Chapter 19
CADE
Someone is knocking on a door.
I open my eyes to a ceiling I don’t recognize. Morning light, a crick in my neck, and Sienna asleep on my chest.
For a few seconds, I am happy.
Her cheek is over my heart. One hand is curled in my shirt, still holding a fold of it like she fell asleep mid-grip. The blanket is tucked around her shoulders. I must have pulled it over her in the night without waking either of us.
I don’t move. I wouldn’t move to double my fortune.
This should not be new.
I was married to her. I slept beside her night after night, and this is the first time I have ever woken with my wife in my arms.
I haven’t slept since she left. Not properly. Last night I slept so hard that when the knocking started I didn’t know where I was.
The knocking stops. Whoever it is waits.
Sienna makes a small sound and presses closer. Her fingers tighten once in my shirt and go loose again. She settles.
She’s still asleep. She would never do this awake. Not now.
I know that. I also know the knocking will start again.
For however long I have left, I let myself have it.
The second round is harder, and a woman’s voice comes with it.
Sienna jolts. Her head comes up. She looks at my chest, at her hand in my shirt, at my arm around her, and then she’s off me and on her feet on the far side of the coffee table, hair wild, a faint red line from one of my shirt buttons pressed into her cheek.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
“What?”
“I fell asleep. I didn’t mean to.”
“You don’t have to apologize for sleeping.”
“I wasn’t planning to stay.”
“Cade.”
“I haven’t been sleeping much.”
She looks at me a beat too long. Then the door gets a third round of knocking, and she closes her eyes.
“Oh no,” she says, and goes to open it.
Three women come in like they own the deed. The one in front is mid-sixties with the posture of a woman who has never lost an argument. She looks at Sienna’s lip and her whole face changes. Then she looks past her, at me, sitting on the couch in last night’s shirt.
Then at the blanket.
Then back at Sienna.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake.”
“Nothing happened,” Sienna says.
“I didn’t ask if anything happened.”
“I’m asking,” says the second woman, shorter, rounder, a grocery bag in each arm, already headed for the kitchen. “I brought breakfast. I deserve context.”
The third one says nothing. She closes the door behind her, quietly, and looks at me the way appraisers look at paintings.
I stand. I put out my hand.
“Cade Belluomo.”
The one in front looks at my hand.
“Take those from Barbara.”
I turn. Barbara is already holding out both grocery bags.
I take them.
“Kitchen,” the woman in front says.
“Patricia,” Sienna says.
It sounds like a warning. Patricia ignores it.
I carry the bags to the kitchen. Behind me they close around Sienna, all three.
Her chin turned toward the window light.
Her lip examined. A hiss through teeth, low questions — did she see a doctor, did she ice it, is she pressing charges, good girl.
Someone smooths her hair back from her face. Someone says sweetheart, twice.
I stand in my wife’s kitchen holding groceries and watch.
“You. Sit.”
Patricia points at a kitchen chair.
Men who run billion-dollar companies wait outside my office until I’m ready for them. Men twice my size get out of my way on sidewalks.
I sit.
Sienna stares at me. I can’t explain it to her. In every room I have ever entered, my name arrived first and settled everything. It doesn’t settle anything here, and I find I don’t mind.
Barbara unpacks the groceries. Eggs, bread, butter, bacon, coffee. She opens the cabinet with the mixing bowls without looking. Last night I opened two cabinets to find a mug. “Nancy, would you put the coffee on?”
The quiet one moves toward the sink.
Nancy, then. Nobody has introduced themselves. Apparently we’re past that.
Nancy pulls the fifth chair over from the desk by the window, because Sienna’s table only seats four, and nobody is planning to stand. That’s what the groceries mean. This isn’t going to be a short conversation.
“We saw the video,” Patricia says.
“Which one?” Sienna asks.
“All of them, dear. You’re everywhere.” She takes Sienna’s chin in her hand, tilts it, looks at the lip once more. “You stood there with blood in your mouth and you answered her.” Her eyes are bright. “I’m proud of you.”
Barbara cracks eggs into a bowl. “The clip of him catching her wrist is everywhere too.”
Everyone looks at me.
Patricia comes over, takes hold of my upper arm through my shirt, squeezes once, and announces to the room: “More muscular than Cardio.”
I have no idea who Cardio is.
Sienna closes her eyes. “Patricia.”
“What? I’m a cougar, dear, not dead.”
“Cardio is her boyfriend,” Sienna tells me, with the expression of a woman reading her own eulogy. “He teaches spin.”
“He’s thirty-five,” Patricia says, with pride.
“I did not ask.”
Barbara pours the eggs into the skillet, and Patricia pulls out the chair across from mine, sits, folds her hands, and looks at me like a judge who has already read the file.
“Do you still love Ashley?”
“No.”
“Did you sleep with her?”
“No.”
“Did you want to?”
“No.”
“Then what in God’s name were you doing?”
The skillet is the only sound in the kitchen.
I look at Sienna.
“I thought because I wasn’t sleeping with Ashley, I wasn’t cheating.”
Patricia stares at me.
“I know better now.”
Sienna is standing by the counter with a dish towel in her hands, not moving. I can’t read her face at all. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s the divorce being handed another exhibit.
“For a man who is supposed to be so clever,” Patricia says, “you behaved like a damned fool.”
“Yes.”
