Chapter 5 #2
"It's not about you."
"It's literally about my clinic."
Iris turned to face her sister. Linnet was two years younger, three inches shorter, and had spent her entire adult life building something useful in a neighborhood that the rest of Seattle drove through on the way to the airport.
She had a right to be angry. She also had a right to be confused, because Gavin Rogers had never, in eight years of marriage to her sister, set foot in this clinic.
He'd written checks. He'd nodded approvingly when Iris described Linnet's work at dinner parties. He had never stocked a supply closet.
"I'll handle it," Iris said.
"How?"
"I don't know yet." She got in her car. "Don't let him leave with the screwdriver. It's probably a two-hundred-dollar one."
#
She drove home the long way, along the lake, because the alternative was the freeway and the freeway required decisions — lane changes, speed adjustments, the cognitive engagement of traffic — and she didn't have the bandwidth for decisions.
The lake road was slow and winding and she could let her hands drive while the rest of her sat with the thing she'd seen.
He'd looked small. That was what she kept circling back to, the detail her brain wouldn't release.
Gavin Rogers did not look small. He was six-two, broad-shouldered, built like a man who had rowed crew at Stanford and maintained the habit with a personal trainer at five-thirty every morning.
He filled rooms. He filled doorways. He filled their bed — had filled their bed — with the unconscious confidence of a man who believed he belonged in every space he occupied.
On the floor of Linnet's clinic, in scrubs that didn't fit, with a screwdriver he didn't know how to use, he had looked small.
She didn't want to think about what that meant. She drove.
#
The text came at seven-forty that evening, from Margot Yee, a woman Iris knew from the foundation circuit — pleasant, harmless, the kind of person who showed up at every fundraiser and remembered everyone's dietary restrictions.
Hey I, saw Piper Hollis at the Cascade Tech Summit tonight. She looked AMAZING. New haircut. Is she still consulting for Gavin's company? I thought I heard she left but she seemed very much in the scene. Anyway hope you're well! We should do lunch!! xo
Two exclamation points. An emoji-less xo. The casual cruelty of a woman who either didn't know about the affair or knew and was fishing.
Iris read the text three times.
Composed and unbothered. That was the phrase Margot hadn't used but had communicated perfectly — the bright, breezy tone that meant Piper Hollis was not hiding.
Piper Hollis was at a tech summit, looking AMAZING, networking, existing in public as a woman whose life had not collapsed.
While Iris sat on a houseboat that smelled like turpentine, wearing the same jeans she'd driven to Rainier Beach in, eating crackers because she'd forgotten to buy real food again.
The image burned. Not because she wanted to be at a tech summit — she'd attended enough of those as Gavin's wife to know they were fluorescent-lit purgatory with worse catering than Linnet's clinic.
But because Piper had done this thing, this enormous destructive thing, and was apparently moving through the world without a mark on her.
While Iris felt like she'd been flayed and hung out to dry and everyone could see the raw muscle underneath.
She set the phone face-down on the counter.
She poured bourbon from her grandmother's ceramic canister — the one labeled COURAGE in Constance's slanting hand — and took it out to the deck.
Lake Union at night was quieter than people expected.
The houseboats along the dock creaked and shifted with the water, a gentle percussion that had scared her the first night and now sounded like breathing.
Across the lake, the city skyline threw light onto the water in long, broken columns.
A seaplane was moored at the end of the next dock, its white hull gleaming.
She sat in the Adirondack chair — Constance's chair, the one with the arm wide enough to hold a coffee mug or a rocks glass or a mason jar of turpentine, depending on the grandmother's mood — and drank the bourbon slowly and thought about Gavin on his knees in exam room three.
The wire transfer had been easy to dismiss.
That was Gavin's first language: money, scale, the blunt instrument of wealth deployed to solve a problem.
The voided prenup had been harder, because it carried a whiff of sacrifice — but it was still transactional at its core.
Legal documents. Financial concessions. The currency of their marriage redenominated.
The clinic was different.
She kept testing the thought, pushing against it, looking for the angle that would let her file it with the rest. A PR move — except no one knew he was there.
A power play — except he'd given all the power to Linnet, who could have thrown him out and didn't. A guilt offering — except guilt offerings were supposed to make the giver feel better, and he had looked, on that linoleum floor, like a man who felt nothing resembling better.
He had gone to Rainier Beach. To her sister's underfunded clinic in a neighborhood he'd never visited.
He had stocked shelves and fixed furniture and assembled a shelving unit badly and said nothing about his marriage and asked for nothing and expected nothing and worn scrubs that didn't fit and looked small.
It cost him something that wasn't money.
Iris took a long drink of bourbon and let the burn settle in her chest, right next to the other thing — the thing she would not name, would not examine, would not allow to matter.
Not yet. Maybe not ever. Because the alternative to certainty was something far more dangerous, and she had already lost enough.
The lake shifted beneath her. The houseboat rocked gently. Somewhere across the water, a boat engine cut out and left a silence so complete she could hear her own heartbeat.
She finished the bourbon. She went inside. She did not text Gavin. She did not text Linnet. She did not reply to Margot Yee.
She climbed the steep ladder-staircase to the studio, lay down on the daybed, and stared at her grandmother's glow-in-the-dark constellations until she couldn't tell which ones were real and which ones Constance had invented.
The stars blurred. She blinked and they sharpened. She blinked again and they didn't.
She slept.