left it.
That every word she said about him was something I’d already thought at four in the morning, and hearing it in her voice made it sound less like fear and more like a forecast.
“I’m going to think about it,” I say.
Something moves behind his eyes. He nods once.
“Okay,” he says.
And that’s where we leave it, in a flooded house, with his mother’s envelope on the chair between us.