CHAPTER 5
LAYNE
Discharge day, and the argument starts in the hallway outside his room.
“He should come home,” I say. “Home is Riverside. Our house. His clothes, his bed, his—”
“His bed?” Helena lifts an eyebrow. “You propose to share a bed with a man who called security on you?”
I’m proposing nothing, and we both know it, and she says it anyway, because Helena never wastes a sentence. There are guest rooms and she knows there are guest rooms.
Renn stands between us with the discharge papers, patiently neutral. “Familiarity is the priority. Whatever environment causes him the least distress. Forcing the unfamiliar risks setbacks.”
“He’s never even seen the Riverside house,” I say. “He bought it for me. For us. He walked me through it blindfolded, that’s how—” I stop, because I’m doing it again, presenting my marriage as evidence to people who’ve already ruled.
“I want the penthouse,” Jonas says from the doorway.
He’s dressed, discharged in a charcoal suit that hangs a little loose, the scar at his temple pink and new against the healing bruise.
He looks like himself and he sounds like himself and the sentence still lands like a slap.
“The Fifth Avenue place. I know it. I can work from there.”
He can work from there. Ten days out of brain surgery and the man is planning to work.
So I do the thing I’m becoming fluent in: I fold myself small. “Okay,” I say. “The penthouse.”
Helena’s face does something satisfied that she manages to keep mostly indoors.
To her, this isn’t a medical decision. It’s a tide going out, her son’s life draining back to the shape it had before I came along.
I see it in her eyes and I say nothing, because Jonas is watching me, wary, braced for a fight, and I won’t be another distress in his chart.
The penthouse is exactly as I remember it, which is to say awful.
All glass and slate and money, forty stories up, the apartment of a man who considered comfort a form of weakness.
Jonas lived here five years and the place never once looked lived in.
We kept it after Riverside because the gym is good and the view sells itself, and some service cleans it monthly, and that’s it. That’s its whole inner life.
Jonas walks through it slowly, touching nothing, and I watch him recognize it, the floor plan clicking into place behind his eyes, and his whole body eases in a way it never once eased in front of our wedding photos.
He goes to the kitchen. Opens a cupboard, and the glasses are where he expects them. Something in his face unknots.
I’m glad for him. It also hurts more than anything so far, and I’ve been hit by a forearm and escorted out by security this week, so the bar is not low.
Marcus meets us at the curb and walks the perimeter with Jonas, quiet and thorough, exits and sightlines, while I trail behind with my tote bag. The doorman, George, twenty years in this lobby, white mustache, brass buttons, takes one look at Jonas and goes misty.
“Mr. Palmer. Welcome home, sir.”
“George.” Jonas shakes his hand, easy, instant. He remembers George. George is from before. George watched him leave for the office a thousand mornings in the years that Jonas still owns.
“And Mrs. Palmer,” George says, taking my bag, and bless him, he puts exactly the same weight on it.
He knew us when Jonas used to meet me here, when this lobby was where I learned that a billionaire could look nervous waiting for an elevator.
Jonas leaned against that very desk, once, in the old life, pretending he hadn’t been waiting forty minutes.
George never sold him out. George is a vault.
“You still live here, George,” Jonas says, gesturing at the lobby. “Same as ever.”
“Same as ever, sir.”
Jonas nods, satisfied, and moves on, and George catches my eye over the bag, just for a second, and there’s a whole conversation in it. I’m sorry. Hang in there. He’s still in there. I nod back. Vaults talk to each other.
In the elevator, Jonas watches the floors count up and says, without looking at me, “You never liked it here.”
It’s not a question.
“I didn’t.”
“Why did we keep it?”
“The gym. The view.” I watch the numbers too. “You said someday you’d sell it and buy me a falling-down wreck to restore, as a present. You said every billionaire’s wife gets diamonds, and you’d be damned if you’d be predictable.”
The doors open. He’s looking at me now, and there’s something working behind his eyes, the machinery of a man trying to decide if the stranger beside him is real.
“I said that?”
“You had a whole speech. Wreck rhymed with nothing, but you made it sound romantic.”
He almost smiles. Then the elevator settles and the moment drains out of him, and he steps out into the apartment of the man he remembers being.
I make myself useful. I text Mrs. Doyle a grocery list. I check the bedroom for clutter he could trip on. And in the hallway, outside the second bedroom, the door to the storage closet stands open, and there are the boxes.
I’d forgotten. Mrs. Doyle hadn’t. She’d offered, over the years, to have them taken to storage, donated, burned in a ceremonial fire — her words — and Jonas always shrugged and said someday. Moving boxes, sealed and resealed, labeled in a hand I don’t recognize, elegant loops.
ESTELLE — BOOKS. ESTELLE — MISC. And one, smaller: PALMER/LARSON ENGAGEMENT.
I should close the door. I know with total clarity that closing the door is the right move, the kind move, the move that costs me nothing and saves me everything.
I’m kneeling in front of the boxes with the small one open before I’ve finished deciding not to.
Photographs. That’s most of it. Jonas at thirty, leaner, sharper, in a tux at some gala with Estelle on his arm in red, both of them gleaming, and the captions in my head write themselves, the era of the city’s most beautiful couple.
