Chapter 24
SIENNA
THREE WEEKS LATER
I wake to the smell of smoke.
Not a lot of smoke. A polite amount. The amount of smoke a very controlled man produces when something has gone wrong and he is refusing to admit it out loud.
Cade’s side of the bed is empty. From the kitchen comes the sound of the exhaust fan on high, a cabinet closing with exaggerated care, and my husband’s voice, low and even, saying something to the stove that the stove has clearly earned.
I pull on his shirt and follow the smoke.
He’s standing at the stove with a spatula in one hand and his phone propped against the sugar canister, and on the phone is a video titled something like PERFECT BACON EVERY TIME, paused mid-instruction.
There’s a bowl of eggs beaten within an inch of their lives.
There’s a pan that used to contain bacon and now contains eleven small monuments to hubris.
The window is open. The fan is roaring. He hasn’t heard me.
I lean in the doorway and watch Cade Belluomo, a man who controls an empire, stare down a strip of bacon like it’s refusing to sign.
“The video said medium heat,” he says to the pan, evenly.
“Did the video mention flipping it?”
He stops. Then he turns, and he’s wearing yesterday’s T-shirt and an expression I can only describe as a man preparing his opening statement.
“I researched this.”
“I can see that.”
“I watched three videos.”
“How’s it going?”
He looks at the pan. He looks at me. “There was a heat discrepancy between sources.”
I laugh so hard I have to hold the doorframe. And here’s the thing, he lets me. He just stands there, watching me with an expression like he’s memorizing it, like my laughing at him is something he’d sign for all over again.
“Move over,” I say, when I can breathe. “I’ll show you.”
“I want to learn it.”
“I know. That’s why I said show, not do it for you.”
So I stand at my stove with my husband looming over my shoulder, watching me lay bacon into a cold pan like I’m defusing something, and he asks two questions that are genuinely good questions, because whatever else this man is, he has never once been a careless student.
The second batch comes out right. He looks at it with more satisfaction than I have ever seen him direct at a quarterly report.
We eat on the deck. The morning is bright and the gulls are conducting their usual litigation over the water, and it’s ordinary, all of it, gloriously and stupidly ordinary, coffee and slightly redeemed bacon and my foot on his under the table, and that would have been enough day for me.
Except that today is book club.
I know something is off by ten.
He checks his watch during breakfast, which he never does anymore.
He clears the plates and then wipes a counter that’s already clean.
When I ask if he wants to walk down to the water, he says he has to go into town, and when I ask what for, there is a pause, a small one, a nothing pause, and he says, “A few things.”
And the old wiring lights up before I can stop it.
I hate that it does. But it does, and I’ve promised myself I won’t pretend with him anymore, even inside my own head, so I stand at the window and watch his car go down the lane and let myself feel it: the little cold drop of here it is.
The distracted husband. The vague errand.
The murmured phone call I heard through the bedroom door this morning, his low negotiating voice, the one I used to hear through the study door, and hadn’t let myself think about until right now.
I know this pattern. I lived in this pattern. I built a whole exit out of this pattern.
I stand at the window with my arms crossed against the reflex of it, and then I make myself look at what’s actually in the room.
The papers are in the drawer of my desk, still signed, still ours, still nothing decided, because we’re seeing, and seeing means this exact thing, this moment, choosing what story to tell myself with insufficient information.
The man who left in that car spent last night reading on my couch with my feet in his lap.
He tried to learn how to make bacon from three videos because I mentioned, once, that I missed cooked breakfasts. He has a tattoo of my duck.
The wiring is real. The house it was installed in is gone.
Fine.
He’s back before noon, carrying two bags he takes directly to the pantry with the studied casualness of a man moving contraband.
At one o’clock he takes a call in the bedroom, and I hear that low voice again, and this time I hear an actual sentence through the door: “—understand the concern, but I’ve made my position on the wording clear. ”
At two he asks me, with tremendous nonchalance, what time everyone usually arrives.
At three he changes his shirt.
At four he moves the living room chairs two inches, considers them, and moves them back.
And I finally, finally, put it together, and I have to go stand in the bathroom with the door shut so he won’t see me laughing, because my husband, the man who stayed outwardly composed while our marriage fell apart, is nervous about his very first book club.
They arrive at five, in convoy. Patricia has her copy under her arm bristling with sticky notes. Barbara has a casserole dish, because Barbara. Nancy arrives armed with opinions and the smile of someone who plans to use them.
Cade meets them at the door like a man receiving a delegation.
“Ladies. Thank you for coming.”
Patricia looks him up and down. “It’s book club, dear, not an earnings call.”
“Of course.” A beat. “There are materials.”
The silence that follows this announcement has genuine texture.
He crosses to the sideboard, where, I now understand, the contraband has been staged all afternoon, and he hands each of us a bound document.
Actually bound. Spiral, with a cover page.
I look down at the header on mine: Discussion Framework and Selected Passages, and under it, the title of the novel, and under that, in smaller type, a date.
“I had some thoughts,” Cade says. “My assistant organized them. There are copies for everyone.”
Barbara flips hers open and turns it sideways, like the orientation might explain it.
“There’s also,” Cade continues, committed now, “a discussion of comparative themes beginning on page four. There was some disagreement about phrasing during preparation. I’m confident the final language reflects my intent.”
“Whose disagreement?” Nancy asks, with the mild tone she uses when she’s hunting.
