10. Delia
DELIA
I was updating the carnival schedule when she walked in.
I had the clipboard in one hand and a pencil behind my ear, and I was standing at the boards watching Maya run through her program for the showcase.
The winter carnival was six weeks out. First weekend in February.
It was the biggest earner of the year, and this year it was the money I was counting on to buy the building.
I’d saved for three years. I had a plan.
I was in my own space, doing work I was good at, and I wasn’t thinking about him at all.
Then I looked up and saw her standing just inside the entrance.
Corinne.
She didn’t belong there. That was the first thing I felt. Not anger. Just wrongness. She was wearing a cream-colored coat and leather gloves and her hair was perfect, and the fluorescent lights made her look like she’d walked onto the wrong set. Maya glanced over, then back at me. I waved her on.
Corinne walked toward me. Careful steps. She wasn’t smiling, but her expression was kind. Concerned, even. That made it worse.
“Delia,” she said. “I’m sorry to just show up like this.”
I set the clipboard down on the bench. “What do you want?”
“I need to talk to you.” She glanced around, then back at me. “It won’t take long.”
Walt was coming out of the skate rental office. He saw her, then looked at me. I shook my head. He stopped where he was. Corinne didn’t seem to notice.
“Grant cut me off,” she said. Quiet. Matter-of-fact. “Professionally. In writing. Access revoked, removed from the account, everything routed through Marcus now.” She paused. “I think you deserve to know why.”
I didn’t say anything.
She took a breath. “He said he’d made his decision years ago. All he’s doing now is managing the consequences of a sunk cost. He wanted to keep it quiet until after the close.”
The air went out of the room.
She tilted her head. Sympathetic. “But you already knew that. I mean, how couldn’t you?”
Six weeks. Just give me six weeks, Delia. That’s all I’m asking for.
I heard his voice say it. I heard the echo land inside what she’d just said. Keep it quiet until after the close. Six weeks. He’d asked me to his face for a window of time, and now I had the reason.
“I don’t—” I started, but I didn’t know how to finish.
Corinne looked at me for a long moment. Then she said, gently, “He doesn’t sleep, you know. Stands in the kitchen at three in the morning with the lights off.”
Everything stopped.
I had watched him do that for seven years. I’d asked him about it twice. Once in our first year. Once the night before the empty Thursday. Both times he gave me nothing. Nobody else on earth should know that.
“Sorry,” Corinne said softly. “I assumed you knew that.”
She didn’t wait for me to answer. She just smiled, a small sad thing, and turned and walked back toward the entrance. Unhurried. She pushed the door open and stepped outside, and the cold air came in behind her, and then she was gone.
I stood there.
The collar through the gap in the door. The four-line refusal with her name in it.
The laughing behind his office door. His voice, so careful: Just give me six weeks.
Keep it quiet until after the close. And the one thing nobody else could know.
The thing I’d asked him about and he’d locked me out of, twice, for seven years.
It wasn’t worse than I thought. It was never what I thought it was.
All of it. Everything. The distance. The silence.
The empty weeks and the careful words and the way he looked past me when I asked him a question he didn’t want to answer.
It had all been something else the entire time.
Not a marriage struggling. A marriage he’d already decided to end, years ago, and he was just managing the timeline.
I looked down. My hands were steady. I wasn’t crying. I waited for the tears to come and they didn’t.
I walked into the office. Closed the door behind me.
My duffel bag was on the floor next to the desk.
I’d been living out of it for two weeks.
I unzipped it and pulled out the sweater.
His sweater. Navy. I’d taken it by accident the night I left.
I’d kept it on purpose. I’d been sleeping in it every night at Roz’s and I hadn’t told anyone.
I walked it over to the trash bin and dropped it in. I didn’t look at it again.
Then I picked up my keys and walked out.
I drove to his building. I parked in the garage. I took the elevator up to the fifteenth floor. The man at the front desk saw me coming and waved me through. He knew my face. Grant had made sure of that, years ago. I was his wife. I had access. Nobody had revoked it.
An assistant I didn’t recognize stood up when I got to the glass doors. “Mrs. Ashford,” she said. “He’s in a meeting right now, if you want to?—”
I didn’t stop walking.
I knew which office was his. I’d been there before. I walked past her desk, past two other people who looked up and didn’t say anything, and I pushed his door open.
He was at his desk. There was a man in a suit sitting across from him. They both looked up.
“Get out,” I said to the man in the suit.
Grant stood. “Delia?—”
“Get out,” I said again.
The man looked at Grant. Grant nodded. The man picked up his folder and left. He closed the door behind him.
I walked up to the desk. I didn’t sit down. I was a woman who had just found out her entire marriage was a lie, and I wasn’t going to sit.
“It was her,” I said. “All of it. It was her.”
He went still. “What are you talking about?”
“Don’t.” My voice cracked. “Don’t do that. She told me. She told me everything.”
“Delia, I don’t know what she said to you, but?—”
“She knows what you do at three in the morning.” I was shaking now. “I have watched you stand in that kitchen in the dark for seven years. I asked you about it twice and you gave me nothing. She knows.”
He didn’t say anything. He just stood there, and his mouth opened like he was going to speak, and then it closed again. There were no words. There was no answer he could give me. He couldn’t call her a liar. Because she wasn’t lying.
“Nothing happened,” he said finally. Quiet. Quieter than I’d ever heard him. “Between me and Corinne. Nothing. There was nothing. There never was. I ended her involvement with the company. That’s all it was.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Delia—”
“I want a divorce.”
He stopped. The whole room stopped.
I pulled the folded paper out of my pocket.
The lease. “Your name comes off this. I’m buying the Ashbury from the city.
I have three years of savings, and the carnival money lands in February.
I’ll have it done by the end of that month.
You don’t contribute a cent. Do you understand me? Not one cent.”
He was staring at me. He looked wrecked.
I turned around and walked out. I didn’t wait for him to answer. I walked past the assistant, past the front desk, into the elevator. The doors closed. I rode it down to the garage. I got in my car. I drove back to the rink.
When I got there, Walt asked me if I was okay.
I told him I was fine.
Then I picked up my clipboard and went back to work.