Chapter 5
Fiona came off the payroll on the eleventh of December.
Imogen found out the way she found out everything that fall, which was sideways.
She was in the study looking for the boiler warranty and there was a letter on the desk, face up, not hidden, from the firm on Weybosset Street: separation terms, twelve months, a non-solicit, a confidentiality provision, executed and returned.
She stood there with the warranty folder in her hand and read it twice.
Then she took it into the kitchen where he was scrambling eggs at nine o'clock at night because neither of them had eaten, and said, "When?"
"Second of December."
"You didn't say."
"No."
"Cormac."
He took the pan off the heat.
"Because if I told you," he said, "it would be a thing I did for you. And then you'd have to have a feeling about it in front of me." He put the eggs on a plate and set it in front of her. "So I did it and didn't tell you, and if you found out, you found out."
Imogen sat down at the island.
"The deal," she said.
"The deal is fine. It's a month of pain. Draycott's furious."
"Is he."
"He said, and I'm quoting him, 'you're setting nine figures on fire to make a gesture at your wife.'"
"What did you say?"
"I said it isn't a gesture at my wife," Cormac said, "because my wife is never going to hear about it."
He went back to the stove.
She ate the eggs. They were bad — he had never once in eight years made eggs that were not slightly rubbery — and she ate every one of them.
After that the house went quiet in a way it had not been since September.
That was the thing she would remember about the fifth week: the quiet.
The plywood came down on the eighth and the new sash went in and for the first time in a month there was light in the morning room at ten o'clock.
The boiler man came. The silver got put away, by Imogen, herself, standing in the butler's pantry with both hands shaking and the door propped wide open with a chair, and it took her forty minutes to do eleven minutes of work and she did it.
She told Cormac about it that evening. She had not planned to.
"I did the silver."
He looked up from the table.
"The pantry silver."
"Yes."
He did not congratulate her. He did not get up and hug her, which she would have hated, and he did not say I'm proud of you, which she would have hated more.
"How long were you in there?" he said.
"Forty minutes."
"How long's it take?"
"Eleven."
"Okay," Cormac said, and nodded once, and went back to what he was doing, and Imogen stood in her own kitchen and felt something in her chest let go that had been holding since the fourteenth.
He told her about the ninety seconds on the fourteenth of December.
One month exactly. Neither of them mentioned that and both of them knew it.
It was a Saturday and it had been raining since noon and they were in the study with the lamps on because the light had gone at four, and she had a catalog on her knees she was not reading, and he was across the room not reading a report.
She said, "I want to hear it."
He put the report down.
"All of it," she said. "Start to finish. And then I don't want to talk about it again for a while."
"Okay."
He did not ask if she was sure. That was one of the things.
"I was asleep," he said. "The alarm doesn't wake you the way you think it does. It's not loud. It took me — I don't know. Two seconds, three. I sat up and the tone was going and I knew what it was and I didn't believe it."
"Where was she."
"In the hall. She was already in the hall when I came out.
" He was looking at the floor between his shoes, which she had watched him do on a four-inch screen for four hours and which nearly took her legs out from under her.
"The protocol's on the back of the door in every bedroom.
Astrid did it. It says get to the room, don't check the house, don't look for anybody.
It says that in capitals. Do not search. "
"I know what it says."
"So I went to the room."
"And she went with you."
"She was in the hall," he said again. "She was standing right there. I didn't — Imogen, I didn't take her. She was in the hall and I said 'room,' and we went."
Imogen made herself sit still.
"Keep going."
"The panel was open, the light came on, and I went in and turned around and she was coming in behind me and I said where's Imogen."
"You said that."
"I said 'where's Imogen.'" He looked up for the first time. "That's the first thing I said in that room. I want you to know that."
"And she said I was already in."
"She said 'she's already in.'"
"And you believed her."
"I—" He stopped. She watched him not build the sentence he wanted to build. "Yes."
"Why?"
"Because she's never been wrong about anything," Cormac said.
And there it was. The whole thing, in eight words, said by a man who did not appear to hear what he had said.
Imogen sat with the catalog on her knees and the rain on the study window and did not move a muscle in her face.
"Go on."