“My assistant felt ‘the hero declines to see what is in front of him’ was too harsh.” A pause. “I overruled her.”
I have to turn and adjust the flowers on the table so no one sees my face.
Then he brings out the wine, a bottle whose label Patricia reads twice, once for the name and once, I suspect, to decide how impressed to be, and pours with the gravity of a man sealing a treaty, and Barbara says what everyone is thinking, which is, “Well. Book club has certainly come up in the world.”
We settle in. The ladies take the couch and the good chair.
Cade ends up wedged between Barbara and the armrest, too large for the space and making no complaint about it, his own copy of the novel balanced on his knee — and his copy, I notice, is not spiral-bound.
His copy is the paperback, and it has flags in it.
Real ones, the little adhesive ones from his office, in three colors, and in the margins, where I can see them when the pages fan, his handwriting.
The handwriting that signs acquisitions, deployed in the margins of a romance novel.
I stare at it until my chest aches. That one goes straight through whatever armor I have left.
The discussion begins the way it always does — Barbara summarizing the plot mostly correctly, Patricia issuing rulings, Nancy waiting. Cade listens with his full attention, which I don’t think the book club has ever actually received from anyone, including me.
Then Patricia says something dismissive about the heroine leaving in the middle of the book, running off the way she did, all that fuss, and my husband says, “I’d push back on that.”
Every head turns.
“Page 114.” He waits. He actually waits, while four women decide whether they are being directed to page 114, and Barbara, God love her, flips to page 114.
“Second paragraph. She’d already asked him to change.
Three times, in the text. He heard her each time and adjusted nothing.
Leaving wasn’t a fuss. It was the only sentence he was capable of hearing. ”
There’s a silence.
“Hm,” says Nancy.
Patricia looks at Cade over her glasses for a long moment. “Go on.”
And he does. Not a speech, he’s brief, always, and dead level, like the book is a matter before the court, but as the hour goes on he keeps defending her, this fictional woman, every time the room tilts against her.
She was too passive, someone says; page 60, he says, she asked directly and was managed out of the room.
She forgave him too easily, someone says, and he goes quiet for a second and says, “She didn’t forgive him.
She gave him a chance. Those aren’t the same thing. ”
The next citation comes late, after the casserole, when the discussion has arrived at the hero, whether he’d changed or just performed changing. Opinions run hot. Barbara thinks the grand gesture saved him. Patricia thinks he should have suffered longer.
Cade sets down his glass.
“Page 203,” he says. “If you’ll indulge me.”
They indulge him. He doesn’t read from the spiral document.
He reads from his flagged paperback, and his voice is even, and the passage is the one where the hero realizes, too late, that the heroine had been loving him the entire time in ways he’d been too occupied to see, and that no gesture could repay it, and that the only honest thing left was to let her go and hope.
He reads it like a finding of fact. Then he closes the book on his finger.
“This is the part that matters,” he says.
“Everything he does afterward only matters because of what he understands here. The gesture is worthless without it. He isn’t sorry he lost her.
He’s sorry about what she carried while he had her.
” He looks around the room, entirely composed, entirely unaware. “I’ve marked it.”
The room is silent.
Patricia is looking at him with an expression I have seen exactly once before, in my kitchen, before she said Oh, Cade. Barbara has her hand flat on her chest like she’s holding something in. Nancy looks at the ceiling, then at her wine.
My husband glances up from his paperback, registers the silence, and misreads it completely.
“We can table it,” he offers, “if the group would rather stay on the ending.”
“No,” Patricia says, and her voice is a little rough, and she clears it. “No, I think that’s exactly right, dear. Pass the good bottle.”
He passes the good bottle. The discussion moves on. And under the noise of it, Nancy leans over to me, quiet, wine in hand, eyes forward.
“Does he know?” she says.
“Know what?”
“What page 203 is about.”
I look at my husband — now folded onto my couch among women who have decided to love him, his ridiculous bound documents on every lap, his flags fanning out of a romance novel, defending a fictional woman with everything he never knew how to say when it counted, and no idea, none at all, that he has been reading his own confession aloud to the entire room.
“No,” I say. “Not a clue.”
“Hm,” says Nancy, and drinks her wine, and lets him keep it.
The evening goes long. The casserole goes.
The good bottle mostly goes. At some point the discussion collapses into Patricia telling a story about Cardio that Cade listens to with the deep, unblinking focus of a man archiving material for future litigation, and Barbara laughing until she has to put her glass down, and Nancy issuing a one-line verdict that finishes us all off, and Cade, who burned breakfast this morning and is now arguing literary motive with Patricia, sitting in the middle of it, belonging.
I stand in my kitchen doorway with a dish towel in my hands and look at my living room.
There was a night I stood at a valet stand alone in the cold, married to a man I couldn’t reach, and I could not have invented this room if you’d given me a hundred years.
The noise of it. Patricia’s laugh. Barbara making room for him.
Nancy’s eyes finding mine over her glass with the smallest possible nod, like a receipt.
And in the middle of it all, wedged in the couch, my impossible, careful, ridiculous husband, who Googled bacon, who annotates love stories, who came here with an ending in an envelope and stayed for the beginning — looking up, just then, and finding me in the doorway the way he found me from the front of a ballroom.
I hang up the towel, walk over to the back of the sofa, and rest my hands on the top of the sofa behind him. Without looking away from Barbara, Cade reaches up over his shoulder and laces his fingers through mine. His palm is warm, his grip steady. He holds on and lets the room carry on.