Chapter 4
Chapter Four
It’s an act, Flint. Don’t forget it.
I have to keep saying it to myself in the quiet of my own office, because she is making it very hard to remember.
She’s in one of the two leather chairs on the wrong side of my desk, the supplicant’s side, the side built an inch and a half too low, except she’s made herself smaller than even the chair intended, knees pressed together, hands folded in her lap, her whole body drawn down into something that looks like it would come apart in my grip if I so much as raised my voice.
She still has her coat on. She came straight here from the corridor and the elevator and she never took it off, and the morning’s crying has left her pale and impossibly young, and the sight of her like that goes in under every guard I have and turns, and every animal instinct I own is shouting at me to come around this desk and gather her up off that low chair and tell her not one word of what I am about to say to her is true.
An act. She had her head resting on Barrymore’s shoulder on a park bench yesterday.
She has spent two months laughing up into that man’s face while she whispered the words to me each morning with her own soft mouth at my door.
The fragile shape folded into the leather is the very same woman the whole city stood and watched choose the golden boy, and if I let the picture of her trembling come apart undo me now, I will deserve every single thing that comes after.
So I keep my voice level, the way I keep my voice level across any table where I mean to take something, and I begin.
“It’s been six months. I think it’s time we ended this farce.”
She flinches like I’ve struck her across the face. I file the flinch away under performance and make myself go on.
“Freedom comes at a price, though. I need an heir, and I’ve no intention of marrying anyone else to get one.”
She shakes her head slowly, side to side, as though if she does it gently enough the words might rearrange themselves into something that makes sense. “I don’t understand. Why are you suddenly?—”
“What other explanation do you need?” I let the boredom slide into my voice, the cruelest thing I own, the same cold finality I’ve used to end careers from this exact chair. “I’ve grown tired of you. I want out. Only not without an heir first.”
“Was it really all a lie to you?”
Her voice cracks straight down the middle of the sentence, and I have to turn my eyes to the window over her shoulder, to the gray river and the gray sky stacked above it, because her face is about to cost me something I cannot afford to spend in front of her.
“We both had our fun,” I tell the glass. “But did you truly imagine it would last? Did you imagine I’d be content, at the end of it, with someone like you?”
Someone like you. The lie is so total it’s nearly funny.
There has never in my life been anyone like her, and that is the whole of the catastrophe, the entire reason I’m sitting here doing this.
But she doesn’t know that, and she never will, because the version of me that might have told her died somewhere in the cold ground between a cemetery and a dream, and the man left holding the desk has exactly one weapon left in the drawer and fully intends to use it on her.
“Why are you being so cruel?” she whispers.
“The truth usually is.” I let myself ease back into my chair as though I’m bored, as though my own pulse isn’t going hard against my collar. “Now stop wasting my time. Do we have a deal?”
And here it is, the moment I’ve steered this whole conversation toward, the trap sitting open between us with its jaws back.
I’ve told her she’s free. I’ve told her I’m finished.
I’ve laid out the exit she ought to be leaping for with both hands, a clean end and a settlement more generous than any court would grant her and the golden boy waiting in the wings the entire city picked for her in the first place.
All she has to do is say yes, give me a child, and walk out into the better life everyone agrees she should have had.
She lifts her eyes to me, and her chin does the brave thing it always does in the half-second before it crumples, and she says the only words in the language that can keep her.
“I can’t give my baby up.”
They’re exactly the words I expected. I know her well enough, even now, even with Nolan’s photographs burning a hole in my desk drawer, to have known she would never hand a child over to a man like the one I’m playing. I built the entire trap on that one certainty.
And I still feel the relief slam into me hard enough to drive the breath clean out of my chest, and I have to hold my own face still by main force so she won’t see what her answer has done to me.
Because those six small words are the key to her cell, and I have just turned it on her, and the worst and most shameful truth of my entire life is that I needed to hear them.
I need her to stay mine. I would burn the franchise and the fortune and the name my father never gave me to the ground before I’d let her walk out that door and into Barrymore’s car, and I will die before I let her see one flicker of it.
“Fine, then.”
This is my answer. It’s the only one I have in me.
“You’ll remain my wife, so that you can be a mother to our child.
But make no mistake about the terms of it.
” I hold her gaze across the desk so she’ll know I mean every word.
“One mistake from you, and I will cut you out of that child’s life so completely you’ll be reading about its birthdays in the papers along with everyone else. ”
“What mistake would I ever?—”
“Another man,” I say.
Her eyes go wide and wet. “I would never?—”
“Then we won’t have any problem at all, will we.” I tip my head toward the door before she can finish swearing me an innocence I can’t let myself believe in. “I’ll see you at home.”
She gets to her feet, and her legs don’t quite hold her, and she catches at the arm of the chair to stay upright. “T-Trey...”
My jaw locks down so hard it aches, because my name in her mouth used to be the best sound in the whole world to me.
She’d say it sleepy in the mornings, say it laughing into her coffee, say it soft against my shoulder in the dark, and I built a small quiet private religion out of the way she said it.