"The door shuts at ninety seconds. It's on a timer off the trip.
" He said it exactly the way she had been saying it for a month, to Siobhan, to Nuala, to her own reflection.
"I heard something. I heard — I've gone over it eleven thousand times and I don't know what I heard.
Something in the hall. And I started to turn and it was already coming across, and by the time I had my hand up it was past the jamb, and you can't stop it once it's past the jamb, it's a hydraulic arm, it's built so a man can't stop it. "
"Did you try?"
"Yes."
"After it was past the jamb."
"Yes."
"How long after the alarm was that?"
"I don't know," he said. "Thirty seconds. Forty. It felt like nine hours."
The rain went on.
"And then you saw the kitchen was empty," Imogen said.
"Then I saw the kitchen was empty."
"On the cycle."
"Every eleven seconds," he said. "For four hours and seven minutes I watched my wife's kitchen be empty every eleven seconds."
Imogen put the catalog down on the floor.
"Okay," she said.
"Imogen—"
"No. That's what I asked for and that's what you gave me and now I want to stop." Her voice was not entirely under her. "I need to stop, Cormac. I need to be a person in this house."
He nodded.
Neither of them moved for a while. The lamp on the desk, the rain, a boat somewhere out in the dark making the noise a boat makes.
"I'm going to say one thing," he said, "and you can throw something at me."
"Say it."
"I don't want you to forgive me." He had his hands loose between his knees.
"I've thought about this a lot and that's what I've got.
I don't want it. If you forgive me now it's because you're frightened of the downstairs and I'm the only man on this road, and in six months you'll work that out and you'll hate me worse than you do tonight. "
Imogen looked at her husband for a long moment.
"That's the smartest thing you've ever said."
"I know."
"Don't ruin it."
"Too late," Cormac said. "I want you to forgive me very badly. I'm just telling you not to."
It was, she would think afterward, an almost perfect account.
That was what she came back to, on the far side, when she had the log in her hand and the arithmetic running and nowhere to put it. Not that he had lied. He had not lied; she checked the whole thing against itself a hundred times and every piece of it was true.
He asked where she was. He was told. He believed it.
There was just one sentence missing out of the middle, and she did not know it was missing, because you cannot hear a sentence that is not said.
He said the door shuts at ninety seconds, which was true, and he did not say and I shut it at forty-one, and the gap between those two facts sat in the middle of the study that afternoon like a chair nobody would move, and neither of them moved it, because only one of them could see it.
She believed him.
She would be very hard on herself about that later, and Siobhan would tell her to stop, and she would not stop.
But the honest version — the one she got to eventually, in March, on the terrace, with her mother's voice in her head — was that she believed him because she had spent a month watching a man do the north gutter in the rain and board a window badly and sleep on a floor and fire the woman and not tell her, and because she was thirty-nine years old and could not go into her own kitchen in the dark, and because she wanted to be a person in her own house again.
She believed him because she needed the man across the room to be someone she could survive in a house with.
That is not a small thing to need. It is not a stupid thing to need.
It just is not the same as it being true.
They came back together that night.
It did not start as anything. That was what she wanted, afterward, for somebody to understand — that there had been no decision in it, no moment where she weighed it, nothing she could have pointed to and said there, that's where I could have stopped.
She was in the kitchen at nine drying a pan. He came in for water and stood there with the glass in his hand.
"The rain's stopping," he said.
"Is it."
"Supposed to be clear tomorrow. Cold."
"Good."
She put the pan on the rack. He was still standing there.
"Imogen."
"What."
"Nothing," he said. "You look like yourself tonight. That's all."
And she turned around with the towel in her hands and looked at him properly for the first time in a month — not at the man who had not looked around, not at the shape on the phone screen, at him, forty-seven and gray at the temples and wrecked, standing in her kitchen holding a glass of water at nine o'clock at night with no idea what to do with his own face.
"Come here," she said.
"Imogen—"
"Cormac. Come here."
He put the glass down.
He came across the kitchen and stopped about two feet short of her — so careful, so absurdly careful, that she made a sound that was almost a laugh — and she reached out and took a fistful of his shirt and pulled.
He came the two feet.