Chapter 23
Chapter Twenty-Three
GRAHAM
The rules were easy to make.
On November twelfth I sat in Renata Cole's conference room on the nineteenth floor and signed my name off Lila's bank account.
Lila sat across the table from me between Renata and Denise, the advocate, a woman around sixty who wore her reading glasses on a beaded chain.
The protective order had been made final on the fifth.
Denise had gone to the hearing with her. I hadn't.
After the last page was signed, Lila asked me about a car loan, sixty months or thirty-six.
"Sixty's going to cost you a lot more in interest," I said. "You want to put down as much as you?—"
Denise looked at me over her glasses without saying a word.
"Ask Denise," I said.
Lila's mouth went tight. She turned her chair toward Denise, and watching her do it was like watching somebody wade into cold water.
Afterward, in the elevator lobby, I told her about the phone. After nine o'clock mine went silent for everybody. Only Naomi would ring through.
"What if it's real?" Lila said.
"Then 911. Then Denise's line. They're up all night. I'll listen to whatever you leave me in the morning."
"Okay," she said, in the voice she used when she meant she'd find out for herself whether I meant it.
That night I wrote Naomi an email. I didn't try to make it pretty. I wrote down every lie I'd told her since July, with the date and what was actually true. It came to four pages. At the bottom I added the one sentence that wasn't a list.
From now on I won't keep anything from you that affects our marriage, for anyone, for any reason.
I read that sentence twenty times at the kitchen island before I hit send at one in the morning, and I believed every word of it.
She answered three days later with one question, about the seventy-eight hundred dollars: did I want Lila to pay it back? I said I wanted to know what she wanted. She said two hundred a month into the joint account, and that she'd tell Lila herself.
That Sunday I drove out to Havertown to see Joanne.
It wasn't one of our Sundays, and I didn't call ahead. She opened the door in a cardigan with her glasses pushed up in her hair, and I could tell she'd been crying at some point that week. Lila had told her about Daniel.
We sat on her good couch, and I told her the birthday was on me. That Naomi hadn't made a scene. That I'd served my wife her sister's dinner without asking her one single thing, and Naomi had sat there being polite about it for an hour before she left.
Joanne sat up very straight.
"She never said a word," she said. "Thirty years. How was I supposed to know what she wanted if she never said a word?"
"I didn't know either," I said. "I'm not here to tell you you're a bad mother. I'm here so you know it was me. Not her."
"You told me to go home," Joanne said. "On her birthday. In front of Lila. I have never been so embarrassed in my life."
"I did. I'm not sorry about that part."
Her face snapped shut like a purse.
"I think you should go, Graham."
So I went. She didn't walk me to the door. Backing out of the driveway, I could see her through the front window, still on the couch with her hands folded in her lap, looking at nothing.
On the twentieth I moved two suitcases into a furnished one-bedroom on the fourth floor of a building I owned in Manayunk.
The kitchen had two burners that worked, two that didn't, and the window looked out at a parking garage.
I texted Naomi that the house was hers whenever she wanted it, that Tess had the keys, that I'd put the porch light on a timer.
The next morning there were two words from her.
Thank you.
I carried those two words around for two days like a coin in my pocket.
On Sunday night, the twenty-second, I fell asleep on the couch in 4B with the TV on and woke up at 12:04 with a stiff neck. My phone was face up on the coffee table, dark and silent, doing exactly what I'd told it to do. I picked it up to check the time.
Lila Hale. 4 missed calls.
Voicemail. 11:41 p.m.
I was on my feet before I hit play. I didn't remember standing up.
"Graham. I'm sorry. I know it's after nine.
I think his car's outside. The Audi. Across the street, down by the corner.
I called 911 like you said. They sent a car.
They drove around the block. They said there's no Audi, and there's nothing they can do if he's not doing anything.
They left. I think it's back. I can't tell from the window.
I can't stay here. Please. Please call me. "
By the end of it I had my jeans on, my keys in my hand, and I was on the stairs.
I called Lila from the car before I was even out of the garage. Not Denise. Not Naomi. Lila.
She picked up on the first ring, whispering.
"Is it still there?" I said.
"I don't know. I turned the lights off so I could see out. I don't know."
"I'm coming."
It came out of me as easy as breathing. I'm coming. I'd said it forty times since July.
I drove down Ridge Avenue with her on speaker in the cupholder, breathing, and ran the light at Kelly Drive with the river black on my left.
I kept saying okay. I kept saying I'm almost there.
Somewhere around the art museum, with the phone still breathing at me, I actually heard myself, and something cold went down the back of my neck.
I didn't turn around. I kept driving.
Pine Street was empty, parked cars on both sides, trees dripping. There was no Audi on the block and no Audi at the corner. I drove it twice to be sure, then double-parked across from 1411 with my hazards on.
Her third-floor windows were dark. A curtain moved.
"I'm outside," I said. "The street's clear. I drove it twice."
"Come up."
"No."
I had my hand on the door handle while I said it, and my legs were shaking.
"Graham. Please. Ten minutes. I just need somebody in here."
"I'm not coming up, Li. Call Denise's line. They've got somebody on right now. I'll sit here until you do."
"You said you'd see me through this."
"I'm sitting outside your building at twelve-thirty in the morning," I said. "Call the line."
She hung up on me.
I sat there with the hazards ticking. Ten minutes. Fifteen. The curtain didn't move again. I watched the corner in my side mirror for an Audi that never showed. At 12:51 a text came.
called. someone's calling me back.
At 2:38, another.
they talked to me for an hour. she's going to help me get a camera on the door. i'm ok. go home.
I stayed till ten past three anyway. Then I drove back up Kelly Drive with the river on my right, and the whole way home I thought about Naomi.
The phone would've let her call through, and it would've let me call her too. I could have called her from Pine Street. I could have texted her from the car.
It was three in the morning, though. She'd just moved back into the house. She'd be asleep, and I'd promised myself I'd quit costing her sleep.
That's what I told myself on Kelly Drive.
Monday morning in 4B I opened a text to her and typed Nay, last night Lila called after midnight.
I— and stopped. It read like a report. It should be said to her face, where she could watch mine while I said it.
I'd tell her the next time I saw her. There'd be a key to hand back, a form to sign.
I'd see her soon enough, and I'd tell her then.
I saved the draft.
Tuesday I didn't hear from her, and I didn't reach out, because I'd promised I wouldn't push. Every time I opened my phone, the draft was sitting at the top of our thread. I'd look at it, then close it.
Nothing had even happened, I told myself. I hadn't gone up. I'd done what I was supposed to do. There wasn't really anything to confess. There was just a thing to mention.
It sounded reasonable. Everything I'd told myself since July had sounded reasonable.