Now it goes into me like something with an edge, because she’s saying it the way a person says a name they’re begging, and I have made very sure she has nothing left she’s allowed to beg me for.
“We’ve discussed everything that needs discussing,” I tell her. “I expect you ready when I come home. The sooner we get you with child, the sooner we both get what we want out of this.”
She goes. I watch the heavy door settle shut behind her and I sit dead still in the big chair until I’m certain she’s past the elevator and out of earshot, and then I let out a breath with six months and one ruined morning packed down inside it, and before it’s even fully out of me I’m reaching for the phone, because the only thing I have ever known to do with a feeling is put it to work.
I call Nolan.
He’s the man I keep on retainer for the work that can’t be done out in the open, the one who quietly profiled three separate sets of investors for me before I let any of them near the team and saved me a fortune in every case.
He picks up the way he always picks up, on the second ring, no name, no greeting, no weather.
“Boss.”
“I need a favor.”
“Sure.”
I give him the names without any preamble.
Barrymore first, and longest, everything there is to be had on him going back a full year, where he goes and who he sees and what he wants and whether any part of what he wants is currently asleep in the farthest guest room of my apartment.
Then Raymond Glasgow, because a man who walks into my office with a folder of photographs already copied and waiting is a man who has been planning this a great deal longer than a single morning, and I want the name of everyone who sat at the table with him while he did it.
Then two more names off the board, the two who’ve always been the loudest on the subject of the right schools and the right grandfathers.
“Find out what they’re all up to,” I tell him. “Every one of them. I don’t care how small it seems.”
“How fast?”
“Yesterday.”
He’s gone without a goodbye, which is the single best thing about him and the reason I keep paying him what I pay him.
After that I make myself go back to work.
There are contracts on the screen that need my eyes and a quarter that will not close itself, and I sit in front of the whole of it and get absolutely nothing done, because every time my attention slips its leash it goes straight back to the same place, the low leather chair, the folded hands, the coat she never took off, the face that flinched when I said farce and broke clean apart when I said someone like you.
An act, I tell myself again, and the word has a little less power over me every hour that passes, because I have sat across this desk from a great many people performing for their lives and not one of them has ever once looked the way she looked.
If it was an act, it’s the only act I’ve ever watched that made the performer bleed.
The thought rides with me through every wasted hour of the afternoon, down in the elevator, into the back of the car, home through traffic I don’t see a foot of, and it’s still sitting beside me at eight that evening when I let myself into the apartment and find it dark and silent in a way it hasn’t been since the night before our wedding.
No music. No lamp left on for me in the hall.
None of the small ordinary sounds of another person somewhere in the rooms. My own room, when I reach it, is exactly as I left it this morning, the bed made and untouched, the air gone cold and impersonal, scrubbed clean of every small warm trace of her I’d stopped noticing because I’d let myself believe they would simply always be there.
Her things are gone from the top of the dresser.
Her side of the closet stands open and bare, the hangers pushed to one end.
And for one absurd, lurching second some part of me is certain she’s run after all, deal or no deal, straight out the door and into his car.
Then I understand. She hasn’t left the apartment at all. She’s only left me.
Fine. As though I’d make any kind of scene about it.
As though I’d go knocking down my own hallway like a boy locked out of his own house, demanding to know why my wife won’t share a bed with the man who spent this morning telling her to her face that he was tired of her.
She has done exactly the thing I told her this morning she was free to do, every part of it short of the one thing I forbade her, and if she wants to put a wall and a length of corridor between the two of us tonight then she is more than welcome to the wall and the corridor both.
I tell myself all of that very firmly, standing alone in my cold immaculate room.
And then I go and find her anyway, down the dark hall past one empty guest room and the next, all the way to the last and farthest one, the small room at the end with the window that never gets the morning, the exact room a person would choose if the thing she wanted most in the world was distance from the man who’d put her there.
The door’s open a few inches. She’s curled on top of the made covers with her shoes still on, fallen asleep the sudden hard way people fall asleep when crying has simply worn them all the way down, and the tracks of it haven’t dried yet on her face.
I stop in the doorway and I don’t go in, because going in is not a thing the man I’ve spent all day pretending to be would ever do.
She looks so small. She looked small this morning too, in the chair, and I told myself then that it was strategy, that the smallness was aimed at me like everything else.
But standing here now in the dark with no cameras and no board and no audience of any kind, with no broad desk to put between us and hide behind, I can’t make the lie hold its shape.
There’s no one here to perform for. There is no reason on this earth for her to be lying asleep and tear-streaked and undone in the worst and farthest room in my home unless the grief is real, unless I am the one who did this to her, unless the thing I broke apart this morning to keep was a thing that had somehow, impossibly, against every term of every contract, already been mine.
I stand over the wreck I’ve made of her in the dark, and the question comes rising up out of the oldest and the ugliest part of me, the part that grew up on the wrong side of every set of tracks there is and never once in its life expected to be the one chosen, and it asks the only thing it has ever truly wanted to know.
What does Barrymore have that I can’t give you?