Chapter 5
CADE
“You’ve read it a dozen times,” Pierce says. “The words aren’t going to change no matter how much you wallow in them.”
“I’m not wallowing.”
“You’re holding that phone like it’s a lab result.”
I set it face down on the blotter and go back to the signature page in front of me. Pierce is standing in the doorway with his coat on. He has been standing there for twenty minutes, waiting on me, and we both know he could leave.
Her message came in this morning.
The movers will come for my things at the end of the month.
They have my list. Nothing of yours is on it.
I would rather not be there, and I expect you would rather not either, so make whatever arrangement is easiest.
S.
She has never signed anything to me with an initial. Two years of notes on the counter about dry cleaning and dinner times, and she signed all of them with her name, and once with a drawing of a duck for a reason I never asked about.
I read it again. There isn’t a single accusation to push back on. She engineered every sentence to strip out the possibility of a fight, leaving me staring at a message that doesn’t even ask for a reply.
I answered anyway. Within a minute of the message arriving I sent two lines that had nothing to do with movers.
Where are you?
Are you safe?
Both delivered. Neither read. That was hours ago and my phone has not made a sound since.
I miss her so badly I would give anything to have her sitting across from me, even if she wouldn’t look at me.
Now I am sitting here trying to draft a reply to the movers message, because that’s the only lane she left open for me, and I cannot make the words go in the right order. Every version sounds like what it is: a man negotiating the logistics of losing his wife.
“You want to hear my read,” Pierce says.
“Not particularly.”
“We had our conversation. I’m not going back through it.” He leans on the frame. “I’m asking what you said to her that night. After.”
“I told her the truth.”
“Say more.”
“I told her I wasn’t going to insult her by lying to her about what this was.” I cap the pen. “I have never lied to that woman. Not once, not about anything. She knew what she was signing before she signed it. She has never once complained about a single term of it.”
Pierce looks at me for a while.
“That’s what I’d sit with,” he says.
There is a knock, and my assistant leans in with her tablet against her chest and says the florist has been trying to reach Mrs. Belluomo about the standing order for the front hall. They can’t get through and want to know if Friday’s delivery is still confirmed.
My assistant’s face is professionally blank. Pierce’s is not.
“Cancel it,” I say. “Until further notice.”
It comes out level and easy and I go back to the page. My assistant writes it down and thanks me and leaves.
Neither of my messages has been read. Until now, I’ve been telling myself she just doesn’t want to answer me. I need that to be the reason.
Sienna does not have any family left. Her grandfather died the year after we married. When his health began failing, he needed someone to keep Ellerin solvent and in the family.
My family had the capital. I had no illusions left about romance—not after Ashley. Sienna got the protection the old man begged for. I got a stake in Ellerin. I thought we both understood what we were getting.
Nobody in this building has ever asked me a single question about my wife that went past the surface.
Neither have I. I know more about the people I do business with than I do about the woman who slept beside me. I look down at the paperwork, ashamed to meet Pierce’s eyes.
He watches me for another second, then he goes, and I sign the rest of the page.
When the office is empty I turn the phone back over. The two messages sit there, delivered, unread. I type a reply to the movers message: That’s fine. I’ll be out of the house.
I stare at it. I delete it. I type it again. I add: Please tell me where you are.
I delete the second line. She did not write a message that invites that. She wrote a message about boxes.
I send the logistics reply and hold the phone and wait for the dots, the read receipt, anything that tells me she is on the other end of this and breathing and somewhere with a lock on the door.
Nothing comes back.
I set the phone down and pick it up and set it down again.
I want to call her. I want to drive to wherever she is and stand outside until she comes to the window.
But I have nothing to offer. Every version of what I want to say starts with come home and she would hear that as a term, not a feeling, and she would be right.
I get a few minutes of work done. The phone stays dark. I check it twice more before taking the elevator down to the garage. Nothing. Just an empty screen that leaves an ugly, hollow ache right in the middle of my chest.
The board dinner is in the private upstairs room at the restaurant we always use, which means an hour of standing with drinks before anybody sits down. I have done a hundred of these. The room is warm and the light is low and every man in it has known me for a decade.
