Chapter 2
SIENNA
The key turns in the front door at two in the morning, and I reach over and turn the lamp on.
I have been sitting in the dark long enough that the light hurts.
My face is washed. My hair is down. I am in the soft gray pants with the worn knee and an old sweatshirt from before the marriage.
The dress is on a hanger on the back of the closet door.
I put it there when I came home, because apparently some habits survive anything.
He comes in the way he always comes in. Keys into the dish on the console, one cufflink out, then the other, jacket folded over his forearm.
He stops when he sees me.
“You’re up.”
“I’m up.”
His pale green eyes go to the lamp, then to me, and I can see him deciding that nothing is wrong, because nothing in the room is broken and I sound like myself. He goes into the kitchen. Water runs. He comes back with a glass, drinks half of it, and sets it on the console next to the keys.
“Pierce sent me a message,” he says. “He said you were very good.”
“Did he?”
“He said the applause went on for a long time.”
“It did.”
He nods, like a report has come in and matched the projection. My grandfather’s award is sitting on the kitchen counter in plain sight. His eyes haven’t gone to it.
“How is she?” I say.
“She’s asleep. She wouldn’t let me call anyone.”
He takes off his watch and sets it on the table beside the lamp.
“She hasn’t been eating again. Her blood pressure drops when she goes too long without food. It’s happened before.”
Again.
“She was still dizzy when I got her upstairs, so I stayed until she fell asleep. Then I waited another half hour to make sure she didn’t wake up sick.”
He says all of this while opening his collar, his tone unchanged, his attention on the button.
As though he were telling me the time.
“Have you eaten?”
The question is out before I can stop it.
He looks at me then, and I wish I had asked anything else.
But I have spent two years making sure he eats. One terrible night has not taught my mouth new habits.
“I had something at the hotel,” he says.
“Good.” The relief is automatic and gone almost as soon as I hear it. “You could have called the doctor and come back.”
“She wouldn’t have let him in.”
“Then you could have come back.”
“Sienna, she was still dizzy. I wasn’t leaving her alone.”
He is not raising his voice. He never raises his voice. He is explaining a decision he considers obviously correct, patiently, to his wife, and every sentence of it is true.
A speech waits behind my teeth, built in the cab and sharpened in the dark while I waited for him.
The quiet stretches.
I let the speech go. The answer matters more.
“Cade.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you love her?”
He goes still. Not because he has been caught. Because he is doing me the courtesy of actually considering the question.
In the study, the answer came quickly. Here, with me, he slows down as though there might be a right way to hurt me. I watch him look for it.
“I don’t know,” he says.
Twice in one night, in two different rooms, to two different people. I had wanted so badly for him to give me a different answer.
I nod. My hands are folded in my lap and they stay there.
“Do you love me?”
He holds my eyes. I wish he would look away.
“I told you what this was before you signed,” he says. “I’ve never pretended otherwise. You want me to say something that isn’t true because tonight went badly. I’m not going to insult you by lying.”
He says it gently. He is being careful with me, and he believes that is the same as being good to me. So did I, for our entire marriage.
“All right,” I say.
“Is this about tonight?”
“Which part?”
“The gala.” He puts a hand flat on the back of the chair, patient, ready to work through it item by item. “If it’s the car, I should have called you. That was mine. I’ll take that one.”
He will, too. He will apologize, make sure it never happens again, and believe that fixes it. A year from now, he would still think the problem was the car.
“You’ve had a long night,” he says.
“I have.”
He lets go of the chair and reaches for the water glass beside his keys. He is going to drink it and go to bed, and in the morning there will be coffee, and none of this will have happened, because nothing was thrown and nobody shouted.
“I was outside the study tonight,” I say. “I heard all of it. I wanted to see if you’d say it to my face.”
The glass stops halfway to his mouth. He lowers it slowly, missing the coaster, the bottom knocking against the wood.
“Sienna.”
