Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
GRAHAM
Her taillights went down the hill, then Tess's, and then the street was dark.
I stood in the mudroom doorway with cold air coming in around my feet and cocoa powder on my thumb. I thought I should wash my hands before I touched anything, like there was still a dinner to finish.
You don't know.
She hadn't yelled. Naomi doesn't yell. She'd said it the way she'd read a number off a tape measure.
I shut the door.
In the dining room the candle was still going in the middle of the tiramisu, burned down almost to the cream, wax pooling in the cocoa. Joanne was sitting at Naomi's right with her napkin still in her lap. Next to her, Lila had both hands over her mouth, and tears were running over her fingers.
I leaned across the table and pinched the wick out. It burned my fingertips. I didn't care.
"Well," Joanne said. "I don't know what's gotten into her."
"Joanne."
"She's always been sensitive about Lila. Ever since they were girls. Lila gets one thing, and Naomi?—"
"Joanne. Please go home."
She stared at me. In twelve years I'd never told Joanne Hale to do anything. I'd carried her Christmas tree up from the basement, fixed her garbage disposal twice, laughed at every story she ever told at every Sunday dinner.
"Well," she said again. She stood, folded her napkin into a neat square, and put it on her chair. "I can see I'm not wanted."
I got her coat and walked her out to her car, holding her elbow down the front steps. She didn't say goodbye.
When I came back in, Lila was standing in the hall with her coat on and her phone in her hand, face blotchy, mascara streaked.
"I'm getting an Uber," she said.
"I'll drive you."
It was out of my mouth before I thought about it. My hand was already going for the keys in the bowl.
"You can't," Lila said. "You can't, Graham. You have to go find her."
"She doesn't want me to find her."
"I didn't know." Her voice cracked. "I swear to God. I thought—she used to love beets. She ate them out of the jar. I thought the truffle thing was about truffle oil, not real truffle. I thought she'd like it. I thought it was nice."
I looked at her. My wife's little sister, thirty-six years old, in a cream dress from a consignment shop on Pine Street because Daniel had frozen every card with her name on it.
"Text me when you're inside," I said. "Lock the bar."
"I know."
After she left, I stood in my front hall in an apron and made myself go back to July.
On July 11, at eight in the morning, Lila was sitting in the lobby of my office building in sunglasses. My receptionist called up to say my sister-in-law was downstairs and seemed upset.
I brought her up and shut my office door. When she took off the sunglasses, there was no black eye. I'd been braced for one.
She told me Daniel had moved her paycheck into an account she couldn't get into.
He'd canceled her credit card and given her a debit card that pinged his phone every time she used it.
He'd put an app on her phone "for safety" so he could see where she was.
Every night he read her texts while she sat there and watched.
If she texted Naomi or her mother anything he didn't like, he made her sit at the kitchen table while he explained what was wrong with her, sometimes for hours.
He'd told her that if she ever embarrassed him, he had a psychiatrist friend who'd sign the papers.
Once, in June, when she said she wanted to talk to a lawyer, he'd pressed her wrist flat against the kitchen counter with his whole weight until she stopped talking.
She wanted out. She had four hundred dollars in cash she'd been hiding in a tampon box, and no idea where to start.
I knew where to start. Somebody handed me a problem with a hundred moving parts, and I broke it into steps. I'd been doing it my whole career.
A family lawyer. I knew one, Renata Cole, so I called her from my desk with Lila sitting across from me, and I paid the retainer.
A prepaid phone Daniel didn't know about, which I bought that afternoon at a Walgreens on Market Street.
I saved her new number as L, so if anybody ever picked up my phone, it wouldn't mean anything.
A plan to move her things out while Daniel was at his conference in Chicago in September.
An apartment. I knew a broker, and he found a third-floor walk-up on Pine Street with a locked vestibule.
I guaranteed the lease, because she had no credit of her own.
The deposit came out of savings because it had to clear that day, and my business account needed a second signature.
I meant to put it back before Naomi noticed. I did put it back, a week later, out of my bonus. I didn't tell her that either.
On September 19 I carried fourteen boxes up three flights and scraped my knuckles on the doorframe of the third-floor landing.
The locksmith couldn't come until Tuesday, so I put in the deadbolt myself.
On September 22, at 12:40 in the morning, Lila texted that someone was buzzing her apartment over and over, then pounding on the vestibule door.
It was Daniel. He'd been tracking her with an AirTag sewn into the lining of her purse.
By the time I got there he was gone, and I sat on the floor of her empty living room with my back against the door until three.
On October 15, at ten in the morning, she stood up in a courtroom on Arch Street and asked for a protective order. Daniel came with his lawyer and smiled at her the whole time. I sat in the back row.