Jonas proposing — an actual photograph of the proposal, someone must have been tipped off, some restaurant terrace, Jonas on one knee and Estelle with her hands over her mouth.
Jonas and Estelle and Helena at a horse race, all three of them polished to a magazine shine. A dozen Christmases. A life.
He remembers every single one of these. Right now, upstairs in his undamaged memory, every one of these photographs is still happening.
“Find something?”
Jonas is in the doorway. I don’t know how long he’s been there. I don’t bother pretending I wasn’t looking. I hold up the proposal photograph, and his face does the strangest thing, recognition and loss at once.
“I remember that,” he says. Quiet. Almost wondering. “Capri. The ring got stuck on her knuckle. We laughed about it in the cab.”
He comes in and crouches, slow, the surgery still in his movements, and pulls the box toward him and starts going through his own past like a man sorting mail.
He knows every object. A cufflink. A playbill.
A cork from something, labeled with a date in her loops, and he holds it and says, “Her thirtieth,” and smiles, actually smiles, the private one, the one I thought was ours.
I sit there on the closet floor, thirty-five weeks pregnant with his daughter, watching my husband remember loving someone else in high resolution.
“Don’t you want to know?” I ask. My voice is doing well. I’m proud of it. “How it ended?”
He glances at me. “They told me. We grew apart. It ended.”
“Is that what they told you?”
“It’s what my mother told me.” He says it evenly, and then he catches it, hears it himself, the thinnest hairline crack of doubt. “Was there more?”
She left you because you cried at a screening of a documentary about a rhino, and she saw the soft man coming, and she wanted the empire, and by the time she wanted you back you were mine.
“Ask her,” I say. “When you’re stronger.
Ask everyone. Not just the people who were there. The people who came after.”
He studies me for a beat, then nods, and goes back to the box, and the moment passes.
It’s later, after the groceries, after Marcus has briefed the doorman, after Helena has commandeered the second bedroom “temporarily,” after Estelle has arrived with soup from some place they used to go, soup, the woman’s weapons are soup and memory — it’s later that it happens.
The soup, I should say, is a production.
Estelle serves it herself in the slate kitchen, in bowls she’s found in a cupboard I didn’t know existed, and she tells a story about the restaurant, some winter, some snowstorm, a waiter who proposed to his girlfriend between courses, and Jonas eats and listens and asks a question about the waiter’s name, and Estelle knows it, she knows the waiter’s name from a dinner six years ago, and Helena watches them over her glass with the serene approval of a woman whose renovation is proceeding on schedule.
I sit at the counter with my decaf and my tote bag and my swollen ankles and play the role of the nice pregnant lady who’ll be going soon.
I hate the role. I play it anyway, because Jonas is eating, and resting, and the color is back in his face for the first time since the crash, and I would let Estelle Larson cater his whole recovery if it kept him healing.
That’s the thing nobody tells you about love.
It’ll make you hand your rival the ladle and thank her for coming.
Jonas stands at the big window, Manhattan glittering below, his left hand worrying at the platinum band. Turning it. Turning it. He’s been doing it for days, but this time he works it over his knuckle.
“Please don’t,” I say.
He stops. Looks at his hand. Looks at me. And takes it off anyway.
“I don’t remember putting it on,” he says. Not cruel. Honest, which is worse. “Wearing it feels dishonest. Like a costume.”
“You did put it on. You just don’t remember being the man who chose it.”
He hears me, I can see him hear me, and he sets the ring on the windowsill anyway, a small bright circle against forty stories of dark, and something in me goes quiet and cold, the temperature of a room I’ll have to live in for a while.
Nobody says anything. Helena, in the kitchen doorway, says nothing at all, and her silence is a whole speech.
I don’t stay the night. I can’t. There’s a guest room offer from Helena, delivered with the warmth of a court summons, and I decline it, and I’m gathering my coat when I see Estelle at the window.
She’s picked up the ring.
She’s turning it in her fingers, admiring it in the light, casual as you like, rolling my husband’s wedding band between her thumb and forefinger, and something in me stops being reasonable.
I cross the room and take it out of her hand.
Not gently. I pluck it from her fingers, and my palm closes around it, and the metal is warm from her, and I hate that it’s warm from her.
“Don’t touch my husband’s wedding ring.”
The room goes silent. Estelle looks at me, and then, deliberately, she smiles, small and cool, and nods toward the windowsill.
“He took it off.”
“That doesn’t make it yours.”
Helena makes a sound, some small disapproving note, and Jonas is watching from the sofa with an expression I can’t read, and I don’t care, I don’t care who sees, the ring is in my fist and it’s staying there.
Estelle raises her hands, elegant surrender, performance complete. She’s gotten exactly what she came for: me, raw, in front of all of them, clutching a ring he no longer wears.
I leave. I take the ring. In the elevator down, forty floors of falling, I open my hand and look at it sitting in my palm, his whole promise, warm from another woman’s fingers.
The doors open onto the lobby. The doorman wishes me a good evening, Mrs. Palmer, cheerful and oblivious, and I walk out into the cold with my fist closed tight enough to leave marks.
At least, I think, walking to the car, at least I have it. He can forget the man who chose it. He can call it a costume and set it on a sill.
He doesn’t get to hand it to her.