I have not eaten today. I have not eaten anything that stayed down since she left. The collar of my shirt is suddenly a size too big, chafing against my neck in the overheated air. I lock my jaw and listen to the hum of three different conversations I don’t give a damn about.
“No Sienna tonight?” Halloran asks, appearing at my shoulder before I can even reach for a drink.
“She’s under the weather.”
He nods and tells me about his daughter’s application to three schools he can’t afford to be seen bragging about, and I ask the right question twice, and that covers it. Halloran moves on.
The second time it is Halloran’s wife, who asks after Sienna with her hand on my arm, warm, no edge in it at all. “Send her my love,” she says. “Tell her we missed her.”
“I will.”
I will not, because I have nowhere to send it.
I hold the smile while she squeezes my arm and drifts away, entirely unaware that my wife walked out three days ago and I don’t even know what city she’s sleeping in.
My stomach folds over and I take a sip from the glass to cover it and the liquor hits empty and burns.
The third time I don’t hear the name. Somebody starts asking and the answer is already out of my mouth before the question is finished, and we pivot straight into the earnings forecast.
Across the room a woman in green comes toward me with both hands out and her face already lit, and I know her, I have sat down to dinner with her twice, and her name is not anywhere in me.
Sienna always ran interference. On the walk from the lobby she’d tilt her head toward mine, dropping names, firms, whose child had been in the hospital, feeding me the cards before I had to play them.
I never asked her to do it. I never even thanked her. Now I’m standing here completely blind.
I take both of the woman’s hands and tell her she looks well and ask whether they managed to get away this summer, and she is delighted, and she does not notice.
I notice. I feel the gap where Sienna stood like a missing stair.
I make a note to have the office put spouses on the brief going forward, and the thought makes me sick, because I am already building systems to replace what she did for me, and she has not been gone long enough for the flowers to die.
Richard Vauclair has sent Ashley in his place. She comes in at the tail end of the drinks in something dark and cut well, and she stops at the door long enough for every head to turn. Once I would have said she was beautiful. Tonight all I see is that she is not Sienna.
She was carried out of a foundation gala in front of a crowd, and this is the first time most of them have seen her since, and every one of them makes it easy for her. She accepts the kindness like a woman who has already used it up and come back for more.
She finds me by the window. She is glowing. Whatever she felt about that gala, shame is not in the neighborhood.
“Tell me honestly how bad it was,” she says.
“You were sick.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
“It was a long night for everyone.”
“I have been sick about it since,” she says. “Not the fainting. The other part. Her standing up there talking about her grandfather and the whole room watching me get carried out.” She tilts her head. “How is she?”
Her mouth is saying all the right things. The smile on her face is saying something else entirely.
I look at her and try to find the woman I was in love with at twenty-six. There is a version of her I have kept very carefully for a long time, and the woman across from me is not quite it, and I do not know when the two came apart. Or whether they were ever the same thing.
“Sienna is fine,” I say.
“Is she here tonight?”
She already knows the answer. She knew it before she walked in.
A waiter announces that dinner is ready. I leave her question unanswered and go to the table. Her place card is beside mine.
I push the fish around my plate until the man on my left asks whether there’s something wrong with it.
“Not at all. I ate late.”
Last night I stood in front of the open refrigerator, hungry enough to feel sick, and couldn’t find anything I could bear to eat. Eventually I closed it and went back upstairs.
I haven’t slept more than an hour at a stretch since she left. I reach for her before I’m properly awake, and the cold sheets bring it all back. Then I lie there wanting her beside me so badly that getting out of bed feels easier than staying.
I straighten in my chair and answer a question about the business. The man across from me nods and asks another, and I manage that one too.
Ashley moves my water glass closer. Before I can refuse the wine, she catches the waiter and sends it back. I look at her, uncomfortable with how easily she has begun deciding what I need.
Halloran asks whether the closing is still the twentieth.
“The twenty-second,” Ashley says before I can answer. “They moved it.”
She’s right. I have never discussed that deal with her.