Chapter 5 #2
I want to ask where she got that information. Across the table, Halloran is already nodding as though her answering for me is perfectly ordinary.
His wife starts telling Ashley about the renovations at their country house.
“Sounds lovely,” Ashley says, turning back to me before the woman has finished.
I look across the table. Halloran’s wife hesitates, then picks up her wineglass. Sienna would have asked a question and listened to the answer. I can picture her leaning forward, interested, making it easy for the woman to keep talking.
Ashley leans closer to me. I wish Sienna were here.
Halloran looks from Ashley to me, then lowers his eyes to his plate. I want to tell him he’s wrong. I don’t know how to do that without giving everyone at the table a reason to listen.
I haven’t slept with Ashley since we ended. I keep coming back to that as though Sienna accused me of it.
She asked if I loved her.
I told her I wouldn’t insult her by lying. I was so determined to be honest that I let her leave believing there was nothing worth staying for. Now Ashley is beside me, and my wife won’t answer my calls.
During the main course, Ashley leans close enough that I can hear her beneath Halloran’s conversation.
“She’s gone, isn’t she? Not just tonight.”
I turn my glass by the stem.
“You haven’t told me why she isn’t here,” Ashley says, still pitched for me and nobody else. “You haven’t checked your phone. And you look like you haven’t slept in days.” She pauses. “I know what you look like when you haven’t slept, Cade.”
She has been watching my face the way she watches everything. Cataloging what is missing. Waiting for the space to open.
“All right,” she says, when I don’t answer. She turns back to Halloran’s wife and gets the woman’s name wrong and doesn’t correct herself, and the wife covers it graciously, and Ashley doesn’t notice or doesn’t care.
Sienna would never. Not once. And Ashley is sitting in her chair, failing at all of it except the part aimed at me.
Halloran gets going on his boat after that.
There is a story about the boat, and a marina, and a harbormaster, and a piece of equipment I do not care about, and it has been going for a while when Ashley says, quietly, at the level of the tablecloth, one sentence about Halloran and the boat that I am not going to repeat to anyone.
I laugh.
It comes out of me loud enough that two people at the far end look up, and it is not a sound I have made at a table in years.
Her eyes widen, her lips part, and I watch her arrange a surprise she doesn’t feel. She is watching me too, checking whether I believe her. I wonder how many times I’ve mistaken that attention for affection.
“That’s the laugh,” she says, soft. “I forgot you had it.”
Her hand comes down on my sleeve, just above the wrist, and stays. Light. Familiar. Exactly where a wife’s hand would go.
I want it off.
I want it off and I do not move my arm, because moving my arm would be a headline at this table, and she knows that. She chose the placement. She chose the pressure. She is giving every man in this room a picture, and the picture is: this is where I belong.
I make myself stay through the rest of dinner, answering Halloran, smiling when someone looks my way. Beneath the table, my knee won’t stop bouncing. All I want is to get to my car and shut the door, somewhere I can miss my wife without having to look as though I don’t.
Ashley is on the steps beside me before I have the valet ticket in my hand.
“Come have a drink,” she says. Not a question. “You shouldn’t go home to an empty house.”
The way she says it, empty house, like she knows exactly what the rooms sound like without Sienna in them. Like she has been picturing it.
“Good night, Ashley.”
“Cade.” She puts her hand on my arm again. “You don’t have to do this alone.”
I remove her hand. I do it gently and I do it where nobody can see, and she lets me, and the smile she gives me when I step back is small and knowing and patient, and it says, not tonight, then.
The valet pulls the car around and I get in and I close the door and I sit there with my hands on the wheel until my knuckles ache.
I take the parkway. My exit comes up with the sign lit and the ramp clear and I am past it before I have decided anything, doing seventy in the middle lane with my jaw locked. I don’t want to go home. I can’t stand the quiet.
The office parks and the outlet strip and the long stretch with the storage places, and then the tolls thin out, and then it is trucks. The city ends all at once, and after that the road narrows and drops and there is a guardrail on the right with nothing behind it but black.
The coast road.
I ease off and let the car slow and pull onto the shoulder and put the hazards on and sit there with the engine running.
I don’t know where my wife is.
I check my phone. The messages I sent her are still unread. Where are you? Are you safe?
She is not going to answer.
I open the phone and scroll through the names. Her doctor, whose office I have called exactly once. The woman who does the flowers. Halloran’s wife.
Not one of them could tell me where she would go, and I couldn’t tell them either. I had two years and I never learned where she goes when she is hurt.
I get to my sister’s name and stop with my thumb over it, and the hazards ticking, and the heater blowing on my hands.
My sister will pick up. She probably already knows.
She and Sienna are friends. If I call, there will be a silence first. Then she will say my name in that particular way she has when I have done something so stupid she needs a second to decide where to begin.
I put the phone down.
I sit there and look at the road ahead and realize where I am going.
The coast road runs north for forty miles, and at the end of it, on a bluff above the water, is the Ellerin plant.
The first building the company ever had after the room over the hardware store.
He put it there because the land was cheap and the water was close, and everything else grew out of it, until it grew into something that needed a succession plan and a marriage to keep it whole.
I wasn’t thinking about the plant. I wasn’t planning a route. I took the coast road, and now I am on the shoulder of a road that leads to the thing she loved enough to marry a stranger to protect.
I put the car in drive. I pull back onto the road and switch off the hazards and the dark closes in on both sides.
I’m not going to find her there. I know that. The plant is concrete and glass and security lights and it will not tell me anything I need to hear.
But I keep driving toward it, because it is the closest thing I have to driving toward her.