And before any of that, in my office on July 11, she'd made me promise.
Don't tell Naomi. Not until I'm out. Please, Graham. She'll tell Mom, and Mom tells Daniel everything. She'll think she's helping. And Naomi will take over. She'll be so calm about it. She'll look at me like she always knew.
I said yes. I thought it'd be two weeks. Somebody asks you to carry something heavy for them, you carry it. You don't set it down to show somebody else how heavy it is.
Two weeks turned into three months.
Every lie I told my wife, I told myself I was keeping my word. King of Prussia. Norristown. Germantown. Conshohocken. Mark. I'm not a liar. In July I'd have said that under oath. By October I could do it without my face moving.
I went back into the dining room.
If you didn't look too closely, the table looked like something out of a magazine, guttering candles, tuberose, wedding china. I started at Naomi's place, because that's where I was standing.
I'd cleared her salad plate myself. I'd seen the beets still on it and figured she was saving them.
Her fish plate was still under the pasta bowl. When I lifted the bowl off, I saw she'd pushed all the capers into a row along the silver rim. The pasta was untouched, not one strand gone, the truffle shavings dark and soft now. Her wine was still at the line where I'd poured it.
On the top shelf of the refrigerator sat a single glass ramekin of tiramisu that I'd made separately, with coconut cream instead of mascarpone.
I'd seared Lila's sea bass in olive oil instead of brown butter and left the cheese off her pasta.
I'd written DAIRY-FREE FOR L at the top of the legal pad and underlined it twice.
I'd thought of all that.
I looked at Naomi's plates and thought, okay. Okay. So what would she have wanted?
The old dinner, obviously. The soup, the short ribs. I knew those. I could make those blind.
But the Tuesday before, Lila had sat on the floor of her apartment and told me, You want the truth?
She told me at Christmas the birthday dinner's sweet, but it's the same thing every year.
She wishes you'd surprise her. Do something new.
Trust me. She'd written out the list on a legal pad.
I'd asked about the beets, and she said Naomi used to eat them out of the jar.
I'd asked about truffle, because I remembered, vaguely, some joke about it, and she said, That's truffle oil.
Real truffle's different. She'll love it.
I never asked my wife. I thought asking would ruin the surprise.
Standing in the dining room, I made myself do it now. I put the old menu to one side. Not the dinner from twelve years ago. Her, now, this fall. What had she been eating?
I didn't know.
At Lucca on the tenth, what had she ordered? I'd been sitting right next to her, watching Lila's bag. I couldn't remember what was on my wife's plate or what she'd been drinking. Something red, I thought. Probably something red.
I stood there with my hand on the back of her chair.
I could tell you Lila's coffee order: oat milk cortado, extra hot.
I could tell you her lawyer's cell number without looking it up.
The date Daniel's lawyer had to respond by.
How much weight Lila had lost since June.
I knew which stair on her landing creaked.
I knew she couldn't sleep unless the bathroom light was on.
I couldn't tell you what my wife had eaten for lunch on a single day in October.
It went through me like cold water, like reaching for a railing in the dark and finding nothing there.
I called her. Four rings, then voicemail. This is Naomi Bennett, please leave a message. I hung up and called again. Nine times total.
I texted. Please tell me you're safe.
At 8:52 a text came in, but not from Naomi.
Tess: She's safe. She's with me. Don't come here tonight, Graham. I mean it.
Okay, I wrote. Thank you.
I took off the apron and cleared the table. I scraped the tagliatelle into the trash, twenty-eight dollars of truffle going into a black bag on top of beet greens. When I rinsed her fish plate, I watched the capers go down the drain one at a time.
The truffle had come wrapped in a paper towel inside a jar of rice. That was what I'd gotten up at two in the morning to check, whether the rice was keeping it dry.
In the pantry, reaching up for the plastic wrap, I knocked my hand against the old tin recipe box on the top shelf. Her grandmother's, red, with a dent in the lid. I took it down and opened it on the counter.
Behind the tab marked CAKES, folded in quarters and soft as fabric, was an electric bill from PECO. Passyunk Avenue, October, twelve years ago. Amount due: $61.40.
I unfolded it. On the back, in my own handwriting, was the list from the first time I ever asked her what she wanted.
SOUP (GRANDMA'S, brEAD + GRUYèRE ON TOP). SHORT RIBS. POTATOES W/ ROSEMARY. RED WINE THAT CAN STAND UP BY ITSELF. LEMON CAKE. REAL. CURD IN THE MIDDLE, NOT FROSTING.
I stood in my kitchen late at night holding it.