Chapter 9 #2
"How are you?" Corinne asked.
"I'm angry."
"Good. Stay angry."
"I was starting to believe him. At the benefit. The cottage confession, the way he looked at me — I was starting to think maybe he'd earned a conversation."
"And now?"
"Now I know he lied about the scope of it. Not just to me — to everyone. Or no. To me specifically. Everyone else already knew. I was the only person in the room who didn't know what was happening in my own marriage." Her voice cracked on the last word. She caught it. Held it. Pushed it back down.
"Annabel, listen to me. You are not stupid. You are not naive. You trusted your husband. That's what you're supposed to do. The failure is his, not yours."
"I know that."
"Do you?"
"I know it in the part of my brain that's rational. The rest of me is sitting in a parking lot in Bridgehampton trying not to scream."
"Then scream. You're in a car. No one can hear you."
Annabel laughed. It came out rough and short. "I want to call Judith."
"Then call Judith."
"I want to sign the papers and be done."
"Good." Corinne's voice softened. "Do you want me to come out there?"
"No. I'm going back to the city."
"Come here first. I'll make you food."
"I don't want food."
"Then I'll make you a drink and sit next to you while you call your attorney. But you're not doing this alone in that depressing beige apartment."
Annabel almost smiled. Almost. "I'll be there in two hours."
"I'll be here."
#
She drove back to the city with the radio off. The Long Island Expressway was thick with weekend traffic, and she sat in it, inching forward, her mind turning over the same questions like stones in a tumbler.
Had Alistair known that people knew? He must have.
A man that careful, that attuned to reputation and leverage, did not carry on a six-month affair in the circles they moved in without understanding the risk.
Which meant one of two things: either he believed he was untouchable, or he hadn't cared enough to be careful. She didn't know which was worse.
And Ronan. She kept coming back to Ronan.
Twelve years of loyalty, and not once had he pulled her aside, not once had he said, Annabel, there's something you should know.
She didn't blame him, exactly — Ronan worked for Alistair, not for her, and she had always understood that distinction.
But she had thought they were friends. She had thought, stupidly, that friendship might outweigh employment when it mattered.
Dorothea was harder. If Dorothea had suspected in April — at the Pierre, watching Daphne with that cool, assessing gaze — she would have weighed her options and chosen silence.
Not out of cruelty. Dorothea was never cruel.
She would have told herself she was protecting Annabel.
Giving her daughter-in-law the dignity of not knowing.
The same logic Dorothea had applied to her own marriage thirty years ago: you can survive what you don't name.
But Annabel was not Dorothea. She did not want to survive. She wanted to choose.
By the time she reached the West Village, the anger had calcified into something harder and colder. Not rage — rage burned out. This was resolve.
Corinne buzzed her up. The apartment smelled like garlic and lemon. A glass of whiskey was already on the kitchen counter.
"Sit," Corinne said.
Annabel sat. She picked up the glass. Took one sip and set it down.
"I need to call Judith before her office closes."
"It's Saturday."
"She gave me her cell. For emergencies."
"Is this an emergency?"
"It is to me."
Corinne nodded. She leaned against the counter with her arms crossed and watched Annabel dial.
Judith Crane picked up on the fourth ring. Her voice was measured, unhurried, the same low tone she used in her thirty-second-floor office. "Annabel. What's going on?"
"I want to move forward. The divorce. Whatever needs to happen next, I want it to happen."
A pause. Annabel could hear Judith shifting — a chair, maybe, or a door closing. "Tell me what changed."
So Annabel told her. The Bridgehampton lunch. The timeline. The six months of public knowledge. She kept it brief. Judith didn't need the emotion; she needed the facts.
"All right," Judith said when Annabel finished. "Here's where we are. You have an unsigned separation agreement that gives you roughly forty percent above what the prenup guarantees. That offer is still on the table. If you want to sign it, I can have the paperwork ready Monday morning."
"I want to sign it."
"Annabel, I'm going to ask you to wait forty-eight hours."
"Why?"
