CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Betrayal Isn’t Only Sex
Alessandra came on a Sunday afternoon in the third week, unannounced, and when I looked through the peephole and saw her standing in the hallway in a camel coat with her hands knotted in front of her, I almost didn’t open the door.
I opened it anyway.
We stood there for a moment looking at each other. She had cut her hair since I’d seen her last, shorter, just above her shoulders, and she looked thinner, and very tired.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Luca gave me the address. I told him I needed to say something to you directly. If this is a bad time, I can go.”
“It’s not a bad time.” I stepped back. “Come in.”
She came in and stood in the middle of my living room the way I had stood in it the first night, looking around at the green chair and the table and the lopsided shelf as though trying to understand what kind of person lived here.
Mia’s drawing of the gray rabbit was taped to my refrigerator.
She saw it and something moved across her face.
“She asks about you,” Alessandra said. “Every night. Whether Vivienne is coming back to read the rabbit book.”
“How is she?”
“Better. Mostly. She still doesn’t like the dark.
” She took off her coat and folded it over her arm and didn’t seem to know what to do with it.
I took it and hung it on the hook by the door, and the ordinary small courtesy of it seemed to undo something in her.
She sat down on one of the kitchen chairs and pressed her hand over her mouth.
I made tea. It gave both of us something to do. When I set the mug in front of her, she wrapped both hands around it and looked at the steam.
“You put a rabbit on her pillow,” she said. “The first day. Before we even got there. You didn’t know us. I’d met you twice. And you put flowers in my room and soap I liked and a rabbit on my daughter’s pillow.”
“You’d lost your husband. You were frightened.”
“I know. And you were kind to us every single day after that, and I let you pay for it.” She looked up. “That’s what I came to say. I’m sorry. I didn’t do anything on purpose. But I let a lot of things happen that I should have stopped.”
I sat down across from her. “You don’t owe me an apology for being frightened.”
“Not for that. For the rest of it.” She turned the mug a quarter turn.
“When we came to that house, I was so tired, Vivienne. My husband had been dead six weeks and I’d been sleeping in my clothes with a chair against the bedroom door.
And then suddenly I was in a house where I’d spent half my childhood, and Elena was calling me sweetheart, and Dante was handling everything.
I didn’t have to think. It was such a relief not to have to think.
I fell back into being fourteen in that family without even noticing I’d done it. ”
“I noticed.”
“I know you did.” She met my eyes. “The chair at breakfast. I told myself it was nothing because you said it was nothing. The shirt. The night of the party, walking in on his arm. His mother’s toast. I sat there while she said it, and I felt sick, and I didn’t say a word, because saying something would have meant admitting what everyone at that table was thinking. It was easier to look at my plate.”
I didn’t answer right away. There were several gracious things I could have said, the kind I’d have said a month earlier without thinking. I found I didn’t want to say them.
“For a while,” I said slowly, “I resented you. I want to be honest about that. I knew nothing was happening between you and Dante. I never believed he was sleeping with you, not once. I knew you were grieving. I knew none of it was your fault. And I still resented you, every time I came into a room and you were already sitting where I used to sit. I hated myself for it. I kept telling myself I was being small.”
“You weren’t being small.”
“Maybe not. But it wasn’t fair to you either.
You didn’t take my husband. He was never yours to take, and you never tried.
” I picked up my own mug and set it down again without drinking.
“The marriage didn’t fall apart because of you, Alessandra.
It fell apart because he kept putting everybody else’s needs first, and he assumed I’d always be there when he got around to mine.
You were just the first time it was impossible not to see. ”
She was quiet for a long moment.
“I told him that,” she said finally. “Some of it. After you left.”
“Luca mentioned you’d talked to him.”
“I went into his study and told him I needed to say something and he needed to hear it. He kept saying he’d never betrayed you because he’d never touched me. He said it three different ways. As though that settled it.” She shook her head. “I told him betrayal isn’t only sex.”
“What did you mean by it?” I asked. “Exactly.”
“I meant that there are a hundred ways to leave someone without ever walking out the door. He put me first when I was frightened, and Mia first when she was frightened, and his mother first when she was difficult, and his men first when there was a threat, and he put you after all of it, every time, and he never once asked what that cost you. He called it family. He called it duty. He never called it what it was.” She took a breath.
“You were the only person in that house who never asked him for anything. So you were the only person he never gave anything to.”
I looked down at the table. There was a water ring on the oak from the first night, when I’d set a glass down without a coaster. I traced it with one finger.
“There’s something else,” Alessandra said, quieter. “I don’t know if I should tell you. I thought about it the whole drive over.”
“Tell me.”
“At the end, after I’d said all of that, he sat there for a long time. And then he said, I love my wife.” She watched my face. “He said he’d never said it out loud before. To anyone. I think he was as surprised as I was.”
For a moment I couldn’t say anything at all.
Seven years. Seven years of mornings and his hand under restaurant tables and three nights of pneumonia and Portofino, and I had never once heard those words from him.
I had built an entire marriage on reading his actions, telling myself that some men simply didn’t say it, that the love was obvious in everything else, that the words didn’t matter.
And he had finally said them, out loud, in his study, with the door closed.
To Alessandra.
“He said it to you,” I said. My voice came out strange and thin.
“He said it about you. Not to me. I want you to understand that. It wasn’t...”
“I know. I understand exactly what it was.” I pressed my palms flat on the table. “He loves his wife. He managed to say so to the woman his mother wanted him to marry, in a room I wasn’t in, and he still hasn’t said it to me.”
“Vivienne...”
“I’m glad he said it. I think I am. Part of me is so glad I could cry. And part of me wants to throw this mug across the room, because of course. Of course that’s how I’d find out. Secondhand, from someone else, about a conversation I wasn’t part of. The same as everything else.”
Alessandra didn’t argue. She reached across the table and put her hand over mine, and I let her.
“I asked him,” she said. “I asked him why everyone in that house except his wife was allowed to know.”
A sound came out of me that was half a laugh and half something else. “You said that to him?”
“I did. He didn’t have an answer.”
We sat like that for a while, her hand over mine, the tea going cold. Through the wall, Carol’s television was playing a game show, and every so often an audience applauded something neither of us could see.
“What will you do now?” I asked eventually. “You and Mia.”
“We’re leaving the house at the end of the month.
” She sat back and wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand.
“The men my husband owed money to have agreed to a settlement. Dante’s lawyers handled it.
The threat’s mostly over. I’ve rented a place in Riverside, a little house with a yard.
My cousin runs an interior design firm and she’s offered me a job, three days a week to start.
I used to be good at that, before I married.
Mia starts at the public elementary in the fall.
She’s nervous. She wants to know if she can bring the rabbit. ”
“She can bring the rabbit.”
“That’s what I told her.” Alessandra smiled a little. “I need to stop living in other people’s houses, Vivienne. I’ve been doing it my whole life. My father’s house, my husband’s house, Elena’s idea of a house. I think it’s time I found out what I’d put in my own.”
I looked around my small apartment, the green chair, the lemon shower curtain visible through the bathroom door.
“I’d recommend it,” I said.
When she left, she hugged me at the door, a real hug, and I held on longer than I expected to.
After the door closed, I went back to the kitchen and sat alone at the oak table with both mugs of cold tea and let myself cry, properly, for the first time in days.
I cried for the words I’d waited seven years to hear, spoken in a room without me, and for a small girl who was still afraid of the dark, and for the woman who had arrived at my house frightened and grieving and had just driven across the city to tell me the truth.
Then I washed the mugs, and I wrote Mia a note on a card with a rabbit on it, and I put it in an envelope addressed to a little house in Riverside.
* * *