Chapter 13 #2
"She has me doing this thing," he said. "Where I have to sit with why.
Not why Daphne. Not the logistics. Why I let myself become someone who could do that.
" He looked at the sidewalk. "It's not — there's no good answer.
That's the point. There's no version of this where I explain it and it makes sense.
It was selfish. It was cowardly. And I knew that while I was doing it. I knew it every single time."
The words landed in her chest one by one.
She had wanted honesty from him for months.
She had wanted him stripped of the corporate polish and the careful contrition and the gestures that cost money instead of blood.
And now here it was — raw, unscripted, offered on a sidewalk in Tribeca with no audience and nothing to gain — and she didn't know what to do with it.
"She asked me when I stopped being honest with you," he continued.
"Not about the affair. Before that. When I started editing myself around you.
And the answer was — I don't know. It was gradual.
I stopped telling you when I was scared.
I stopped telling you when something at the firm was bad.
I built this version of myself that was always in control, and then I resented you for believing it.
" He exhaled. "That's not your fault. That was mine. "
A taxi passed. Its headlights swept across his face and she saw it clearly — the exhaustion, the rawness, the absence of armor.
He wasn't performing. She had watched him perform for a hundred investors and a thousand donors and she knew every tell.
The slight lift of his chin. The way he modulated his voice down when he wanted to sound trustworthy.
None of that was here. He was just standing on a street corner, telling her the worst things about himself because she'd asked a two-word question.
"Thank you," she said. "For telling me."
He nodded. Didn't reach for more. Didn't try to turn it into a pitch.
They stood there for a moment that lasted longer than it should have. She could smell his soap — not cologne, just soap, something plain — and the wine on both of them and the summer air coming up from the river. She was close enough to touch him. She didn't.
"My car's on the next block," she said.
"Okay."
"Good night, Alistair."
"Good night."
She walked away. She did not look back. She was very precise about that. She put one foot in front of the other on the cobblestones and she found her car and she got in and she sat with her hands on the steering wheel for a long time before she started the engine.
#
The Murray Hill apartment was exactly as she'd left it.
Beige walls. Rented furniture. The separation agreement in its manila folder on the kitchen counter, forty-three pages of language that would undo eight years.
She set her keys beside it. She poured a glass of water.
She stood at the window and looked at the building across the street, where someone's kitchen light was on and she could see the shape of a person moving behind the curtain.
She was afraid.
Not of Alistair. She had moved past being afraid of Alistair somewhere between the Bridgehampton lunch and Dorothea's living room.
And not of being hurt again — though she would be, probably, in some form, because that was what happened when you let people matter.
The fear was quieter than that. More specific.
She was afraid of her own willingness.
It sat in her like a low hum, steady and constant, and she had been pretending for weeks that it wasn't there.
Every time she caught herself softening — the painting, the fellowship, the way he'd looked at her in the garden at East Hampton — she had found a reason to harden again.
The tabloid photo. The Bridgehampton revelations.
The sheer accumulated weight of what he'd done.
And the reasons were real. They were legitimate. They were not wrong.
But they were also a wall she was building to protect herself from a decision she didn't want to make.
Because the decision wasn't whether to forgive him. Forgiveness could happen at any distance. She could forgive him from across a courtroom. She could forgive him and never speak to him again and it would still count.
The decision was whether to try. Whether to take everything she knew — the affair, the lies, the months of secret phone calls and hotel rooms, the public humiliation, the way he had broken the one thing she thought was unbreakable — and hold it alongside the man on the sidewalk tonight, the one who said I knew it every single time without flinching.
Whether both of those things could be true at once and she could choose to walk toward him anyway.
She picked up her phone. Put it down. Picked it up again.
Corinne answered on the second ring.
"Hey. How was Sophie's?"
"He was there."
A pause. She could hear Corinne's apartment in the background — the creak of the old floors, something that might have been the radiator even in August.
"And?"
"And we talked. After dinner. On the street." Annabel pressed her thumb against the edge of the counter. "He's in therapy. He told me about it. Not like a sales pitch. Just — honestly."
"Okay." Corinne's voice was careful. Not the sharp, protective edge she'd been carrying since the beginning. Something more measured.
"He said he stopped being honest with me before the affair. That he built a version of himself and then resented me for believing it."
"That sounds like something a therapist helped him figure out."
"It does. It also sounded true."
Another pause. Longer this time. Annabel could picture her — curly hair piled up, probably on the couch with a book turned facedown on the cushion beside her, reading glasses pushed up on her forehead.
"I'm scared, Corinne."
"Of him?"
"Of me. Of the part of me that heard him say all of that and thought — okay. That's where we start."
She waited for it. The familiar Corinne response. He doesn't deserve you. He had his chance. You owe him nothing. All true. All things Annabel had needed to hear for months. All things she had leaned on like scaffolding while the rest of her life rearranged itself.
But Corinne didn't say any of that.
The silence held for three breaths. Four.
"What do you want?" Corinne asked.
The question was so simple it broke something open. Not a wall. Something smaller. A door she'd been holding shut with both hands.
"I don't know," Annabel said.
"Yeah, you do."
She closed her eyes. The counter was cool under her hand. The apartment hummed with the low drone of the air conditioner and the building settling around her. Forty-three pages on the counter. A man on a sidewalk who had finally stopped performing.
"I'm not ready," she said.
"That's not what I asked."
Annabel pressed her lips together. Her eyes burned. She would not cry. She had done enough crying over Alistair Stirling to fill every gallery in Chelsea, and she was done with it.
"I know what I want," she said. "I just don't know if I can survive wanting it."
Corinne was quiet for a moment. When she spoke, her voice was gentle in a way that fifteen years of friendship had earned.
"You survived everything else."
After they hung up, Annabel stood at the window for a long time.
The kitchen light across the street went dark.
The city kept moving below her — taxis, a couple walking a dog, a delivery bike weaving between lanes.
All of it ordinary. All of it continuing without regard for the fact that she was standing in a rented apartment with a separation agreement on her counter and the first honest conversation she'd had with her husband in years still warm in her chest.
She didn't sign the papers.
She didn't move them, either. She left them where they were — forty-three pages on the counter, waiting — and went to bed.