Chapter 9
CADE
We never had a honeymoon.
I open the laptop on the desk without sitting down and scroll the calendar back two years, to May, and there it is in front of me in the same blue blocks as any other week.
The wedding on the Saturday. Monday, seven fifteen, the finance review.
Tuesday, the site in the north lot, all day.
Wednesday, dinner with a Belgian who ate almost nothing.
Thursday, three separate things I could not have named a month later.
A clean, full, ordinary week, and the week after it the same, and nowhere in either of them a gap where the two of us went anywhere at all.
Nothing was booked, and nothing was canceled, because the subject never came up. It had not crossed my mind once. If anyone had asked me in the elevator, I would have said that we are simply not honeymoon people, in the tone of a man reporting a preference the two of us had agreed on.
She was twenty-nine. Her grandfather had cried when he saw her in her wedding dress.
I sit down. The album is still open at the cake, and I turn back toward the front, past the toasts and the wedding guests, until I reach a photograph of her on the steps. I stop turning the pages.
There was no sex before the wedding. Why would there have been?
There hadn’t even been a kiss. We had signed the papers.
We had shaken hands across a table with her grandfather beside us.
She was not my girlfriend. I had not courted her.
I had no right to touch her, and I was proud of myself for understanding that.
I had mistaken restraint for decency before the marriage had even begun.
She came out of the bathroom our wedding night in silk. Cream, or something near it, cut low at the back, and she had done something to her hair so it was off her neck, and she stood there in the doorway of a suite I had booked and paid for, not looking at me at first.
She was so beautiful I could not swallow properly. I remember the shape of her under that silk, and I remember standing there looking a good deal longer than a gentleman looks.
And then I decided to be one.
I said she should take the bed. I said I would take the couch, and I said it kindly, the way you hand a woman something she must be relieved to be handed, and I was pleased with myself while I said it. I thought I was giving her a way out of the one part of the arrangement she had not chosen.
I did not notice her expression then. I watch it now, knowing what I know, and something goes out of it.
It happens between one breath and the next.
Her chin comes up a half inch and her mouth arranges itself and she smiles at me, and it is the smile she hands people in a receiving line, the one I have stood beside a thousand times.
She said we were both adults. She said we were married, for goodness’ sake, and that I should sleep in the bed, and that she would stay on her side, and she stumbled twice getting through it, and she was still holding the doorframe when she finished.
I said all right. A sensible arrangement, I thought. The two of us handling the awkward part well, like people who understand what this is.
We lay in that bed with a foot of sheet between us and I slept. That is the worst part. I didn’t even hold my new wife. I slept through until morning, woke first, and thought not waking her was consideration.
It was five weeks before she came to me, and she did it in the dark, with her voice pitched low so it could be a joke if it needed to be, and she asked me whether I wanted to, and she had clearly been carrying the sentence around for a long time before she found the nerve to say it.
She had to ask. I was her husband, and she had to ask.
She had even built an exit into the question in case the answer was no.
I was a man and she was a beautiful woman and I said yes. On the rare occasions I thought about it, I considered that the night our marriage properly began.
I had always made sure she finished. I had taken pride in that, as though competence were tenderness.
But I had never made love to my wife. I had sex with her.
I had touched her carefully. I had given her pleasure and kept everything else behind the walls.
And I think now, with something close to horror, that she knew the difference every time.
That first January, I came downstairs with my tie hanging loose because I had taken the knot apart twice and made it worse. Sienna laughed when she saw it and came over to fix it.
Her fingers worked beneath my collar, brushing my throat each time she tightened the knot. I remember looking down at her. I remember how close she was and how quiet the room became. When she finished, her hands stayed there for a second, resting against my chest.
I wanted to kiss her. The wanting was clear enough that I recognized it, and I still stepped back.
“Thank you,” I said.
Her hands fell.
She smiled as though nothing had happened, and I let her.
She did not ask me for anything that mattered again until the night she left.
Not a honeymoon, not an anniversary, not an hour.
Whatever she needed that money could buy, she got.
She learned fast, so she stopped asking and started managing, and I have spent two years calling that a peaceful marriage.
I close the album before I can go through it again.
I turn back to the laptop. The foyer lamp is still on, throwing its usual square of light across the hall.
Sienna Ellerin. Not Belluomo. She was Ellerin until she was twenty-nine, bought her own groceries, paid her own rent, lived an entire life before I ever put a ring on her finger.
Lauren told me I needed to figure out who my wife actually was.
This is step one. And it’s the only goddamn thing about her I’ve ever bothered to look up.
The search takes forty seconds. That’s all it takes to find her life before me. A deed bought outright, never transferred, taxes paid on time every single year, including this one. There’s a parcel number, and a road name I’ve never heard spoken out loud in my life.
I put the address into the map and the aerial takes a moment to load, and then there it is from above: a small roof, a deck off the back, a rail, a gravel lane running down to it, and water to the edge of the frame.
I hold the print against the edge of the monitor, lining them up. It’s the same roof. The same gray deck jutting out toward the waterline. Years apart, but the bones haven’t changed.
Ninety minutes up the coast. She had owned it our entire marriage, and I had gone on believing our house was her only world.
I open a blank page and type her name at the top of it, and under her name I type her favorite place, and then I put the road name after it, and look at what I have made.
Lauren gave me three simple questions, and I solved the easiest one off a public website. An address. And I still don’t have a damn clue about the rest.
The timer takes the lamp out at midnight. I do not get up to put it back on.
I start the second line.