Chapter 21 #3
“Congratulations.”
Normally that would earn me a look. Tonight his attention goes past me to the desk. The drawer is open. I don’t remember opening it. The papers aren’t out, but Pierce has been in this office long enough to know what lives there.
He doesn’t ask if I’m all right. He doesn’t say anything about the drawer.
“Have you eaten?”
I hear Sienna. I look away.
“I’m fine.”
“I can stay,” he says.
“No.”
He sets the folder on the corner of the desk. Then he crosses to the cabinet, pours two fingers from the bottle some board member gave me that I’ve never opened, and sits down in the chair across from me. He doesn’t say anything else. He drinks at the pace of a man with nowhere to be.
He stays anyway. I let him, the way I let Barbara put a plate in front of me.
When his glass is empty he sets it down, and I make myself say it before he can say anything.
“I’m not doing this tonight.” The lie comes out level. All my lies do. “I’m going to head home. Get some sleep.”
He studies me the way Nancy studied Sienna across a kitchen table. I hold it. Whatever he sees, and he’s known me too long to see nothing, he decides I’ve earned the privacy of it.
“Call me in the morning,” he says.
Then he’s gone. The elevator carries him down, and the outer office is quiet again. I thought I wanted to be alone. Pierce offered to stay, and I lied until he left.
I take the papers out more carefully than I need to and turn past the tabs to the last page. Her signature is there, exactly where it has been every night.
Sienna Belluomo. Steady. Certain. No hesitation anywhere in the letters. And beneath it, the line with my name typed underneath. Waiting.
She signed while I was still telling myself there might be some way to bring her home. But I stood in her garden this morning. I saw the sea from her fence line. Patricia ordering everyone around, Barbara feeding us, Nancy watching everything, and my wife in the middle of it.
She isn’t waiting to come home. She is home.
Every day this stays in the drawer, she’s married to the man who did this to her.
I love her. That gives me no right to keep her.
I reach for the pen.
I stop.
I have signed contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars without thinking about the physical act of writing my name. Documents with entire towns depending on what happened after the pen touched paper. My hand has never shaken.
It shakes now.
I put the pen down, and for one second I think I can’t do it. Not because I don’t know what’s right. Because I do.
My vision blurs. A tear hits the paper before I understand that I’m crying. I stare at the dark mark spreading into the page, and another lands beside it.
I wipe my face with the heel of my hand, irritated, as though irritation has ever accomplished anything, and reach for the pen again.
My vision goes completely.
The first sob catches me so hard I bend forward.
I put a hand over my mouth and it does nothing.
Another follows, then another, until I’m folded over my own desk with one hand against my face and the other braced on the wood, because I can’t get enough air.
I have never cried like this. Not when Ashley chose Martin.
Not ever. There’s nothing quiet or dignified in it, my shoulders shake hard enough to hurt, my nose runs, I wipe my face on my sleeve because I can’t see well enough to find anything else, and in any other version of my life I would be humiliated by the sound coming out of me.
I don’t care. There is only Sienna: waiting in that old sweatshirt, asking whether I had eaten, standing in front of me while I told her I would not insult her by lying and then waiting for another sentence that never came.
She walked away because I never gave her one.
“I’m sorry.”
The office is empty. Nobody hears me. An apology she can’t hear does nothing for her. Neither does my pain. Neither do the flowers or the sleepless nights or how badly I want to crawl back to that couch and wake up under her again.
I sit up and wipe my face. The papers are spotted where the tears landed, the page rippling where they soak in. I wipe the signature line with the side of my hand so the ink will take.
I pick up the pen. My hand is still shaking when the tip touches the line.
I want her. God, I want her. I want another morning with her asleep on my chest. I want to sit in that kitchen while Barbara tells me I am too thin and Patricia orders me around.
I want Sienna’s coffee beside mine and her laugh in that cottage.
I want the ordinary days with her. Those were the things that mattered, and I was too stupid to see it.
But wanting my wife does not mean I get to keep her. She asked me to let her go.
For once, I’m going to listen.
I sign my name beneath hers, over the stains.
The first letters look normal. The last do not.
I set the pen down and look at the two names, hers and mine, together on a page one last time. My eyes fill again, and there’s nothing left in me to fight them with.
I do not put them back in the drawer.