Chapter 8 #3
"When?" Her voice was flat.
"March. You were in the city for Corinne's birthday."
She remembered. She remembered calling him that night from Corinne's apartment, laughing about the restaurant they'd gone to, telling him about the terrible dessert.
She remembered his voice on the phone — warm, attentive, present.
She remembered saying I love you before hanging up, and she remembered that he said it back.
"One night," he said. "It happened once, in this house, and I have no way to make that not true."
"No. You don't."
The ocean was loud. The wind had shifted, pushing the waves closer, and the sound was insistent and relentless and exactly right for this moment.
"I'm not asking you to forgive me," he said.
"Good. Because I can't."
"I know."
"You keep saying I know like it's enough. It's not enough, Alistair. Knowing doesn't undo it. Knowing doesn't scrub her out of that cottage. Knowing is the bare minimum of being a decent person, and you don't get credit for it."
He took it. He sat in the chair and he took it — every word, every accusation — and he did not defend himself.
He did not explain. He did not say but she was, or you have to understand, or any of the practiced phrases she'd braced for.
He just sat there, and for the first time since the confrontation, his silence felt like honesty rather than strategy.
She hated that too.
"We built this house together," she said.
Her voice broke on together, and she let it break.
She was done holding things steady. "Every room.
Every piece of furniture. The tile in the guest cottage bathroom — I picked that tile, Alistair.
I sat on the floor of a showroom in Bridgehampton and held samples up to the light for two hours, and you sat there with me because you said you cared about the details. "
"I did care."
"Then how could you bring her here?"
He didn't answer. She hadn't expected him to.
She stood at the railing for another minute. Then she walked past him, through the screen door, into the house. She didn't say good night. She didn't look at him.
She climbed the stairs.
#
The garden bedroom was dark and cool. She changed into a T-shirt and shorts, brushed her teeth in the small bathroom, turned off the light. She lay on top of the covers because the night was warm and because she couldn't bear the feeling of being tucked in, held, contained.
Below her, she heard him moving.
The kitchen first. Water running, a glass set down. Then the living room — the creak of the floorboard near the bookshelves, the one they'd never fixed because he liked the way it announced his presence. Then silence. Then his footsteps again, slow, the pacing of a man who couldn't settle.
She lay in the dark and listened to him the way he'd described listening to the apartment without her. Every sound mapped and measured, every footstep a word in a language she didn't want to understand.
She wanted him.
The wanting hit her like nausea — sudden, physical, unwelcome.
Not a romantic ache, not a wistful longing for what they'd had.
Something rawer. Something that lived in the part of her body that remembered his hand on her back, the heat of his palm, the way his fingers had spread across her spine with the casual ownership of a man who knew exactly where to touch her.
Eight years. He knew her body the way she knew his footsteps — thoroughly, instinctively, without having to think.
She turned onto her side. Pressed her face into the pillow.
This was the betrayal she hadn't expected. Not his — hers. Her own body, turning toward him in the dark like a compass needle swinging north. Her own skin, still warm where he'd touched her. Her own want, persistent and specific and indifferent to the facts.
He had brought Daphne to the guest cottage. In March. While Annabel was at Corinne's birthday dinner, laughing about bad dessert, saying I love you into the phone.
And she still wanted him. Standing on the other side of that knowledge, with the full weight of it pressing on her chest, she still wanted to walk down those stairs and into whatever room he was pacing and put her hands on him.
She didn't move.
She lay in the dark and listened to him below her — the floor creaking, the silence stretching, the occasional sound of a door opening and closing as he moved through rooms that still smelled like the life they'd built — and she held herself still while her body argued with her dignity.
Wanting him felt like a betrayal of herself.
Not of the marriage, not of the vows. Of herself.
The woman who had walked out with her grandmother's earrings and a self-bought watch and the clean, hard knowledge that she deserved better.
That woman would not lie in the dark wanting the man who had wrecked her.
But she did. She lay there, and she wanted, and the ocean made its sounds outside the window, and the house held them both like a fist that wouldn't open.
She did not go downstairs.
She did not sleep.