"Because you just received new information that made you angry, and anger is a perfectly good reason to leave a marriage but a terrible reason to accept a specific financial arrangement without reviewing it carefully.
The agreement is generous. That doesn't mean it's optimal.
If the affair was longer and more public than initially disclosed, there may be grounds to renegotiate. "
Annabel closed her eyes. She didn't want to renegotiate. She didn't want Alistair's money. She wanted to be free of him — free of the lies, the humiliation, the way her skin still remembered his hands.
"I don't care about the money."
"I know. That's why you have me. Give me forty-eight hours. I'll review the agreement again with this new information. If it still looks right, we sign Monday. If there's room to do better, I'll tell you what better looks like and you can decide."
"Fine. Forty-eight hours."
"Good. And Annabel — don't contact Alistair before we talk. Don't respond to anything he sends. Can you do that?"
"Yes."
"I'll call you Monday morning."
Annabel hung up. She put the phone face-down on the counter.
Corinne hadn't moved. "What did she say?"
"Forty-eight hours. She wants to review the agreement again."
"Smart woman."
"I should have signed it weeks ago. Before the painting, before the benefit, before I started letting him back in."
"You didn't let him back in."
"I did. Not all the way. But I cracked the door.
I stood in that tent and watched him work the room and thought about what it would be like to go back.
Not to forgive him — just to go back. To have the life again.
The house. The foundation. The version of us that worked.
" She picked up the whiskey and drank. "That version never existed. I was the only one who didn't know."
Corinne crossed the kitchen and sat on the stool beside her. Their shoulders touched. Corinne didn't say anything. She didn't need to.
Outside, the West Village hummed with Saturday noise — people on the sidewalk, a car horn, music from somewhere down the block. Normal life. The kind of life Annabel had given up when she married into a family that treated privacy like a currency and silence like a virtue.
"I keep thinking about March," Annabel said. "Your birthday. I called him from this apartment, actually. Right there on the couch. I was laughing. He said he was having a quiet night."
"And he was at the cottage with her."
"He was at the cottage with her."
Corinne's jaw tightened. Her hands curled on the counter.
"Every good memory I have from the last six months is contaminated," Annabel said.
"Every dinner, every weekend, every time he touched me.
I don't know what was real and what was performance.
And the thing that makes me angriest is that I can't tell the difference.
If you can't tell the difference between real and fake, then either the fake was very good or the real was never as solid as you thought. "
"Or both," Corinne said.
"Or both."
They sat in the small kitchen with the garlic-and-lemon smell and the whiskey and the late afternoon light coming through the window that faced the fire escape.
Annabel thought about the painting — the Sara Koh winter landscape, fourteen by ten inches, eight hundred dollars, sitting in a storage facility in Long Island City for nine years.
She had almost let that painting mean something.
She had almost let it rewrite the story.
But the story was simple. Her husband had cheated on her for six months.
Everyone knew. He let her be the last to find out.
And now he was sending paintings and confessing in moonlit gardens because that was what men like Alistair did — they managed the crisis.
They deployed the right gestures at the right moments.
They made you feel like forgiveness was your idea.
She was done being managed.
"I'm going to sign the papers Monday," she said. "Whatever Judith says about renegotiating, I'm signing. I want it over."
"Then it'll be over."
Annabel looked at her best friend — the curly hair, the warm face, the steady presence that had been the one fixed point in the last several weeks.
Fifteen years. Corinne had been there since the first week at Columbia.
Before Alistair, before the money, before the penthouse and the foundation and the careful construction of a life that turned out to be built on sand.
"Thank you," Annabel said.
"Don't thank me. I'm keeping a tab. You're buying me dinner for the rest of our lives."
This time, Annabel smiled. Small. Brief. Real.
She finished the whiskey. She called no one else.
She sat in Corinne's kitchen until the light shifted from gold to gray, and she let herself feel the full weight of what she'd lost — not the marriage, not the money, not the house.
The hope. She had let herself hope, and the hope had been crushed by a woman she barely knew over a two-hundred-dollar bottle of rosé in a Bridgehampton restaurant.
She would not hope again. She would decide.