He says my name the way he did at our wedding, and for one second I am back there waiting for the rest. It does not come.
I wait. I give it more room than it deserves. This is a man who can stop six lawyers mid-argument with one sentence and he cannot find another sentence for me.
He could tell me I heard it wrong. He could lie, badly, the way Pierce would have wanted him to, and I would have something to hold on to for a week.
I stand up and walk past him, and he does not put a hand out.
The suitcase is on the bench at the end of the bed, open, half full. It was open long before his key turned.
I did it as soon as I got in, still cold from the curb, and then I stopped halfway, because I told myself I was being dramatic and that a reasonable woman sleeps on a thing like this. Then I went downstairs and sat in the dark to find out.
He appears in the doorway. He does not come in.
“What is this?”
“It’s a suitcase.”
“Sienna.”
I fold the jeans. I put in the sweater with the stretched cuff, the one I wear when nobody is coming over.
I take my charger off the nightstand and the paperback that has had the store receipt marking the same page near the front since spring.
I take the folder from the bottom drawer with my passport and the trust papers and the deed that has my own name on it and always has.
I close the folder and put it under the sweater, so it does not bend.
“Where are you going?”
The wedding ring catches when I pull it over my knuckle. I set it on the dresser beside the jewelry box. Everything else stays inside. Every piece was chosen by someone whose job it was to choose it. Beautiful, expensive, and never mine.
“You don’t have to do this tonight,” he says. “Take the house. I’ll go to the apartment. You can have the house as long as you want it.”
“I don’t want the house.”
“Then tell me what you want. Whatever it is, we can do it in the morning with people who know how.”
He means it. I know he does. He is willing to give me almost anything I can put a name to except the one thing that matters. I just want him to love me, to give me one reason to believe he feels anything for me.
“There’s nothing to arrange.”
“There’s always something to arrange.”
He isn’t wrong. There will be a quiet mountain of logistics, and he will manage the entire process flawlessly, and every single detail will be handled by someone whose name I will never know.
“I can have somebody drive you,” he says.
“Cade.”
“Yes.”
“I told you what I heard tonight, and this is what you have for me?”
That one does not get an argument either. His eyes go to the suitcase on the bench, then to the closet, still mostly full. His face eases. He thinks I am coming back.
I put my shoes along the bottom edge, wedge them in beside the jeans, and pull the straps tight. Cade watches from the bedroom doorway. He has not crossed it.
“Wait until morning at least,” he says. “It’s the middle of the night.”
I pull the zipper around the three corners of the suitcase and tug it shut.
The suitcase is heavier than I expected. I take the stairs slowly, one hand on the rail, with Cade following behind me.
The award is waiting on the kitchen counter. I shift the load to my other side and fit the plaque against my ribs. It leaves me with both arms full.
Cade stops at the bottom of the stairs.
“Let me do something.”
I freeze. A foolish, traitorous beat of hope rises in my chest as I wait for him to go on. Don’t go. Stay. Talk to me.
His hand reaches toward the leather handle. “The suitcase. At least let me carry it.”
That is all he meant.
“I don’t need your help.”
He puts his hand down. I work the lever with two fingers and shoulder open the door to the garage. He follows me as far as the threshold.
“Sienna, wait.”
I stop beside the car.
“What am I supposed to tell people?”
I turn around then. He is standing in the doorway, waiting for me to answer, and I nearly do. I nearly give him something that will make this easier for him.
“Tell them I asked if you loved me.”
His mouth opens.
“I’ll send for the rest of my things.”
I put the award on the passenger seat and the suitcase in the trunk. The trunk does not latch the first time, so I do it again, and it takes.
From behind the wheel, I press the remote. The garage door climbs, and the cold rolls in beneath it.
The engine turns over on the first try. Cade is still standing in the doorway between the garage and the house.
The gate opens.
I pull onto the empty road, and for the first time tonight, maybe for the first time in our marriage, some of the weight lifts.