“Don’t agree with me that quickly. I’m not finished.” She leans forward. “That woman walked into your marriage over and over again, and you held the door for her.”
There’s nothing to say to that. I don’t look away from her, because looking away would be the coward’s version, and she’d see it.
“Sienna loved you.”
Loved.
I think I might actually be sick.
I loved you. Her face when she said it. That fucking past tense.
Patricia has no idea what she just did to me.
“And you knew?” Patricia asks.
“Not then.”
Patricia’s face changes.
I look at Sienna. “I understand that now.”
“Oh, Cade,” Patricia says.
“Patricia.” Sienna’s voice.
“No, Sienna. He needs to hear this.” She turns back to me, and she isn’t angry anymore, which is worse.
“You gave another woman years of attention your wife was too proud to beg you for. Sienna shouldn’t have had to ask her husband to notice her, Cade.
And while she was going without, you were giving your time to Ashley. ”
The skillet hisses. Nobody rescues me. I wouldn’t want them to.
“Yes,” I say. “That’s what I did.”
Patricia looks at me a long moment. Then she sits back, and Barbara starts making plates, and the kitchen breathes again.
Barbara makes Sienna’s plate first. Eggs, bacon, toast cut on the angle, set down with a “you’re eating all of that, don’t argue.” Then she makes a second plate, the same, more of it, and puts it in front of me.
“You’re too thin,” she says. “Eat.”
I look at the plate.
My mother never made me breakfast. The staff did. Until Sienna, nobody had ever made me breakfast like it mattered whether I ate. Barbara has just done the same thing.
“Thank you,” I say, and my voice comes out rough enough that Barbara glances at me. She says nothing about it.
We eat, five of us around a table set for four.
Nancy pours coffee, and when she reaches me she pauses, cup in hand, and I say, “Black is fine,” and pass Sienna’s mug up the table before anyone asks — milk, no sugar, more milk than she’ll admit to.
Nancy looks at the mug. Then at me. Then she pours.
Sienna slides her toast onto my plate. She does it without looking, mid-sentence, answering some question of Barbara’s about the police — she just registers that my plate is emptying faster than hers and deals me her toast like a card off the top of the deck. I don’t think she knows she did it.
Barbara nudges Nancy.
“What?” Sienna says.
“Nothing.”
“Barbara.”
“Eat your eggs.”
The coffee pot ends up by Sienna’s elbow, on her bruised side. When she reaches for it I take it first and fill her cup, and she lets me, and nobody says anything about that either. Everybody sees it.
“And you.” Patricia turns her chair two degrees toward Sienna, which in this kitchen is apparently how you know court is back in session.
“What about me?”
“He holds you once and you let him spend the night?”
“I was assaulted.”
“I know, darling. I saw the video. I also saw the way that man was looking at you.” Patricia doesn’t look at me while she discusses me. “One night of him finally doing what husbands are supposed to do does not erase what came before.”
Sienna’s jaw tightens. “I haven’t forgotten.”
“Have you forgiven?”
“No.”
“All right. I needed to hear you say it.”
I keep my eyes on my plate. She’s right, and she said it in front of me on purpose. One night erases nothing. I built the debt. I know roughly what it runs to.
Nancy sets down her coffee cup. She’s been quiet the whole meal, watching, and something about the way she squares the cup on the table quiets everyone else too.
“Cade,” she says. “Are you?—”
“Nancy,” Sienna says.
Nancy looks at her.
Sienna shakes her head once. “Please don’t.”
Nancy studies her. Then she picks her coffee back up, and Barbara starts talking about the farmers market, loudly, and everyone lets her change the subject.
She didn’t want the question asked. I can think of only one reason.
She doesn’t want an answer from me.
I finish the toast she gave me.
Patricia points; I clear the table and stack the plates by the sink. Barbara loads the dishwasher in a way I suspect Sienna will redo. Then Patricia hands me the tied trash bag and points at the side door with her chin.
“Bin.”
I carry it out.
And stop.
I’ve only been here in the dark. In daylight the sea is everywhere. Past the low fence the grass slopes toward the water, and the morning is clear enough that there’s no end to it. Salt in the air. Gulls somewhere beyond the roof.
Paradise.
I almost laugh at myself. I have never called anywhere paradise in my life.
Ashley called this a pathetic little house last night. She could not have been more wrong. Somewhere in my head I had still treated this place like somewhere Sienna had gone until she was ready to come back.
Standing at the bin with the morning coming off the water, I finally understand. Nobody would ever leave this.
She isn’t hiding here.
I put the bag in the bin and stay outside another minute, because when I go back in, I’ll be closer to leaving.
It ends anyway. The ladies leave in a flurry of cheek kisses and instructions — for her, mostly, and one for me, from Barbara, delivered with a pointed finger: “Eat.” Patricia takes my hand at the door, accepting the handshake I offered earlier, and holds it a second longer than a handshake needs.
“You listen well,” she says, “for a man nobody’s ever said no to.”
Then they’re gone, and the kitchen is clean, and there’s no reason for me to still be here.
Sienna walks me to the door.
“Get some sleep,” I say.
“You too.”
I step outside. The door closes behind me, soft.
From the doorstep I can see the garden, the salt-faded shutters, the water going bright all the way out. I’ve seen this cottage before. I’ve never once understood what I was looking at.
I always thought, when I let myself think about it at all, that this would end with her coming back.
It won’t.
I look at the cottage again.
She is already home.