Chapter 15 #2
Iris had written the questions down. She'd sat at the drafting table in the houseboat studio two nights ago and filled an entire page with them, then crossed out the ones that were really accusations wearing question marks, then crossed out the ones she already knew the answers to from Piper, then looked at what was left and felt her chest tighten because these were the ones she actually needed to hear him say.
She didn't take the list out. She'd memorized them.
"When did it start," she said. Not a question. A command.
Gavin's jaw worked. "September. The Suncadia corporate retreat. She was there as a consultant on the Meridian deal."
"The first time."
"The last night of the retreat. We'd had drinks with the whole team and everyone else went to bed and she didn't."
"And you didn't."
"And I didn't."
Iris's hands were still folded. She pressed her thumbs together until the nails went white. "How many times total."
He paused. Not because he didn't know — she could see that he knew, that he'd counted, that his therapist had probably made him count. He paused because saying a number in front of her made it a fact that would sit in the air between them forever.
"Thirty-one," he said. "That I can account for. Some of them—" He stopped.
"Some of them what."
"Some of them were the same night. The hotel. I'd leave and come back."
Iris felt her stomach drop the way it had in the elevator, but slower, like the cables were fraying instead of holding.
Thirty-one times. Fourteen months. She did the math without wanting to — roughly twice a month, sometimes more, sometimes stacked into the same evening.
While she was at home. While she was at the studio.
While Constance was dying and Iris was spending nights at the hospice and Gavin was telling her he had late meetings.
"Which hotel," she said, though she already knew.
"The Edgewater. Suite 1412. I had a standing arrangement."
"You booked the same room every time."
"Yes."
"Under your name."
"Under a corporate account. It didn't flag because Rogers Ventures has a block at the Edgewater for visiting executives.
" His voice was flat. He was not excusing it.
He was explaining the mechanism, and the mechanism was damning — he hadn't even needed to be clever.
The infrastructure of his wealth had made the affair frictionless.
"Did you think about me," Iris said. "When you were there."
He didn't answer immediately. Dr. Osei was still, watching.
"Sometimes," Gavin said. "Not the way you mean. I thought about logistics. Whether you'd check the calendar. Whether the car service would log a different address." He swallowed. "I didn't think about you as a person who was being lied to. I thought about you as a variable I needed to manage."
The words landed like something dropped from a height.
Iris felt the impact spread through her chest and her arms and her hands, still clasped, still pressing.
A variable. She had been a line item in his operational thinking, a risk to mitigate, a problem of timing and alibis.
Not a woman in a bed wondering why her husband smelled different. Not a person.
"Why," she said.
She didn't specify. She let the word sit there, enormous and bare.
Gavin looked at her. His eyes were wet but he wasn't crying yet. She could see him fighting it — not because he was trying to perform composure, but because he was trying to say the thing he'd come here to say before his body made it impossible.
"Because I could," he said. "Because my world made it easy. Because nobody around me — not Hugh, not the board, not anyone — treated it like it would cost me anything. And because—"
He stopped. His hands were gripping each other between his knees. She could see the tendons standing out.
"Because I stopped believing you were a separate person."
Dr. Osei didn't move. The room was so quiet Iris could hear the white noise machine in the hallway, a thin hiss like radio static.
"I don't mean I thought you were an object," Gavin said.
His voice was coming apart now, the corporate control dissolving like something left in water too long.
"I mean I stopped believing you had a door.
That you could leave. You were always there — you were always going to be there — and I stopped treating that as something I had to earn.
I treated it like a fact. Like gravity. And because it was a fact, nothing I did in other rooms could change it. "
He was crying. Not the way she'd seen him cry before — at his mother's funeral, controlled and brief, or during an argument where the tears had felt like a tactic she couldn't name. This was ugly. His face was red and his breathing was ragged and he kept trying to talk through it.
"I wasn't choosing Piper over you. I wasn't choosing anything. I was just — taking. Because I had never in my life been in a situation where taking had consequences. And you deserved consequences. You deserved—" He stopped and pressed both hands against his face and breathed.
"You deserved to be someone I was afraid of losing," he said into his palms. "And I wasn't afraid. And that's the worst thing I've ever done."
Iris sat very still. Her body felt like it was made of something rigid and breakable — porcelain, maybe, or the bisqueware she pulled from the kiln before it was glazed, before it was finished, when it was at its most fragile.
She could feel every point where her bones pressed against the chair. She could feel her pulse in her throat.
She did not comfort him. She did not reach across the four feet of carpet. She sat and she listened to him cry and she let the words be true without trying to do anything about them.
Dr. Osei waited. A full minute. Then she said, gently, "Iris, do you want to respond?"
"No," Iris said. "Not yet."